skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know what to do with tests, to be honest. I am a very inexperienced developer, and the general sentiment is "knowing what to test is a learned skill"

damn.

I could use some opinions actually. The current workplace arguments about what we should or shouldn't test go like this:

"We write tests to establish specifications, then we write code to meet
those specifications. We should have tests covering every aspect of the
system as a way to assert that things are meeting the designed specs."

"but our model objects have allot of tedious detail. Why should we write
tests about what the name field can and can't accept? It's a max length of
32, that's it. Asserting that the constraint fails is beyond tedious and a
waste of our time. Most of the code we'd be testing is auto-generated. Are
we running tests on our framework or our code?"

"Some of this does seem like a waste of time, but what about when
someone changes something as part of the development cycle? eg.
Someone needs to remove validation from the name field to test other
parts of the systems behavior with an overly large name. If we had a
complete testing system in place it would alert us that the model isn't
meeting the spec. We've already had instance where temporary code to
bypass authorization was accidentally pushed to the develop branch."

On one end of the spectrum there is this base level of tests that are actually REALLY useful when developing features. Doing simple testing has helped me catch off by one errors and other kinds of bugs, I can stand by my code confidently. These kinds of ad-hoc in development tests don't cover everything, but they're useful. They're like a substitute for step through debugging to verify code.

On the other, I don't know how big of an issue bug regressions will be, we've heard other developers suffering for lack of a solid testing base to detect problems. Without a full battery of tests asserting everything we know about the spec, there's no way we will catch many regressions.

HN what do you think?
I was also fairly disappointed, it looks like 5 out of 5 of my ideas for what I wanted to do with Glass can't be done with this API. But I'm hoping they wanted to get some basic / easier to implement API out as fast as possible while still working on more interesting support on a side (native apps, in particular).
"It's the unexpected technologies that you have to watch out for."

Some would argue that the unexpected technologies are what keep technology curves exponential rather than S-shaped. (I'm thinking of Kurzweil here). Once advancement starts to slow something else crops up and re-energizes progress, keeping the exponential growth curve intact.
Show HN: Better than QR codes.
The Node.js Community is Quietly Changing the Face of Open Source
hm... only support for java and python. I hope they release a version for Go since it is Google's language.
Can you please show some statistics to back that up? I've been at a conference with a stuttering speaker, and I'm not sure that it's true that the preponderance of stutterers in conference speakers as compared to the general public is as disproportionate as that of women.
Co-founder at Streak here. Would love to know how we can do better in the support use case. We've gotten much better since first launching but, admittedly, we aren't that great at that specific use case. Feel free to send to me directly at aleem at streak.
Also it's obviously not his fault that the bank collapsed, whereas we will blame someone if they do not have work in a few months
> Krugman is often wrong. He got a nobel price,

Being wrong now and then is excusable, clearly.
As much as I'd like to Krugman-bash, with respect to the implied context of his prediction -- the Internet's effect on the macroeconomy, overall income growth, and standard-of-living -- it wasn't that bad of a prediction.

The Internet has massively changed many industries and our ways of living and communicating, especially those of us active on HN. But, the impact in the macro statistics is still.. meh. See also Peter Thiel's laments and Tyler Cowen on 'the great stagnation'.

Personally, I suspect there's been a lot of qualitative improvement that doesn't show up in the time-series statistics. (For example, we're taking a lot of the benefit of the Internet in economically-unmetered leisure/shirking.) Also, I'd guess much of the benefit of new computer/telecom efficiencies has just helped offset continuing losses to outdated and parasitic arrangements by entrenched incumbents. (That is: the Internet's boosts-to-growth have somewhat hidden the continuing losses-to-growth from festering things like anti-competitive regulations, socially-broken education and medical incentives, and income-sapping entitlement program financing/payments.) Net-net, we're still on the same (or even a slowed) long-term income trend, whereas if we fully addressed these older things, we'd be seeing the full bonanza of Internet technology.
Not to mention the pace of tech change (computing-wise) seems to slow down, unless we can do something about Moore's law that doesn't involve 2000 cores, battery life, and such.
And most Americans see the whole "monarchy" thing as ridiculously anachronistic with kings, queens, dukes, grand dukes, etc. and aristocracy of any kind as having no place in the modern world.
The problem I have is that he advocated the boom that nearly destroyed the #1 economy in the world in order to avoid a potential slump.
Handhelds (i.e. VHF/UHF, most likely 144MHz or 440MHz) will only work locally without additional equipment. If you have access to a repeater (which isn't a problem, as most are open) that's linked the internet then you can talk to anyone, either via the internet, or via a repeater (that's also connected to the internet) elsewhere.

HF (1.8 MHz - 30 MHz, in select bands) will propagate around the world if the conditions are right, just like shortwave radio. It's really the same thing, except lower power. That "if the propagation is right" is a big if, however, and also requires a large antenna. I also would not have wanted to set up a portable HF antenna in Boston this afternoon - even if perfectly legal, spreading out wire along the ground and throwing a wire up in a tree doesn't really sound like the best idea right now.

Of course, most of the time it's the HF stuff that's the most fun... and although somewhat reliable, and likely to get you talking to someone, somewhere fairly quickly, it's not going to let you talk to a specific person at a specific time with a lot of reliability, even if you've schedule things in advance.
You can also make free phone calls to anywhere in the USA via Gmail. Look for the "call phone" icon on the left sidebar, above your list of contacts.
> Well I don't exist to facilitate your preferred status quo.

You are not a technical conference. You are a person.

At a technical conference, focused on technical content: if you sacrifice the quality of that technical content for quotas, then you've produced objectively worse conference.

> That's the context of the article - some speakers are exercising their right not to participate on panels or give talks unless the conference makes more than a lip service effort to include people who aren't 30 year old white males.

What would qualify as "more than a lip service effort", exactly?
Hiring is based on flat-out dumb reasoning, as long as it is a stupid reason to exclude someone rather than include them.
I mean, you can go through and set up your network... but the setup process gets blocked when you need your actual device to sync.
What is a "USAian"? Are you really so ridiculous as to believe that "American" is not the correct term?
Typical neuroscience study had a power of just 21%
He is a prolific blogger (2-3 items per day, about 6-7 days a week) and he has written about bitcoin a grand total of 3 times over the 3 years.

The feelings he seems to have for bitcoin are much worse than hate - it's bemused indifference, which must be what drives bitbugs so mad.
He's also been pretty open about the fact that he views himself as a voice of the left and he's gradually seen himself as more political and less of an academic economist. So he's usually not trying to make testable predictions. I recall this being because he feels he has greater political impact that he did as an academic economist. If you're interested, the New Yorker did a fantastic profile of Krugman a year or two ago that covers how he views his writing for the Times [1]. That said, as other posters have pointed out you're wrong about the specific instance of the stimulus.

1. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/01/100301fa_fact_...
It really seems that honesty is a gigantic liability in this industry.
The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn't a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

Here's the whole paragraph for context. I don't know how it could be read any differently than as advocating this proposed solution.
And yet you're not post monarchy or aristocracy, so you haven't grown beyond needing to give people titles of duke and count and whatnot based on their birth.
And we Europeans think your big, boxy cars are ugly, so there!
"I am outraged that there is nobody outraged about this." In other news, women have it SO much better than men. Amirite fellas? When will men finally be allowed to break through this injustice and be treated as well as women? Ugh.
And why was this a top item https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548976 (around the same time CATO published a positive review on Bitcoin)? HNers shorting bitcoins?
When has the news ever covered stories solely in proportion to the number of people who died? I don't understand how you could be astonished by this...
Are Software Development and IT Careers Doomed in North America?
That guy is an asshole.
Energy-Smart Buildings: How information technology can cut energy use and costs
Can someone explain me what this news has to do with hacker news, IT, programming, hacking??
It doesn't make a lot of sense to think of "the technological curve" as opposed to various technological curves. If you look at things like power technology, aerospace, medicine, etc, improvements have not been exponential in the last 5-6 decades.
FPGAs and ASICs are rare -- at least the HFT firm I work for, they're basically non-existant.
As someone else said, "He's gotten remarkably good at not making testable recommendations or predictions."

With a bad spirit, one could say he got medal for that.

Yet his work on new trade theory in international commerce, and how the european union data contradicted standard HOS theory is quite interesting. He should have kept to that.

But when your self proclaimed intention is to be a voice from the left (or the right, or anything) and have political impact instead of academic impact, you may have to take distance from reality :-/
> stop writing tests, the customer will never run this code

git rm <code that customer will never run>
NOOOOO they'll ruin everything with their proprietary software with $799 price tags.
Interesting. If I understand the math correctly, that means that you have an effectively variable interest rate over the life of the loan (though presumably it will average out to the 3.5%). Is there a special name for that kind of loan?

The reason mortgages front load the interest is not to victimize borrowers (that's just a pleasant side effect) but because in the early days of the loan, you are using more of the lender's money. You pay it back slowly, but you pay interest in each payment on the amount that you're using at that point in the term.

So payment #1, you pay interest on ~100% of the loan. Plus a little extra to reduce your principal. Next payment is interest on ~99.8% (100% minus 1/360th), plus a little extra (more than last time) for principal reduction so that the payments total the same amount. On and on til payment #360.

If you're paying 40% principal on payment #1, by my math, either your effective interest rate is variable over the term, or you're choosing to overpay the invoice (applying the excess to principal -- which makes a huge difference in the early years).

I'm surprised the economics of buying work out so well in SF these days. When I left, it was the other way around. Interest rates help a lot. Congrats on the house!
True, but this is no sign up required, just type a number and hit a button.
I was about to comment on how it is such a beautifully designed site, yet you get to the 'next page' button which is a low res scaled arrow graphic.. this totally ruins the experience.
You cherry-picked one line from the post and used sarcasm to attack it, missing the four or five other lines that would have disproved said sarcasm.

Well done.
I used to think it was ethically questionable to add cameras and trackers to wild animals just so we could investigate their habits. Now human animals are doing this to themselves voluntarily.
I read that as not so much advocating it, but rather a sarcastic way of saying "what Greenspan is doing will create a housing bubble."
I have checked those hand-held hams but they are quite big, aren't they? Or am I missing sth? Can you link to one that is really small enough to carry around and is an actual ham radio - as in works just like any other ham radio would. I am really new to all this. Need some informational push.

I have been thinking about it for a long time but I get stuck on the size. Also I read somewhere that - somehow/maybe - all that can be simulated on PC too with some smaller and additional equipment. Is it?

And, halfway across the world? They are supposed to be high power are they? Besides a conversation halfway across the globe would need some kind of repeater. Questions questions.
Schiff's prediction was that there would be an economic crisis soon, driven by hyperinflation and a dollar collapse. That is... not exactly what happened.
LVM snapshot, that's the way I'd go about it. Is how we do our backups, to maintain a good state. Mount the snapshot, and do the same with it.
I strongly disagree about a "qualitative improvement". facebook may be fun, but not that fun if you can't put a dollar value on it or the surrounding ecosystem.

The great stagnation is a real issue.

There is a visible disconnect in the growth rate of OECD countries. It's not just reaching Solow long term equilibrium - it happened too fast. It's just weird and troubling.

Hopefully the "rest of the world" will keep growing and improving the human lot. Too bad for OECD countries.
Sure, but that isn't the former owners problem.

Are you thinking of expired cards? That is different.
I should flag the submission.

But what happens if I do? Is my flagging affected by me using a flag on something with so many up votes?
Reviewlu: site to see what women have written about you on Lulu
source: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1ce77o/weekend_p...
That severely underestimates the intelligence and wrath of their highly technical customer base.
This... is... QA!
Today, John Mauldin, a lesser known (but well known) financier wrote a more positive note on BitCoin. You can freely subscribe and read his position: http://www.mauldineconomics.com/ttmygh/bit-happens
*Can you send a physical package from Los Angeles to New York City in 14 minutes?

Nope. But we might be able to do NYC to LA in minus 3 hours on a fast drone.
Agree! I was thinking also of in house support code, tooling, infrastructure maintenance, local IT stuff, build tools. Stuff that runs in-house, might be important but if it breaks, there won't be a 2am call from Australia or a public tweet about how "Product <X> from company <Y> just lost me all my data".
ChromeOS does not use X, though X can run on the devices.

Chromium is actually providing it's own compositor and windowing system.

The plugin they are getting rid of the is the Chrome-only Pepper API based plugin that for some reason is unavailable on the current Samsung ARM Chromebook.
You cherry-picked one example of something which hasn't put men's desires at the top of the priority list, missing the social and cultural context of thousands of years of male-domination that would disprove said accusation of misandry. Well done.
Dark matter experiment CDMS sees three tentative clues
The past decade has wrought a massive shift in the communication paradigm of humans. The context map of communication has completely changed. Over the next decade, we will begin to see the both the positive and negative effects of our collective shift in social perspective.
People interested in this might also want to check out simmer, which provides a simple unix stdin/stdout interface for this class of bounded summaries of unbounded streams. Quantiles are actually a weak point for simmer right now (I have a TODO item to add Q-Digest), but it has a bunch of other useful sketches implemented, via the Algebird library which I also hack on. Would love to get feedback & patches. https://github.com/avibryant/simmer
Yet is still better in general to solidify your gains into repeatable tests, instead of throwing away all your research.

To the GP, yes, the less you write tests, the more your code base rolls up into a giant ball of hair and wax, and you can't investigate the behavior of any part of it without mocking out the rest of it. That is why we say testable code is usable code.
If finding contracting work were easy, the person wouldn't be unemployed for 6 months now, would he?
To be clear: I did not say TDD was bad. I simply said it might not always be best. I took that a step further and suggested that with a start-up, and especially an early stage one, is probably not worth it. Not that it's bad or wrong. Simply that the costs might outweigh the benefits.

If you aren't market tested and/or market validated, I would suggest that getting something out the door is probably more important than test coverage. Because odds are those tests you wrote will be worthless when you pivot. There's a cost to writing tests, and the benefit from those tests are increased when they are reused. If you use a test once, then pivot and have to scrap it, you would have been better off hacking your way through the first release and getting to that first pivot faster.

Once you start to gain market traction and you actually know what the market wants you to be then your world changes and your approach to writing code should as well.

And as for junior devs, that's a tough one and a reason I avoid hiring junior talent. Not avoidable for all managers, but I didn't write my post to be the new bible. Quite the opposite: I think we're a bit too worried about making sure we're doing what everyone else says we should be doing. Rails is omasake and all...

I'm just tired of hearing everyone talk about TDD as if it were a given. Protecting against SQL-injection? That's a given. Being a TDD-based web startup? Not so much.
Metamage Software Creations
Generally speaking, the one place a criminal is not is the scene of the crime. Explosion over there? If the criminal is still around, they are not going to be at that site (and if they are, they're not in a state to worry about further criminal action coming from them).
>> HNers shorting bitcoins?

Or maybe it's just a dumb idea. Let's see, I buy enough computing hardware and I can create money! I think it's a glorified pyramid scheme.
> That's not the case for open-source tech conferences. Open source has a preference for social change at its fundamental level - "anyone can edit". This at least leans towards promoting an egalitarian environment.

Open-source is not simply egalitarian. PostgreSQL (for example) doesn't try to apply egalitarian ideals to patch acceptance. Bad code is bad code, no matter who wrote it.

In the ideal, open-source is meritocratic, which also happens to be the ideal criteria applied to selecting conference papers.

> Also, half of the value of tech conferences is networking, not lectures, which is about 'meeting people' rather than 'imparting knowledge' ...

Why do you think these are different things? Some of the best collaborations I've had have resulted from meeting the smart people presenting at conferences, and sharing knowledge.

If conferences break the signal-to-noise ratio by attempting to fill quotas rather than selecting noteworthy papers, then the smart people will stop attending; the social value AND the associated knowledge sharing will be diminished.
If you have a general feel of the community, your community is very small.

Is your community full of laptop researching prototypers, or million request per second distributed system operators?
"See something say something" is still far too late in the process. As a society we need to do a better job of preventing people from being abused, neglected, and marginalized.
Given your last point re: kids, how is it "insane" that people want to buy houses? Most people have/want to have kids.

Btw, I don't agree with your last point. It's pretty much possible to stay in a rented apartment for 5 years at a time quite easily. And kids go through wrenching changes every five years on average (home->kindergarten->middle->high school).

You make good points about the drawbacks of buying a house. However, the ability to lock in your housing expenses for the next 30 years (i.e., no impact of inflation) shouldn't be underestimated. IMHO.
All this talk of Krugman reminds me that there's an awful lot of scientism out there today -- beliefs masquerading as science. The scientific method has been thrown out the window in this regard. If someone is going to propose a theory they claim is proven in someway, I want them to also identify the specific event that if it occurs will disprove their theory.

The whole economics profession is filled with scientism, but my two pet peeve issues on this are stimulus spending to fix the economy and man made global warming. For them to be viable scientific theories, there must be an observable event that if actually observed would disprove the theories. Without that, they are just beliefs. Nothing against beliefs, but let's not call them scientific theories.
Apply the same thinking to the feature code you write as well.
I can't give you any insight into developer wages. But as far as commuting in the Houston area goes, I used to commute from Fort Bend County to Bush Airport (which really was an absurd commute) and it took me about an hour each way. So if you're trying to keep your commute under 45 minutes each way, you may have a wider area of acceptable areas to live in. Especially if you are thinking of companies inside the loop.
> You are not a technical conference. You are a person.

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?

And your post has a couple of assumptions that I feel compelled to point out:

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

2. That conferences include talks based on some absolute value of merit.

3. That conferences are so amazing that everyone wants to go to them.

> What would qualify as "more than a lip service effort", exactly?

Something more than "We didn't get lots of women applicants for talks, so we have 100% white males."
what makes you think you are more special then anyone else? Why would they tell you more details, than the rest of the people?

Sorry if you get offended that they didn't tell you much more. But seriously? you are not special. This whole thread is a lynch mob.