skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the most part, in my experience Cucumber isn't worth the effort (one place called it "Encumber"). If you have product managers or BAs who can read code, then it's easier to capture the requirements with more developer-friendly testing tools. And if the product managers or BAs do not read code, Cucumber doesn't usually help much.

Having said that, I did work a gig where the tester would sit with the subject matter experts, and as they would talk, he would capture what they were saying as Cucumber tests, and he would then echo the tests back to them to see if they were right. Afterwards, he would then add whatever other tests he needed (checking weird edge cases and such), and code up any additional fixtures he needed. Then it was just a matter of me getting all the tests to pass. It was a really nice way to work - I knew unambiguously when I was done with something. (It helped that the tester sat right next to me.)
What it's like to be a woman in Y Combinator
I find the most useful office layout is a blend of spaces. I think you should have:

- hotelling rooms for phone calls, thinking time, etc.

- team rooms - closed spaces for groups of people that often work together

- conference rooms for larger get togethers

I think individual offices are too limiting for those that don't have frequent private conversations. And I think purely open plan is insane, you're just staring at your coworkers all day. Grouping people into "pods" or "team rooms" lets each group come to their own system of working. Everyone in one team like music playing out loud? great, they rotate responsibility for what plays. Likes quiet time? Headphones and breakout rooms for conversations.

But if you give people some options as to how they can structure their own work environment, they'll generally come to a consensus on what works for them.
My biggest problem with iOS 7 is Apple's loss of their attention to detail - several of the animations are broken (multitasking gestures on an iPad especially), and the newer typography turns out to be inconsistent throughout. It was incredibly impressive last night, but the more I use it, the more I dislike it.
I worked for a startup in the electronic medical records space. Data interchange.

We had various interactions with both the Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault teams. They were both making patient facing apps, ours was physician (and staff) facing.

We had a patient facing app, because all the hospitals thought it'd drive admissions.

But at the time no doctor would trust patient's data.

To the best of my knowledge, that hasn't changed (five years on).

The "quantified self" movement may change the perception of patient gathered data. When data collection is automatic, standardized. More importantly, when doctors are doing it for themselves, so are familiar with the tools and culture.

So, in short, Google Health and MS HealthVault were just wishful thinking. There was no "there" there.
> Apple community's concern that without Steve Jobs[...]

The Apple community isn't concerned about a lack of Jobs, it's a portion of the non-Apple, Tech community that likes to shout this one out.
I'd guess around $400.
Spartan boys were almost completely unsupervised for many hours a day. They were expected to roam in packs and steal food - they were not fed. Caught stealing was the death penalty. Thus they knitted iron-clad group loyalty with their peers.

So not play exactly, but lots of peer interaction and social dynamics at work.
Couldn't you do the same with RSpec or straight Capybara code?

I no longer see the added value of Cucumber when you work in a project that has no non-technical team members writing tests.
Yes, and deservedly so. It's not a question with an answer, it's not even a poll. Other communities would close it as "Chatfilter" or "GTKY". What's interesting is that it was ever allowed on SO, and that it stood as acceptable for so long. And I wonder if the fact that there was a time in SO's lifecycle where it was accepted was important to the site's success. It's the sort of question that fosters community and good will in a way that "MVC 4 Validation using Data Annotations and Jquery" does not.
Are you shitting me? Docker is a horrible little Go binary that doesn't even clean up after itself properly when you CTRL+C it. It's barely documented, it does barely anything except some macro combinations of tar+wget+lxc with a schmoozy web site on top.

Who is pushing this thing? Why does anyone even care about it? Does anyone even know what a Linux container is?
They've recently said they are going to release a PS4 version later in 2014. They refused to comment on the XBox One, interestingly.
I've come across this one several times courtesy of https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=aphyr

def self.merge(man)
# Shock!
clark_kent = super man
They don't for customers with a German bank account.
I think he also worked for Be Inc. (the makers of the BeBox and BeOS) until the end. But it's too hard to tell, he might just've had a great offer from Yahoo as well.
I love iOS 7. It is a long overdue step in the right direction.
That assumes more money can produce better results. Imagine if the $115m figure came from legitimate, generous estimates by the development team. They wanted for nothing, had sufficient staff, sufficient resources, etc.

Then imagine marketing submitted their budget independently. Their proposal included some high cost, unique advertising campaigns and totaled $150m.

Both got approved.

In most circumstances, budget is a finite resource that people fight for, and one person getting more means someone else getting less. But for a very successful company releasing pretty much the world's most successful game, maybe they just gave everyone what they wanted/needed and marketing's costs somehow were legitimately higher.

I agree it seems weird to have the split like that, but not all development efforts are cash deprived, and if it isn't then more money won't help much.
It is not only eagles ;)
http://www.reddit.com/r/gamingsuggestions/comments/1edfwh/ow...
... and yes creating a flying sim based on abilities of those masters of the skies in the wild would make for an epic game... i believe.
The effects of "collaborative office spaces" on the companies accounting system are well understood. It is cheaper to buy or lease cubicles or (heaven help up) put plywood on saw horses, then it is to get enough space then subdivide and construct offices. One is written off as furniture, the other is physical plant, and depreciates at a far slower rate.

Sometimes it's about the ability to see if you're at your sewing machine making garments, but the motives are nearly always financial.
> To me iOS 7 UI is too light, low contrast type and unusable, I'm getting an Android next.

Way to add some framing to your poll!

Note - Don't expect your poll to be accurate.
I like the routine of going somewhere everyday to work. It gets me in the mindset, "Okay, now it's time to work." I also like keeping as much separation as possible from "home" and "work." When I'm at home on my couch, I want that to be a place to relax.
What's better, having courses delivered at home which are specifically created because of an incentive (money, wide distribution, etc.) with great production values, or having a huge proportion of the students be exposed to subpar courses delivered en masse in a classroom where everyone takes the same notes, and if they go to the bathroom or skip a class they miss something?

If there's a particular math lesson that was specially designed to teach kids in an awesome way, e.g. by an expert in teaching micro-steps one by one (and possibly be tailored to each kid through interactive features) ... why shouldn't more kids have it? Of course you should videotape it, and distribute it to as many kids as possible. And all this is possible, far more cheaply than paying an army of math teachers -- some worse than others -- to deliver "lectures" to kids sitting still 8 hours a day in class.
The current product page has download links:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/jrockit/overvie...
Google is taking over Apple!! :-0
>> Actually you only lose features you wouldn't want in the first place and would drag the whole thing down (less battery life, bulkier, etc).

>> How it works and feels is much more important than how it looks ("design is how it works").

As an iPhone 4 user who upgraded to iOS 7, I would have loved the option to turn off all those extraneous animations that force me to wait for them to finish running before I can do anything.

In other words, I want to lose some "how it looks" features because they drag the whole thing down ("how it works") for me on my phone.
Corporate Accounts Payable, Nina speaking! Just a moment!
Nost hosting companies require a drivers license or similar, very few don't anymore.

Softlayer and Hetzner are the two that I remember needing this, both seemed fine with my expired one I scanned ages (2008 or something) ago - I couldn't be bothered scanning my new one.

But really, it might stop some people but it's easy enough to fake it if you really wanted to do something bad.
Stop Deleting Content
Some of it was inevitable overcrowding/overbuilding of towns. We can have all the morals we can afford.
So you've self selected for people that thrive in noisy, distracting environments (and plenty of such people exist), then conclude that open offices are the right way to go?

You conclude that because somebody likes something, in the absence of any study, (or in this case, contradictory to every study done!) that it is in fact better? No.

We fool ourselves all the time. The classic mouse study comes to mind. Most programmers prefer typing to the mouse - "it's faster" we say. Except, it's not. It's just that typing engages our brains in a way that the mouse doesn't, so we don't perceive the passage of time as much when tab typing out a directory, and we do perceive it while navigating the mouse. Mouse is faster (generally), we think typing is faster.

So, I don't take it for granted that just because somebody says they are more productive in an open office that they are. They might just perceive it that way because they are having so much fun hanging with the fellow brogrammers, or the constant interaction gives the illusion of progress, or....

I can't take continual noise - it drives me bonkers. And yes, to me headphones count as noise. So, I would not accept a job at that place, most likely, and thus they do not have the data point of someone going quietly mad in their midst. See, open plans are better!

"Ignore these scientific studies, my selection bias says it's fine" is usually a pretty poor path to the truth.
looks like angry birds
Dropbox has know about it for quite some time. I complained about the same issue over a year and a half ago and I regularly have to kill Dropbox.

Obviously they are some tough technological problems, but that's only an excuse for so long.
Look, this stuff is subjective and I'm barely a novice. But.. any choice of detail you make is going to have a lot of influence on how the reader sees that room. They carry their own biases and associations. I saw two 28 year old white guys, kinda of californian looking, clear "non formal workplace' subcultural affiliation. The Asian lady, I imagine as a little older, more formally dressed and not saying anything. The interviewee is a few years older than the guys, more formally dressed and generally more accustomed to a a formal work environment.

If it had been 'two white guys and a tall woman' I probably would have pictured the interviewee as non white. I also imagine (because its in blog/HN comment format) the objection to singling out the asian. That makes it seem honest, because noticing that she's asian is like an admission of guilt.

This story is making fun of stereotypes. Using clichés is how he's getting a particular effect.
IOS 7 Animation Doldrums
I see what you're saying, but I can provide at least one counterexample. This was on the front page whenever: http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=2055

There were loads of interviewee issues that occurred in the article. Hopefully that balances things a little.
No doubt, there's 1000s of ways to do online promotion and get in front of customers. Show HN is also one such way. Few companies like geckoboard.com and freshdesk.com used Show HN effectively and ended up getting beta users, feedback and ultimately few initial customers.
To me, some important information seems to be missing for it to become a legit brain-teaser: the numbers of rabbits? the number of holes? how does each round work?, etc.
Three Reasons Hero Worship Is Toxic To Entrepreneurship
Ask HN: Lunch interviews
Yet another bad interview story in on the front page today.

For every such bad interview story, one wonders about the programmers at the interviewing firm who "went along" with it. Someday they will also look for another job, run into some bad interviews, vent their frustrations on their blog, find another job, and forget about the whole episode until it is time for the next job hunt. Nothing good ever comes out of this though. The only way to improve the interview scene, IMHO, is to try make small improvements to the interviewing process at the firm you are employed at. With that in mind I have a question for the HN crowd.

I am employed at a startup in San Francisco which is in the middle of a hockey-stick growth. We are expanding in interesting directions and hence, we are hiring a lot. We now have a team of ~ 20 in-house recruiters to manage this. Overall, they do a good job, but I dislike one particular practice they have brought in.

When a candidate is in the office interviewing during the lunch hour, the firm buys lunch for them. But lately, lunch is brought into office and served over one of the interviews. Essentially, the candidate and the interviewer sits in a conference room, eat sandwiches and chat.

San Francisco, whatever its other ills might be, has plenty of great restaurants. Plus, more often than not, the weather outside is splendid. Thousands of tourists visit this city every year to sample both these aspects, among other other things. That being the situation, I will find it insulting to sit in a conference room, chew a sandwich and try to answer random technical questions. I would much prefer stepping out to eat at a restaurant, or at least pick up food from someplace to bring it back to office and eat.

Before I bring this up our recruitment team, I wanted to check if it is just me. I am told that many firms have adopted this practice. What do people here think about it?
At least here it keeps it simple for most of the people to use it!
Cool stuff. I have been playing with nltk and gensim myself recently in order to solve similar problem. But I want to combine unsupervised topic modeling (LDA) with some supervised learning algorithm (probably naive bayes). Struggling with LDA at this point, but pretty interesting stuff.
A room full of noisy people is actually less of a problem than an overly quiet office, where a single phone ringing will set everyone doing meerkat impressions...

Not disagreeing with the headphones bit, I couldn't wear them for 8hrs.
Perhaps the husbands were not involved? This just seems like such a weird as hell point to pick up on. Why does it matter?
Disclaimer: I'm not for or against the use of cucumber.

The second claim against cucumber / gherkin is not it's fault, it's the toolset's fault. Using grep to find your step definition is not very effective.

If you use a tool like Rubymine, you can jump directly to the applicable step definition through one key combination.
I couldn't agree more. The pipe dream is that you have BAs or other non-technical team members write the Gherkin specs and that saves the developers time because "the tests practically write themselves!" (Assuming you're maintaing your giant library of awkward cucumber regex matchers...). In reality it takes much longer to sit down with someone and teach them how to write in Gherkin, all for the goal of having a human readable spec that doubles as test steps. It's much better if they write the specs however they want, in normal english, then you can translate those into normal rspec or test unit tests.

It's a laudable goal, but the abstraction is so leaky in reality it just ends up creating more work for everyone.
Crap? Really? I upgraded yesterday and think it's amazingly good, in spite of a few minor issues. Do you have any concept of what it took to imagine, develop, implement, test, and distribute something like this to 100 million devices?

Crap, really?
Was on iOS 7 (betas). Had same reaction at first, but after several days, my initial reaction went away, and I found having a darker background image made a lot of difference.

Now I'm giving Android a fair shake, using a Galaxy s3 I had for testing. Will use it for several weeks at least, and decide to either get a 5S, or stick with Android (possibly getting a S4 or other new phone). There's a lot I don't like or that I'm finding missing (harder to type after trying multiple keyboards, sometimes funky bluetooth, etc). My gut feeling is that I'll go back to iOS in a month or so, but things like widgets could make a difference.
The new guys learning to deploy to production
With iOS 7, that's now iOS keyboard_S_.

Non-iOS 7 apps on iOS7 render the older keyboard, which is really annoying.
>> You see, all of the "trivial points" that you mention in the link above are all assumptions on your side, but not facts [1].

I've answered similar garbage repeatedly, so I'll just quote myself:

"As I've written five++ times, it is not only my motivation -- it is the Obama administration's motivation.

So your long argument why you don't need to quote and answer that goes also for the main US motivation... THE thing to argue against, you refuse to touch!"

>>basic logic itself that you don't follow

I answered that before too, another quote of myself: "That you call trivial game theory "illogical" makes it even better."
This is like paragliding :) But without the hassle of collapses, material problems and a wee bit faster.
"When I write a Cucumber feature, I have to write the Gherkin that describes the acceptance criteria, and the Ruby code that implements the step definitions."

As someone who recently started using cucumber, this was definitely a frustration at first. But after a couple weeks of writing step definitions, and focusing on making them reusable (using some of the tips here: http://coryschires.com/ten-tips-for-writing-better-cucumber-... ), I ended up with a pretty good bank of general steps that I could cobble together into new features without much modification. The result was something much more readable and reusable than if I wasn't using Gherkin on top of the step definitions.
iOS 7 is Apple's Windows 8.

For those of you who use Office 2013, some asshole made it all but unusable by taking out the contrast between threads.

Same thing for Apple now, much of it is too subtle. "Hooray, it's flat!" But no... it's just amature. There's a good article up now about all the things that seem broken and rushed through.

Remember when Steve Jobs was sheriff and the trains ran on time? Ok, first I had like a 4 hour gap between when I downloaded and when it would actually let me install. Then it wouldn't let me sync with iTunes last night until I upgraded... but the upgrade wasn't available until today. Just a culster fuck of stupidity on Apple's part. They rushed these half-assed changes and it shows.

Great that they have a new OS, but damn does it need polish.
Chrome all the time.
* Handle invalid input: if I say I bought my pork on 'lol' it tells me I have NaN days to eat it.

* I had to experimentally derive the purpose of the date field to mean "that's when it expires". No UI hint there.

* Why won't your app let me eat something that hasn't expired? Maybe I just want to eat my pork that will never go bad because I said it expires on lol.

* I can't figure out how I'd track things I already bought, as opposed to what I bought today. Does that even matter? I think it won't but that's based on my guess for what the date is.

Concept is cool, at least.

It would be nice if you could suggest & derive expiration dates -- if I buy "ground beef", maybe suggest "refrigerated ground beef", "frozen ground beef", ... and suggest an expiration date based on what the product is.

And it would be killer if you were able to suggest recipes based on what you have/what is expiring. I'd pay for that, no joke.
Firefox and uzbl on Ubuntu
Google May Stop Using Cookies to Track Web Users
That is probably true. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that theft happens, by and large, due to poor access to drugs. If the drug market was more efficient, it is possible a lot of those theft crimes would go away.

Of course, theft and copyright infringement are not directly comparable, being quite different concepts.
On the next episode, I guess the character Mike will get an offer, and will be asked to move-in to the company house where all 5 employees of the whole company live in the same big apartment?
Nice try, HN. You almost got me to visit 4chan while at work! You rascals ;)
Cucumber, gherkins, capybara, handlebars, sinatra... do these goofy names bother anyone else? I'm writing code, not hosting a children's show.
The admins seems to have stopped me answering pipi. I have already written the same answers repeatedly to the troll's "points" about why he doesn't need to answer mine/Obama's motivation for bombing.
I don't agree there. Explanation would be more "I do/think/believe X because" where indoctrination is more "you should do/think/believe X because".

A more passive form of indoctrination would be repeated explanation (with or without query/prompt) so explanation can become indoctrination depending on context, but I'll stand by my choice of words above.
I met one of the co-founders of this at a QS meetup in Paris. I'm surprised to see this here, because he had the fanatical privacy zeal that you typically see with people making projects like this that go nowhere. It's fantastic that they're making progress; I think this technology is vital if we're ever going to escape digital feudalism.
Arguably, SomethingAwful (founded in 1999).
I was at a talk last week where pushing interview code to production was highlighted as a good lean practice and recruiting tool

Someone in the audience asked if they made the interviewees sign anything since the company was using their unpaid labor and the guy giving the talk was seriously dumbfounded as if the idea had literally never even occurred to him.
Centrifuge
You nailed exactly what I was going to say -- goes against studies.

I honestly wonder if he did a valid, anonymous questionnaire to his own employees what the result would be, I am guessing he would learn people HATE it.
I don't really think it is necessary to 'defend' any particular office setup whether it be open plan, private offices, or an activity-based office design.

What companies need to embrace is the ability to adapt and adjust their office plan to their current situation they find themselves in.

From what I can tell, Hubspot has tried to modify their open plan office by adding private spaces, conference rooms, and trying to use technology to mitigate unnecessary distraction. That's a far cry from what most people decry, which is a big room where desks are crammed in like sardines with nowhere to hide.

Also, I run Office Snapshots and we've shown Hubspot's offices in the past - http://officesnapshots.com/companies/hubspot
I'm giving Apple until the next iPhone (when my contract expires.) to fix it. If it still looks like a pre-schooler made it I'll switch back to Android.
I'm usually gaming on a 120hz monitor, and I'm actually having some problems playing GTA V due to the low frame rate. However, it's so much fun that I can't stop playing.

When the PC version comes I'll probably double dip.