skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While there is initial overhead in hooking in the tests, the power comes when you have modularized test steps that you can reuse for multiple tests.

At my last company we had QA write all the cucumber tests and someone would hook in the new statements, which is the overhead you suggest. Now if you write 3 different gherkin statements that do the same thing, then that is not optimal.

Like many problems, I don't think the tool is at fault. It does what it claims. Provides human readable syntax for test cases and lets you hook that in however you want.

I think it's a valid point to think that extra layer is unnecessary, but I wouldn't go as far as discounting it and saying that no company has derived value from it.

Like all code, the messes usually stem from how the code is implemented, not the language itself.
I commented elsewhere that I was at a talk last week where they presented pushing interview code to production as a great recruiting tactic.
actually, wire latencies for 10GbE are much better than you think- they are basically the same.

Anyway, my point was that infiniband is not a high speed interconnect, and it's cheaper than 10GbE. The challenge is to deliver scaled infiniband, which is far harder than scaled ethernet.
Ask HN: Help? Despite years of trying, I cannot learn to program.
I have been trying to force myself to learn to program for years, and I can't get anything to work, not for want of trying.

I recognize how important programming is; I consider it the literacy of the 21st century. I have utmost respect for engineers, and I know I need to learn, but every time I sit down and try to learn to program, no matter which language/method I use, I don't get very far. I feel completely handicapped.<p>I've started the following, only to get stuck, end up spinning my wheels by trying something else.

CodeCademy

Team Treehouse

Python the Hard Way

Eloquent JavaScript

Udemy courses

My biggest problem is that I find it really, really hard to get interested, and I'm terrible at motivating myself to do something I'm not interested in. When I read a book, for example, I can either read only a couple pages at a time and throw it away (I'm well versed in the first 10 pages of great literature) or I go crazy and tear through the book in a all day and all night without sleep and without paying attention to anything else in the world.

So what can I do to make programming interesting enough that I'll want to learn how to do it? Or what resources am I not trying?
Wait, seriously?!

This was at a phone company. Phone companies do everything wrong. Billing IT was considered part of finance/accounting, and so was accounts payable. (Actually, so was about a third of a 14-story tower.) To be honest, however, this was a temporary (couple of months? it's been awhile) condition, and with sufficient headphone volume I found the A/P yokels distracted me less than other IT people had when I'd been in with them. Perhaps that was my manager's theory? I'd hate to give her too much credit, but when I moved again it was to a quieter location even farther from the rest of Billing IT.
As was alluded to with "SAGE GOES IN EVERY FIELD," people hope to cause a snowball effect where others join in an sage the thread (by announcing loudly that they are sage-ing). In general, the idea of using sage as a downvote has been around for a while, even though it's anything but.
I'll always love all the comments that came to light when a significant hunk of Win2k source code was leaked, especially:

* The magnitude of this hack compares favorably with that of the national debt.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795
so bad that you are switching to windows phone? you have other issues to worry about, my friends.
yes, and the people buying those machines often tell me that their science is limited by how much RAM they could buy in a single machine.

Which is poppycock.
For those of you who have an interest in functional languages, let me throw out this book:

http://www.amazon.ca/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris-Okas...

I just can't say enough good things about it. The code is in ml but there is a Haskell port of the data structures.

It's a small book so its easy to read and digest in a couple of weeks.
>Any student attending University is welcome.
This article annoys me to no end.

This is my job, I should not have to fight for some peace and quiet in order to get some solid work done! Having to wear headphones is a pain in the ass. Often listening to music is a distraction in and of itself, so you haven't solved the problem of noise at all.

There's also a huge unaddressed problem of visual distraction. You can see people moving around, going to meetings, or having conversations even if you can't hear them! This is often more distracting than sound.

You defend and have an open office plan so you can make the claim that you're doing everything you can to increase "collaboration" on the product, but I think you've completely covered up for yourself, the extreme downsides to the open office plan, and don't realize that the open office is probably hugely slowing down the development of your company's mission.
I think Ryan Bates "How I test" screencast is a great example. It's specific to rails but I've used this approach on web applications in a few different frameworks. http://railscasts.com/episodes/275-how-i-test?view=asciicast

Basically, test the heck out of your domain model layer, and then do full stack acceptance tests above that to simulate the user using the app. If it's a web app use something like Capybara, if its a terminal app or some other interface, simulate that appropriately with some other kind of integration test.
Very cool plug -in . have added it to three website
I used to work in an open office and I really liked it. The team was always on the same page because of how easy it was to talk to eachother and show everyone what we were working on.

Now I have my own office and I hate it. Everyone sits in their little office, works on their work, and only gets help when they really need it. Getting up, walking down the hall, knocking on someone's door, seeing if they're even in the office, and then talking to them is a pretty huge barrier to fast easy collaboration.

Discussions that would happen naturally and take 5 minutes end up happening in hour long meetings. Code reviews can take days because it's way easier to ignore someone you can't see.

Obviously every company is going to be different, but I just liked the open plan better. I felt like part of the team, not just a person working on similar stuff.
Cucumber was most developers first exposure to capybara (IIRC, capybara was developed by the cucumber folks).

Since capybara is so awesome, it gave a lot of people a nice impression of cucumber.

But unless you actually have a customer in the loop writing cucumber tests, just use the capybara directly.
We do a company-wide survey every quarter. I took a look at the raw responses for Q2 of this year. I found a single request for more meeting spaces, but no one requested a private office or the like.
company A to you is company B to someone else. The point is that the risk is not to the bank but to merchants.

For any given transaction the company does not know if they're "company A" and you're a genuine customer, or if they're "company B" being defrauded out of product with stolen details, so all merchants are taking on risk.
> Does anyone even know what a Linux container is?

Judging by the number of times "when will Docker support Windows containers?" has been asked... no.
A few of them work across many browsers actually. For example, if you enable the right tags you would get Regions in Chrome. Clip paths, canvas paths should work by default, while canvas blend modes should work on Canary and most of these should also work on WebKit Nightlies. Canvas Blend Modes should work in Firefox too.

I could have posted a screenshot but I thought it was nice to have people play with the demo within the browseer, probably will stick to screenshots next time.
I've seen this one before and it looks interesting; but I've got a good enough system of notes. What I'd really like to do is keep a engineer's notebook about my software and record things I tested, what I thought, and the results, but I don't quite know where to start or what sort of system would work well for me. I guess I should be A/B testing that.
I'll add my anecdotal data point (several, across my personal experience) that it's not that uncommon.

There is also the phenomenon of in/at cube meetings. Seriously. In a development shop.

Add to that, shared cubes or "cubettes" approaching a bullpen type arrangement.

You're supposed to sit there and be productive while an hour long conversation takes place 3 feet away. Depending upon the personalities, over which you also have zero control, sometimes a quite animated discussion.

Many people who complain about open space working environments do so for very good reasons.

I'm to the point now of simply refusing to participate in them, and I suggest others consider this course, as well. Move on to something better, and trust/hope that when only those who "don't care" remain, the institution will fail under its own incompetence.

And... investigate this topic during your hiring. If the person has actively participated in advocating/implementing an open-space plan, pass them by.

Yes, this is a rather opinionated position, and many won't agree. Nonetheless, after too much misery in crap open-space arrangements and arrangements that have been forced into open-space, I'm done having anything to do with it and with those who inflict it upon unwilling participants.
The flat is furture of UI,like IronMan's things,so ios7
Can we have an option for those who actually use the phone as a tool. Who are not fanboys nor fandroids.

Really, it's fine. Applications still work and my email arrive on time. That's what I want. I'm warily interested in the fingerprint scanner, though.
Then there's Facebook.

"We integrated with Facebook a few months ago, it should be easy to do it again."

Famous last words. I've lost count of how many times I've become an "expert" at some aspect of Facebook integration to have it be completely different just a few months later. Google is also really bad about this, at least in the past year or so. It almost makes me want to quit webdev and be a dba or something.
The problem with the 'quantified self' is that more information doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes. Even in cases where the stakes are high and information seems essential, like pregnancy and childbirth, more monitoring isn't better. That's true of 'routine' ultrasound monitoring during pregnancy (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199309163291201) as well as heartbeat monitoring during birth (http://evidencebasedbirth.com/evidence-based-fetal-monitorin...).

What does work is identifying cases where there is genuine cause for concern - symptoms for healthcare patients, lack of ability to complete tasks for procrastinators - and collecting the data needed to determine if/when intervention is required.

The challenge for the quantified-selfers will be to sort the signal from the noise.
Well, I imagine given the current love of Docker on this site you're going to be down-voted with a quickness, but from what I've seen and done with it so far I really don't see the great benefit of it over standard LXC. Essentially it's a neat wrapper and has some cool API features, but I don't see the benefit beyond that.

Honestly if I was/am going to hitch my cart to LXC I'd probably be going the libvirt-lxc route so I'd be dealing with something of an actual standard.

Edit: I suppose one reason people might prefer Docker over libvirt would be no XML blegh, but it's honestly not that bad.
If attention to detail is a problem, switching to Android is not a solution. Also, this is the very first release in a massive redesign, things get missed. I'll be concerned if Apple doesn't do anything to improve from this point.
I'm unable to see how to reconcile "I want to work closely with others" with "to get anything done we all must wear headphones all the time" and "IM is a must".

The most productive places I have ever worked have been at single-team-size, open-plan startups. But that worked for us because we were very disciplined about noise. When you heard somebody talking, it was something relevant to the work. Non-relevant stuff happened elsewhere, or during breaks where we were all not trying to focus. That was awesome, because the ambient information kept us all in sync.

But right now I'm visiting somebody else's open-plan space, and it's infuriating. Noise levels often get up to the "busy street" marker on my decibel meter. All of the developers I've talked to feel their productivity is significantly impacted by the noise. Ad-hoc collaboration is low, because everybody's in their own little headphone bubble.

The model I'm most intrigued by now is Spotify's. There, each team has a shared team space that's closed off from other team spaces. Plus they have lounge space directly outside, so that the team room is really for working. That seems to be to get the benefits of open-plan spaces (easy collaboration) in a way that supports productivity (minimum noise and distraction).
Flat is furture of UI,like IronMan's thing,so ios7
I cannot stand open plan offices, to many visual & noise distractions....even just people walking around distracts me (at they coming over to talk with me? I hope not!) Call me crazy, but I much prefer having a small / private office with the door open 70-90% of the time....it is not like I am going to be less accountable (git log anyone)
Half of these are from Beta versions and do no longer occur... But nice catches, there are definitely somethings that could be improved, but others are just up to personal preference and interpretation.
Most people who own cars have little interest in how they work under the hood. Same is true for computers today. It's not just true for machines but all parts of life. I know several adults who hardly ever cook, despite that fact that they've been eating meals cooked by other all their lives. Using something doesn't necessarily mean you'll want to learn how to create it yourself.
I think you could adjust your tone to be more HN-suitable, but I don't think this is worth getting upset about: it sounds like Docker made a lot more changes than did OpenShift. It's good positioning by DotCloud, but it's not likely to have any real consequences IMHO.

Kudos to the dotCloud guys for being willing to drop docker's weirder dependencies (e.g. AUFS)
If I find something interesting enough that I think I would want to reference it later, I have taken to printing it to a PDF file, and saving that file. If you don't have a local copy, you never know how long it will last.
Something between "I love iOS" and "I hate it, but don't want to switch"

You can want to keep your phone for reasons other than loving the OS (the apps you've purchased, etc)
Ok, I'll bite. Reading the terms of service, which were definitely, um, funny?... was interesting. They are going to collect a bunch of emails on a list, sell them to a big company, and split the proceeds with the people on the email list. They are of course taking the costs associated with splitting a large sum of money with an even larger list of emails out of the portion of money going to the really large list of emails. And of course "big" companies are going to buy an email list from this company even though there is an already large and cut throat industry for creating email lists to sell to large companies? Sounds Awesome!

Business Plan
1) Make quick website
2) Make funny(?) Terms of Service
3) People Sign Up with Email
...
4) Umm...
...
5) Are we profiting yet?
...
...
This really looks like a some kind of a scheme. Only reason someone would be interested in buying this start-up is for collected emails (They openly acknowledge that in their terms of use). So in essence, at best, people joining provide all the value, while getting at best marginal benefit later on. At worst, this is going to be scam with millions of auto generated emails joining diluting real value (And scamming anyone that would be silly enough to purchase this `startup`).
I'm a huge fan of the gherkin format, it let's me sketch out a feature and then work through it methodically, testing as I go. But cucumber has a critical flaw, it forces you to think about code while you're writing. Because step definitions are global you can't just write any old thing, you might fire off a step you wrote previously. This is only a side issue though, compared to the biggest problem, step reuse.

Given a person "fred" exists
And a person "ethel" exists
And a fatherhood exists with parent: person "fred", child: person "ethel"

Did someone mention cucumber steps are written in english? What happened to:

Given Ethel has a father called Fred

I moved over to Spinach[1] about 18 months ago and I've been much happier. Steps are specific to a feature so I can go to town with shakespearean english. Reuse isn't an issue either, it just happens in the step definitions, not in the gherkin files. Using more natural english tends to lead to fewer larger steps anyway, so it feels a lot less like call-by-regex.

[1] https://github.com/codegram/spinach
Oddly, I can see it just fine with JavaScript disabled. I do not use NoScript (I use Opera 12 and whitelist sites to allow JS or not via per site settings[1]). I also have Disqus added to my hosts file (but disabling JS will have the same effect). I would guess perhaps NoScript decides to partially allow some scripts and not others, making for chaos? That just seems like a mess waiting to happen that no developer can 100% predict. No JS or all JS is much easier, but half blocking is not so much when there's dependencies.

However, I realize when sites fail (re-enable JS) and adjust accordingly as anyone that does such things should if they're blocking content (though I'm used to adjusting since I've been using a browser with a minority user base for years). Alternatively, view it via Google cache search (and add strip=1 to the end to remove all images and JS) and run it through readability. While I would prefer all sites to not assume, that's not going to happen and comes down to if I care enough to work around to see the site content or just move along and deem it not worth it.

[1] http://help.opera.com/Windows/12.10/en/sitepreferences.html
The Rspec Book. Even though it advocates Cucumber (I kind of ignored that part), it really explains how to think about tests. How to approach unit tests, integration tests, and testing behavior not implementation. I don't write Ruby code or Ruby Specs, and I found the code and the book completely applicable to PHP and JavaScript testing.

http://www.amazon.com/The-RSpec-Book-Behaviour-Development/d...
You really are the product this time.
> Non-technical people don’t read code, no matter how easy it is to read.

There is something deep and surprising about this fact.
It seems like the core of Docker is little more than a helper script that should be part of libvirt or LXC proper (which btw, already has a system for building containers from a template), but that would involve less horn-blowing and web design than it would submitting boring, well-tested old patches upstream.
Those sure are some leading answers.

iOS 7 is very different. It will take some getting used to, but a majority of people will stay, and I'm not sure a tech-savvy site like HN is a good sampling of what the average consumer will do. Anecdotally, I heard dozens of new-Siri beeps this morning at my tech company as people show off the update. New icons may suck, but they never killed anyone.
Another call about my "Windows" computer
「運」という意味がその３つのどの漢字にも入ってないよ。
Eh, AUFS isn't that odd these days. I built a chroot build utility for an open-source project on the back of it and it's super easy to work with. Haven't dealt with it in a couple of years, but I can't imagine it somehow got all kinds of crazy difficult to deal with or implement.
#tinytext
Right, the inconsistency is: the First World goes tsk tsk at the Third World for its overpopulation and poverty; meanwhile, it critically relies on the Third World to breed a neverending supply of cheap immigrant labor to exploit.
Yes, cucumber is terrible. But I mean terrible in the "it not only doesn't solve the problem, it actually makes it worse" sense, not the "it's poorly written code" sense. I bet it's a well-written (and tested!) piece of software, but I haven't actually looked.

Cucumber tries to solve the problem of turning customer requirements into 'real code'. In exchange for that worthwhile benefit, it asks you to implement the most terrible, reg-ex based spaghetti code imaginable.

The problem is that it doesn't solve the original problem AT ALL. And then you are left with terrible reg-ex driven spaghetti code. Like the Jamie Zawinski saying, "now you have two problems".

The lesson here is that software development processes have to pass the 'human nature' test.

The software industry has largely abandoned waterfall development because it just doesn't work well in practice. It doesn't work because people don't know perfectly what they want before they build it. Agile processes usually are much more efficient because they are more closely aligned to how humans solve problems in the real world.

Cucumber suffers from the same issue of being disconnected with reality. In theory, you can find a customer who can give you perfectly written use cases and you can cut-and-paste those into your cukes. In practice, that never, ever works. So let's all stop wasting our time pretending it was a good idea now that it has been shown to not work.
If you can afford it, the Big Nerd Ranch iOS courses will send you on your way quickly, but at ~$4,000 USD they're pretty spendy.
I've been fortunate enough to work in both environments. I'll be the first to admit there are pros and cons to both.

I've had an office and in my opinion, for focused work there is just no comparison. Being able to close the door means no corner of the eye people walking by distractions. People can talk about headphones all they want but if you can't put 4 walls around you then there are just too many distractions for me to get "into the zone".

On the other hand I currently work at a hedge fund with an open office and it probably needs to be open. Every one needs to know what the others are doing but design. The number of good ideas that come out of open discussion is just amazing.

The other up side to an open office that some people may not be aware of is the inclusiveness of it. with doors its easy for 3 people to have an impromptu meeting and not realize there are excluding others. With an open office everyone hears the conversation and can know if they want to participate or not.

or put another way, shy people are more likely to listen in and participate in meetings in open offices than they are to enter a closed door office to participate in the same meeting.

Many companies try to combat this by using irc. google hangouts, style chats which I feel really helps.
In case this crowd is missing part of the parody here, this is a Seinfeld startup: the "show about nothing", where George runs "The Human Fund", a fake charity.

"The Human Fund. Money for People".
The toolchain of dreams
Figured the bottom voted comment would be about the virtues of fresh cucumber.
Some I definitely agree with (mixed font casing), some I don't, and some are plain bugs which are annoying but not a question of sloppy UI. There's a lot slipped through that it's slightly inconsistent, but there was plenty of inconsistent design through iOS1-6 as well and with OS X.x in it's various releases.

Design over a large product like iOS or OS X is hard, it takes time to get all the edges smoothed down and given that iOS 7 is probably the result of a year to two years of work it's not a surprised it's rough. If it's a bug (or a UI niggle) report it to Apple, they may or may not be listening but it's a better solution to highlight it with them directly, as well as on Tumblr.