skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Experience with equity sharing for talent?
I read an article in Bloomberg Businessweek about investment firms that send/provide engineers and talent instead of cash in exchange for equity. I've never thought of or heard of this concept before, but I'm very interested.

My husband and I run a small javascript/node/realtime consulting firm, but we are also bootstrapping a testing product that has great potential. Obviously cash would be nice, but what we really need is a dedicated team working on it.

Does anyone have experience with these types of investment firms, like Equitive? Was it worth it to you? What was the process like for getting their attention and negotiating a fair deal?
As an ex-games developer it reminded me of flying around a level editor with a fixed forward speed and using a mouse for orientation.

Maybe that's just me!
I'm not sure about the "ethics" of non-constructive criticism from a developer perspective, but I think it is completely justified from the customer perspective. I paid (a lot) for this phone, I am allowed to be unhappy with the direction it's going: 1. As a market signal to the creators (which serves as very useful feedback), and 2. Because realistically I have to upgrade or be forced to not get any updates for my apps either (just in case someone wants to chime in that I "could" stay on iOS 6).

That's kind of the interesting thing we're seeing here that doesn't fit your analogy: most of the people complaining this time around are the iOS people about iOS.
Yeah. That part is true. I think you are probably onto the reason there. For RHEL distributions at least all I've seen included are the fuse based unioning filesystems which is sad.
> We need more people like this. Ready to call out crap.

We already have plenty of people ready to call out crap. Half the discussions on this site devolve into someone arguing about perceived flaws in something.

What we actually need is people pushing up the level of discourse. A stream of pictures and pithy sarcasm isn't useful until someone else comes along and responds to it. The world needs more thoughtful analysis and advancement, we probably have enough tumblrs full of snarky images.
My impression (as a static typing bigot) is that Cucumber style testing is like the crap shoot of dynamic testing (what should I type? What are valid commands? What params do they accept?) made an order of magnitude worse by using regular expressions.

...who thought this was a good idea? (Sorry, being harsh.)

That said, I think the idea is conceptually fine, and, as usual, I think could actually be fairly pleasant with the right (static) tooling applied, e.g. ThoughtWorks's Twist:

http://www.thoughtworks.com/products/twist-agile-testing/

Which is a GUI that provides all the nicities of "what commands are allowed", "what params do they take", "oh, refactor this command name from abc to xyz", etc.

I think PM/testing types would love this sort of setup. Granted, it would still take dev investment to get the fixtures/commands/etc. setup. But if you have a huge line-of-business app that will drive a business for the next 5-10 years, I think that's a good investment.

Disclaimer: I've never actually used Twist because it's a commercial product. Yes, I know I suck.
High-Profile MOOC Prof Dumps Coursera
It's had lots of practice, don't worry ;)
What is a package manager except a macro combination of tar+wget+a dependency graph?
"The training is nothing! The will is everything!" - Batman Begins
It means you don't have a social media blocker plugin installed. Ghostery is one example of such a plugin. With Ghostery enabled, the article content on this particular page is invisible. (That's not how it's supposed to work, and I suspect it's due to a mistake on the website's end.)
TL;DR stop bitching about an acceptance testing tool when you're not using for acceptance testing.

The problem isn't with Cucumber. The problem is your cukes suck. This is probably also a problem in your Rspec/Minitest/whatever tests. If you're using cucumber the way 90% of the cucumber tests I've ever seen (indeed, a great many i've written myself) are written, then you're writing integration tests, and probably crappy ones at that.

Given a user
And I go to some really cool page
And I click on some button

is NOT a domain test. Domains, for the most part, don't have 'users' (unless maybe your domain is drug addiction). Or 'pages' (unless you're in publishing). And they're definitely not about 'buttons' (unless you're a tailor.) [Yeah, you can probably find some domains where those are actual concepts. They're probably not all concepts in the same domain.]

Write actual domain tests for your acceptance tests. Do this regardless of your framework—there's absolutely nothing preventing you from doing it rspec or anything else. Fuck step reuse (gherkin alternatives like spinach are great, specifically because the steps are isolated to the test.)

If you don't want to write acceptance tests, and you feel comfortable with that, no biggie. Lots of people don't. But don't create a straw man out of Cucumber just because you don't understand layers of testing.

This goes for Cucumber fanboys as well. Don't push cucumber into layers it doesn't belong. Its a domain testing tool. Not an integration test. definitely not a unit test. Don't push it on a team that doesn't want it. You can write the same kinds of tests in rspec. Disclaimer: I like cucumber. I am not using it in my current job because it wasn't a good fit for the company. I will probably use it again one day. I still write AT's.

This:

Given I hate cucumber
And I post a scree against it
Then the haters will rejoice

is pretty much the same as this:

describe "hating on cucumber" do
it "produces a response" do
given_i_hate_cucumber
when_i_post_a_scree
then_haters_rejoice
end
def given_i_hate_cucumber
end
#....
end
5 Best Replies to Jaden Smith's Dropout Tweet
Of course SSH is better all around, but the article was saying that you'd have to authenticate every time you push if you use the HTTP link which isn't really true.
How can anybody (even if they never saw Seinfeld, and everyone watched Seinfeld) mistake this for a parody. HN has been getting very humorless anything satirical needs a comment explaining that. sheesh
I would suggest you get assessed for a learning disability. The pattern you describe is extremely typical for someone who is 2xE -- I.e. both bright and learning disabled. Identifying and addressing a previously undiagnosed disability is typically life changing in the most wonderful way.

For this specific issue, I suggest you go to programmer meet-ups and make friends in person. Find someone you hit off with. Ask them to do a little hand holding and explaining. You might have to try this a few times before you find someone that clicks with you in the right way. Once you get over that initial hump, you will likely be fine.
4chan lost its very special flavor about 7 years ago, when it stopped being possible to follow threads without noko'ing them.
I only use Noscript, and I can view the content.

I primarily use NoScript because it does a really good job of blocking modern popups.
Hollywood blames Google for failing to stop piracy?
No more managers at TreeHouse (part 2)
As an employee in this type of survey, I tend not to ask for things I assume would never happen. So if I disliked the open-plan (which I don't), I don't think I would ask for a private office. I would think that the open-plan is a given and not something that could change in the whole company because as soon as you give a private office to one of your developers, you have to do it for everyone who wants one which is not practical without moving.
QS is a good idea, but I doubt the time has come for it yet.

It's a basic fact of life that you make better decisions with more information available, presuming you can think about that information sanely.

Humans generate lots of information, and computers can capture and record that information. It seems like there has to be some intersection, where we can write programs that help us make decisions.

That's not totally there yet, but it doesn't make monitoring bad. The worst case is that the data isn't useful right now.
They sure make it easy to search for related questions.
> Cucumber tries to solve the problem of turning customer requirements into 'real code'

No, it tries to solve the problem of narrowing the gap between objective, easily reusable tests and customer-understandable requirements. Insofar as it involves code, "real" or otherwise, that's a means to solving the problem, not the fundamental problem its trying to solve.

> 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.

The theory that "customers" on their own do this is flawed (and seems to be part of the we-don't-need-no-stinking-analysts school of software development theory); that's not a problem with cucumber or tools, its a problem with not having system/business analysts (which term is preferred depends on the environment, but they are the same thing) who work with customers to elicit requirements that the customers own and can validate but which the analysts helps them to shape into the needed structure.
One place I worked used noise cancelling tech (some white noise, along with what appeared actual noise cancelling) to the effect that you couldn't hear a conversation ten foot away.

I'm constantly surprised we don't see this more.
Interesting...what would be an example of a randomized epidemiological study?
> Ideally, json2csv would have added the header.

You can raise an issue (https://github.com/jehiah/json2csv) or just fork and add a flag to include a header line
I suspect it might be more useful in, for example, software-designed radio applications which should be able to make use of the full analog bandwidth and the much better dynamic range.
I rewrote a (~10k lines) C++ app to erlang back when I was learning erlang, and saw a ~75% reduction in lines of code.

http://www.metabrew.com/article/rewriting-playdar-c-to-erlan...

I expect the 'N' value varies wildly depending on what you are building, and whichever language you are comparing against.
Nice tools.

You can actually do most of that with vanilla PowerShell and Excel believe it or not but it's much fuglier and you spend most of your way working around edge cases.

The only thing that scares me about this though is that JSON is a terrible format for storing numbers in. There is no way of specifying a decimal type for example so aggregations and calculations have no implied precision past floating point values.
If these are the worst things that people can find to complain about in iOS7, then Apple should feel pretty proud of themselves.
Some of these are cool, but I don't understand the preference for command line tools over writing, say, a short python script in vim and then executing it. I see the two methods achieving the same results with about the same amount of text, except with a script, its savable and much easier to type.
Are employees guaranteed it's anonymous? Are the questions leading? Are you asking the right questions in the first place?

We just had a company wide survey. They said it was anonymous, but there's no way to be 100% sure of that as an employee. My company is paying another company to do this. And something tells me if they really wanted to find out who gave a specific response, they could. Point is, I'm still going to be reserved in my answers.

And ultimately, the fact remains that almost every bit of research contradicts you. I know you desperately want to think your company is different. But maybe this is a good opportunity to give yourself an honest assessment of the situation.
I actually owned and played both those games on the 2600 when I was a kid. As it turns out, they were very buggy (and for me to recognize this as a child says something). Not refuting your point, just an anecdotal comment.
You're right. I completely confused the Korean war dates. Egg. Face.
> Also, the blog is not called "Apple Sloppy UIs", but "Sloppy UIs". That still qualifies.

Tagline to the blog: "We love Apple. We think this is the best way to point out what's not up to their standards so they can fix it." (emphasis mine)

Do they expect Apple to fix the UI of other people's apps?
It's different though, alot different.
It's more diverse and less annoying then that of angry birds.
Plus it's alot more of a challenge
The thread seems to be overrun by a bunch of whiny crybabies.

No one forces people to use them, yet they seem to have a great time crying about it without trying to defend their position.

Cucumber and RSpec are among a set of testing tools which has really changed the testing landscape. It would be really wonderful if people spent half this time and energy on trying to create a better tool or joining the open source groups of Cucumber and RSpec and trying to make it better.
For those people who are interested in topic/article classification and NLP, Twitter can a gold-mine, especially hashtags. If you gather the hashtags for a million articles, you pretty much have a co-location database. Now you can mine that data and see which hashtags are common if you have "Google Panda" in your title for instance, or which hash tags are commonly used with #seo. Hashtags are basically structured semantic data, if you look at them in aggregation. A good tool for doing this is SOLR or ElasticSearch. Simply import all the hashtags for a bunch of articles to the index, and do a faceted search for a specific hashtag, or keyword, and you'll get the top 10 associated hashtags that are highly related to that keyword.
Shakespearean English did you say? Something like this?

Borne o'er the cruel firmament become Ethel
That Fred hath usurp'st from her the silence
When lo! Upon them should harrow a fatherhood
Of parent, Fred besieged by the burden
And his daughter the indifferent imposition of child

Sounds great! I'd much rather use that than Cucumber.
The Ultimate Cheat Sheet to Starting and Running Your Own Business

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/08/the-ultimate-cheat-shee...
use 2 spaces to make it a quote within a <pre>

def mymethod
:is_awesome
end
For a persistent JVM, take a look at Nailgun [1].

Additionally, the Drip project [2] uses a swapping strategy, by keeping an additional JVM spun up in the background. It was apparently built because the authors had trouble with persistent JVMs containing old dependencies.

[1] http://www.martiansoftware.com/nailgun/

[2] https://github.com/flatland/drip
Of course, that - i wouldn't really know. Perhaps if we attack it from the other side - what happens when a civilized society shifts its balance point from "we don't know a lot, we know only a few things" to "we know a lot, what we don't know isn't important". How is one grown in the first society is with a bigger openness, the need to be sharp in every situaton vs. the "life through recipes" which proliferates in the second society.

(sorry for my english and somewhat vague thoughts, i hope something gets through)
Good read. Thanks for that.

edit: HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6243627
"Hi boss, I'd like a private office, even though everyone else in the company is forced to stare at each other across their shared desks." -- a statement you're sure to see in your company wide survey.
Because I recognize the value in it. I hate sitting by waiting while my co-founder builds things and keeps servers up and I feel like an idiot. I can go get more users and sign them up all day, but I can't really contribute to product, even when I'm wildly passionate about it.
I spent 8 months traveling through Central and South America helping someone develop a travel site, Skilljet.com, a job I found through Odesk. Although I loved every minute of it, I can agree that there are some limitations. It's a bit hard to venture off into remote territory, when work is dependent upon stable internet access. And when moving around often, it can take a bit of time to get re-settled and find a comfortable work place.

However, like I said, I loved every minute of it! I initially left for my trip with only $600 USD in my account. Working online allowed me to stretch what would have been a 3 week trip into an 8 month trip where I was able to visit 6 different countries! When I found my 'office' to be a hammock on a beautiful beach in Brazil, I knew I had accomplished something very special.

Also, since Skilljet is a website designed to help travelers find amazing adventure around the world, I was able to contribute to its development from my personal travel experience. This really helped me unite, both the virtual world of working online, with the physical world around me, which made my experience much more meaningful.
Dont learn yourself something you're not interested in. Its a lot more difficult this way..
yeah, figured that out in the time between our posts :) thanks for the tip!
New Multi OS Network Installer for the Raspberry Pi
These are great!

I wrote a quick ruby script that converts one or more CSV files into an SQLITE db file, so you can easily query them.

https://github.com/dergachev/csv2sqlite
Twist last time I used it appeared to be much more inflexible to cukes. You still had to delve into Java to make it do anything useful so it still has the problems that cukes has.
Be very careful of over reuse of step definitions, and of Transforms. You'll end up with code that's very difficult to understand as your step codebase grows.

I now tend towards minimal step re-use, lots of one or two-line steps calling into nice clean plain ruby classes which actually do the work of my steps.

I've blogged a lot about how to use cucumber well here:
http://chrismdp.com/tag/cucumber
Thanks for pointing this. Notekeeping is a very personnal process anyway.
In my opinion he gave up on recording every thoughts because the software wasn't up to par with his specific structuration technique. (I do think that almost every one will have a different way to structure his external mind so that it is useful for him/her, generalized software will be frustrating).

I do record almost all my thinking. I use a very simple software called "the guide" (very lightweight outliner) and also use a mix of chronology and concept maps (basically mapping by concepts until the leaves, where each entry/page is stamped with date).

There was interesting ideas in the book (but it does look like a sample from a notebook :-)). I'll definitely take something out of it, starting with an attempt at collating my dozen of files into a global system.
Reminds me of the time I was watching my cat and had a sudden revelation: The fur and flesh over his skeleton and organs is just like "skinning" a basic web page with CSS styles.

A second later I was like...

"doublefacepalm.jpg"
It's a mix of design and organizational history, I left out most tech commentary because by the time I wrote it in 2008 the technology we used for ibm.com was laughably outdated and obsolete.
Worst thing is that serious bugs in Safari that surfaced during beta are not fixed for release.
> What Simpson's paradox is not

> Every ommitted variable problem

Not quite the same thing as the OP (not sure if you were implying it was). Regardless, OVP is still a great thing to have in your mental framework.
My biggest problem when I first started out was just following tutorials and thinking "hmmm, i really dont get this".

The best way I learned to program is to do it. No,seriously. Pick a project you want to make and make it. If a task like "user registration" is too tough, break it down further into subtasks e.g. create form to register, have form send info to db, etc.

Following tutorials and online sources that have you make useless things like "CREATE A CALCULATOR" I never found useful in trying to learn programming.
Are bugs in the UI not themselves part of the UI? If their goal is point out "sloppiness" in the UI, why should obvious or slightly less-obvious bugs be excluded?
Isn't getting users just as, if not more, important? The best product in the world is pointless if no one uses it.
Try analyzing your bank transactions/statements in an Excel spreadsheet. For e.g change interest rates/fees etc.
something similar to - http://hashtagify.me
design is one thing, and you know what, its pretty good, however i can't understand how google - the WW leader in indexing - is letting people use a phone that takes up to 2-4 seconds to load the contact list... that's crazy.
You know what? Maybe I'll start shopping at HSN instead of Amazon, because as we all know, HSN's higher margins obviously means that they're a superior store than Amazon's crappy margins. </sarcasm>

Profit margins are irrelevant to the discussion.
Awesome plugin! This is big!!!
Tools are definitely important, however proficiency with those tools and most importantly, proficiency with the language are the largest determining factors. It takes months (if not years) to get to the point where you're really comfortable in a new language and can crank out volumes of code relatively quickly.

If you made me write with Eclipse, I'd probably be horribly inefficient. It's not that Eclipse is a bad tool, it's just that it lends itself to languages that I'm not super fond of writing in (ie. Java, ActionScript, etc.) and it's much different than the way I'm used to working (with vi, git and a command line). If you transplant a C# programmer into the vi and Python world, they'll usually run away screaming. Neither is better, they're just different.
I'd like to see some classification performance numbers, ROC curves, etc.
Upsource can point to any repository, public or private. Kotlin and IntelliJ projects on there now are actually pointing to GitHub.
Release it on PC and keep your finger crossed while a cracker team cracks the drm and releases it on a torrent site.
LA Media and Entertainment Startup Weekend
> This goes for Cucumber fanboys as well. Don't push cucumber into layers it doesn't belong. Its a domain testing tool. Not an integration test.

Its far from the worst integration testing tool available, and I'm not really sure that there is a big difference in the requirements for an integration testing tool vs. a domain/acceptance tool; certainly, the ideal usage patterns into which the tools are embedded for those uses (including who should be writing tests: if you are trying to involve customers in test design, but your trying to do integration-style tests, that is likely to fail hard independently of tooling.)
Seevl.fm: a new and clever music discovery experience
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nice answer
I agree! I like the idea of BDD. I disagree with the rspec book in degree, it goes overboard, too many tests for not enough return.
He's sleeping right now. Try again in twelve days.
Probably not, but he did disclaim that it was pretty naive and could be improved in many ways. I think it's a pretty darn good first pass. That particular issues comes about from tagging words that are common in the target text without reference to whether or not that's actually significant- i.e., whether it's common in the text just because it's a common word overall, rather than because it's actually an indication of the text subject. That should be pretty easy to fix by comparing with an English word frequency list.
IE/FF/CR
It is possible to read it as 'VLC comes with crapware' rather than 'third-parties distribute VLC with their own crapware'.
Thanks, jmorrow, cannot wait to show you what is next!
The whole iOS7 UI is not intuitive at all. Look, I love flat UI but when I became and engineer and founder, started talking to customers, I realized that customers are simply not as aware as the people that designed and made software. They don't know what to click, they sometimes don't even know they can click something, and they often get lost. When you go to a Microsoft store and see people playing with Windows 8, you see this and it really hits you. People are lost, randomly clicking on text thinking it is a button. While Windows 8 and iOS7 look good in many ways, I think this release is a step backwards for people who might not be very tech savvy.