skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
// Don't remove this comment, or the next line will break. WTF?!?

Turns out, we had mixed carriage returns and line feeds in our source. We had some UNIX coders, and some Windows coders. The Windows coders were in VS6 (ug), and the IDE showed the code perfectly. The compiler, on the other hand, was getting confused because one file had mixed CR/LF... So, essentially, it thought

// Comment
formatHardDrive = true;

It thought that pesky next line was still part of the comment. It wasn't literally formatting the hard drive... that was another bug we encountered, one time... oh, the places you'll go...
We're on HackerNews. "it's honestly not that bad"... the point of hacking is taking things that are bad or "not so bad" and making them better.

This argument to me achieves only the opposite, it makes me never want to consider whatever option it defends.
We started using Cucumber 6 months ago and I hate it. My biggest issue is that it's unreliable. 90% of the test failures work if you do it exact same steps manually.

It seems like it always times out waiting for something on the page to load.
Thanks! Saltstack, Mailgun, and Pin Payments I hadn't heard about before.
It is "bull". The tablets are being bought and used mostly outside the US, primarily in Asia. If you compare global sales with US web usage you've got a mystery to explain because the figures don't match, which leads to theories like all Android tablets get bought and put in drawers.

If you look at web usage segmented by region it's clear that they're getting used roughly in line with installed base, which is higher for iOS tablets in the US than elsewhere:

http://www.tech-thoughts.net/2013/08/reality-android-tablet-...
You are right. I will say that I had not noticed this story being fictional. Makes me feel rather stupid. Why did I not notice? I have been in this situation many times. We often read about how perfect startups are. How nothing in Silicon Valley stinks. But life has had me participating in scenarios similar to what the OP described. Which is the point of the post itself. The path to understanding makes shreds of the ego.
just another holy war on something that doesn't have one right answer

This article is in reaction to a scientific study, one of many, showing that in fact there is a right answer.
But months ago these were quirks in a beta release. iOS7 is now released software, and it's expected to have matured.
You don't need to learn to program unless you have a specific goal in mind. Lack of such goal is probably why you can't bring yourself to do it. It's a myth that everyone needs to know how to program
iOS 7 and Xamarin: Ready When You Are
QML support for Golang
Awesome let us know if you have any feedback.
This kicks ass! Buh bye Slideshare.
Sun also tried this with Maxine Virtual Edition (nee Guest VM) JVM. I can't find any updates on it so it looks like it was canned.

https://kenai.com/projects/guestvm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHIaH12f2Ek
Are you trying to advertise safecast? When was the last time you heard of a reactor issue in your life, aside from the one being built on the "Ring of Fire".
Perhaps a title change is in order. We know the mice became unafraid of cats, just not that the change was permanent.
Here's what it looks like to create a container in libvirt-lxc: http://libvirt.org/drvlxc.html

It is pretty dang clear to me how to create it.
If programming isn't interesting enough, figure out a problem you really want to solve with programming. Such that every morning you wake up saying its up to me to solve this problem, I'm going to figure out how to get past every wall in my way and I'm going to reach out to people for help, since this problem needs to get solved.
Another relatively similar instrument is the PicoScope series http://www.picotech.com/oscilloscope.html
Awesome! getsentry and circleci are both new to me. We're going to look into them a little more and get them into the Tool Shop database.
Holy crap I'd never even made that connection. (Maybe because I've also worked in a giant cubicle farm in the D/FW area, so that's what I think of when I watch Office Space?) That's hilarious. Trust me, talking on the phone was the least obnoxious thing the A/P folks did. At least when they were on the phone, there was a theoretical maximum volume at which they were speaking.
The key here is that in all probability you need a realistic programming task that will result in a piece of software you want to use.

It is exceedingly difficult to just "learn to program". If you were to go to college then you would be set tasks that you would be motivated to complete (for a qualification of what have you) and you would thus learn enough about programming to complete the task.

Without the motivation for each stage of learning - the task of learning would be pretty dry.
I imagine that the answer would be "Yes".
> So what can I do to make programming interesting enough that I'll want to learn how to do it?

Pick a simple chore you do now manually by hand and try to automate it so that the computer can do it for you.

This way, you may have more motivation, because if you can automate the chore, you won't have to do it manually anymore.

Learning to code from the "how-tos" is hard if you are unmotivated because the examples they ask you to create are not something you'll ever need, or use, again. Therefore you have difficulty staying motivated because it all feels like busy work.

Note, the word "simple" above is critically important. You have to pick something that is within your skill level. So it has to be something "simple".
This is probably a driver issue, if you're not using it try Poltergeist[1], a headless webkit driver. Because it's webkit it basically behaves the same way as if you were testing it yourself in chrome.

[1] https://github.com/jonleighton/poltergeist
Totally agree about the RSpec book, what a nightmare going through the examples, seems to me like they're trying to convince you that RSpec is good for you, but...I'm already reading the book, so just cut the crap and teach me how to write good tests based on realistic scenarios.
Evaluating evidence from published research
Thanks so much for the response. Are you happy with these tools?
omg does this work even with Ruby and Go!?! :O Do you have a tutorial???! The fonts suck so bad. Omg this is not even web scale
Did they tell you afterwards if you were one of the toxo-zombies??
DotCloud have done a wonderful job of popularizing the idea of LXC containers with Docker. I think the idea of LXC containers as software-distribution mechanism is a great one, and I credit Docker with getting that idea into my mind.

It is great to see that many of Docker's ideas are being implemented upstream; e.g. LXC added support for BtrFS snapshots shortly after Docker launched. Sounds like OpenShift is considering which Docker ideas belong in their platform.

It can sometimes be hard to work with upstream projects, who often have a different world-view. I do like the idea of releasing a "sacrificial lamb" project that is a demonstration of your ideas, even if long-term all the ideas belong upstream (i.e. LXC in the case of Docker).
I started learning to code when I was a kid -- not by reading books or plowing through tutorials, but by making websites. I'd build something simple, and then iterate on it, adding features as I felt like it. After a certain point I got the urge to recode my work, then having a better understanding of how all the pieces fit together. After several apps, I started to gain a more intrinsic sense for how programming "worked."

In short: why not sit down and try to code something simple?
here's an example of pushing to a private repo

https://gist.github.com/bosky101/6625584
I think the problem with letting people choose individually is that a lot of software work is essentially collaborative.

One team I'm working with right now is entirely distributed. And they're building a video call tool, so they like remote-presence tech just fine. But they still work one week physically together every month, even though that means a bunch of 10-13 hour flights. Despite the pain, they see the direct collaboration as necessary to making rapid progress.

If you let individuals be remote or unavailable as they please individually, it becomes very difficult to collaborate. Another team I work with has made Tuesday the optional work-from-home day just to minimize the scheduling chaos and communication impairment that comes from people being out of the office.

I'm hoping that remote-presence tech will solve this problem eventually, but for now, there's just no substitute for having everybody in the same room.
Earthflight has similarly beautiful footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIKnol2i850
The first time I saw this was Human Planet, in an episode about Kazakh hunters training Golden Eagles to hunt foxes for them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y3Dl0BGFfw

The extras part of the documentary includes a behind-the-scenes look at getting the birds-eye shot.
Agreed. The scenery in that part of the world is breathless and no better way to see it then on the back of this beautiful animal.

Incredible.
My understanding is that it's been unable to get into the Linux kernel because it's unstable? I agree it's a great tool if it works :-)
"It is not very difficult for a determined attacker to harvest your email and scan it for common structured data like credit card details."

In particular, let me highlight that scan part. The attacker in question is probably not attacking you personally... the hacker is simply spreading a dragnet as wide as possible and running a simple RE over the whole thing. The odds that a hacker is attacking "your" email is low, the odds that your email is part of some dragnet somewhere is non-trivial, in a world of bot nets and rampant compromises.
I'm with 'roc' on this one. Including a bunch of obvious bugs tells me that you either a) can't distinguish between design and implementation or b) are more interested in shitting on other people's work than saying anything useful.

This is fail culture masquerading as design critique, and it isn't even doing that well.
It completely depends how you use it. There's so much misuse of it out there I can understand why people hate it so much. But done right it's an extremely valuable collaboration tool.

I'd recommend the Cucumber Book if you want to read about how to use it well:

http://pragprog.com/book/hwcuc/the-cucumber-book

I've also blogged a lot about how to use Cucumber well here:

http://chrismdp.com/tag/cucumber
And it also depends on the editors, debuggers and other tools they use/know to use.
任天堂本社こそその意味が確実に付けられると思ってない。

http://kotaku.com/5649625/nintendo-might-not-mean-what-you-t...
The fact that you could list them all off proves that they are memorable.
So they keep posting, having no idea they broke any rules, until they realize they were banned. Then they make a new account and continue on, not changing their behavior in any way, as they have no idea what caused the ban in the first place.

The problem with it is it makes one particular set of assumptions about behavior - you must be a troll, you must crave attention, and in the absence of attention, you must either get frustrated and leave or else continue trolling. Because being a troll with no possible valid input to offer or being a good user is a binary state.

But of course if you look at the comments by most of those users, you'll see a number of perfectly reasonable banned comments and maybe (if you can find it) the one infraction which may have started it all. For most of them, I wind up wondering if a simple warning from a mod might have sufficed.

And yes, as you point out, legitimate posters who just lost their head for a moment go on talking to an empty room while the actual trolls just burn another account.
> "The nature of Easter eggs is an oxymoron. Why would Snapchat or any other product hide functionality..."

I'm not sure what word was intended there, but it wasn't oxymoron. Perhaps the writer meant to say the nature of Easter eggs seems confusing?
Thanks, marlos1965! We will really be digging in on creation next, so cannot wait to hear your thoughts!
Don't forget the experience they also gained with Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3.
Hi,

Thanks for the useful insight.

* As the app is supposed to be used on mobile phones, the date field should pop a calendar on focus, which _normally_ doesn't give the user the opportunity to screw around. This field needs validation, but it's not primordial at the moment.

* Nice idea, thanks.

* On a phone, you can only select a date starting from today, so my Android doesn't let me try it. It seems buggy on desktop browsers, I'll check that out.

The two last ideas are awesome, but sadly the time won't let me implement them.

Regarding the names suggestions, a cache for food names is implemented, I just need to connect it to the app.
Depends what level of testing, but the Cucumber Book gives great examples as to how to write Acceptance Tests for customers:

http://pragprog.com/book/hwcuc/the-cucumber-book
>> Not directly. But if you buy a tablet and it sits in the drawer, you probably won't buy the next one.

Yes.

Most of what I did on my iPad 1 was surf. Upgrading to iOS 5 killed my iPad (Safari crashes constantly) and it basically went into the drawer. iOS4 killed my iPhone 3G in an even more dramatic fashion.

While those OS upgrades happened in the age of Forstall, it is no longer a foregone conclusion that I would upgrade to an iPhone or iPad.

It used to be an easy decision, but now that there is more parity among platforms (compared to say, 2010), it's that much more important for Apple to ensure that people can continue using their device.

Hopefully with OS upgrades in the age of Federighi, we won't see as many performance crippling major releases as we have in the past.
Totally agreed. 600 people aren't meaningfully collaborating on anything.

I've really loved open-plan spaces for 5-10. But at the point where a lot of the people you see are effective strangers, it's no better than just setting your desks out on the sidewalk
The show about nothing (Seinfeld) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQnaRtNMGMI
And some slope soaring FPV: https://vimeo.com/37879715
IIRC, "invasion threads" were off-topic (bannable offence) at one point too. I don't know if they are anymore (it's been years since I've been there).
someone watched Seinfeld last night
This is clearly a piss-take on the state of web 2.0.
The problem is that the assets are dynamic. If you give me a single complete requirement for some little feature I can give you a pretty accurate estimate. But most of my requirements are things like "Write an app to do X." The only part of that I can estimate is the part I've done before, but if the app were just like all the apps that came before there would be no need for a new app. But the juicy candy center is an abject mystery and there is nothing to compare it to from which to derive an accurate estimate. Once you've dug halfway into it, you'll be tossing out new requirements. Maybe you can make good estimates on those, but your a priori estimate is now probably really off.
As a professional programmer, I can't sit down, open a book on a language/platform, and read it and learn it. It doesn't matter how much I want to learn that language/platform. I have to learn by doing.

Forget about learning to program. Figure out what you want to make, and start making it.

I've been working on an Android app recently. This is my third or so attempt at learning the platform. This time, I've actually made good progress, because I have a goal. I started not by saying "Gee, I want to learn this", but by saying "Why does this app not exist? I could make it. I should make it"

Start with a basic "Hello world". After that, instead of going onto the next chapter, think "What's the easiest thing I can do next to advance my goal".
I've thought about something like applying a threshold filter to thumbnails to distort them sufficiently so they're not potentially "offensive" but have it still be apparent if they might contain bad content. It's too difficult a problem for me to actually implement though, and I suspect it could be easily hacked somehow.
You are right. I worked as BI consultant before. In our company the three main challenges we had were :

* collecting data
* having clean data
* extracting the right indicators and analytics from the data

I think the problems remain the sames with QS. Actual QS solutions lack of interoperability, do not really allow experimentations and do wrong about privacy. That's why Cozy could help: it allows to build data collectors in a few hours, a data browser is available to clean wrong data, and the best of all it allows anyone to hack new stuff on top of this new set of data without compromising privacy.

disclaimer: Cozy member
I haven't been able to find a clear reason as to why AUFS seems to have lost support from major distros - although the fact that it requires patching VFS in the kernel and isn't "just a module" doesn't help.
Have you tried swiftKey? I found it to be the best there is for Android. (I'm in no way related to it)
I've begun archiving thing like that with Evernote. It helps me tag things, and provides a searchable archive accessible from all of my devices.
And then there will be a reality show called "Six is a Company".
There is some value in using it when everyone knows Ruby: it forces you to get your head out of the code, using language that your customers understand rather than naturally defaulting to codespeak.

I use Cucumber on my own projects when it's just me, for precisely this reason.
The one video I really remember was a drone with a GoPro I think in Bangkok and it was going straight down the sides of skyscrapers and going over the top of the city.

It was an amazing video and I can't seem to find it anymore.
Your post makes me feel like you're missing the point of BDD.

The point of BDD isn't to "stop breaking the code". I think "coders" value "code" too much.

The point of BDD is to build understanding of the problem you're solving by enumerating behavioral ambiguities/edge cases up front, before you've invested time and emotion into a particular code approach.

You're using testable _behavior_ to drive the development of your code. More simply - test first, code second. Having a regression suite is a cool side effect.

Of course, this is just how it's "supposed to work." In real life YMMV. Whether or not you think there's much value in that methodology is another story - but if you are going to dismiss something, you have to dismiss it based on a relevant metric.
Cucumber has been a great success for our team. We've trained the BA's how to write cucumber scripts, which in turn has done a lot to train the BA's in how to think about the stories and features that they are requesting. The dev will sit down with this feature definition and the BA's, and the feature is groomed into a viable and feasible feature that is testable. We strap these to a web automation (we use specflow to watin), and get a fairly significant return on investment.

Cucumber is like any tool; if used correctly, it's great, and if it's used as a de facto tool, then you're going to struggle with it.
Why yes, it actually does have Ruby bindings:

http://libvirt.org/ruby/
Culture of overwork overshadows better, more balanced lives
I've used Cucumber for years, and I've never had a customer write a feature. Customers reading features after I've written them and checking them works much better in my experience.
A strange example. Does the author really think hashtagifying the word 'content' has improved the tweet in some way? Do they expect people to be searching Twitter for #content and getting some useful results?
> I have been trying to force myself to learn to program for years [...] 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.

Why are you trying to force yourself to do something you aren't interested in? My first suggestion would be to really understand what you want out of it, and why you are doing this.

My second suggestion, if you decide it is something you really do want to do and you have a good story for yourself as to why you are doing it is to try to do learning with either a co-learner or a mentor who understands your motivation for learning, and to try to work with them to find real projects to apply what you are learning that relate to your motivation.
Cyagenmod looks really promising now. :)
If you're interested by this application, please try it on a mobile device.

It was not written with desktop browsers in mind, which means it can behave incorrectly on them.
Definitely hadn't heard about Fogbeam or Jenkins before, will investigate. Thanks!
How Bad You Want It (Success)?
How to Use Structure to Become a More Effective Entrepreneur
It doesn't really make any sense, but that's the official story even inside Nintendo (of America).

And using Japanese here is pointless.
I appreciate all of your responses, are there any particular tools/resources that you've been needing? Or a tool to replace one that you're unhappy with?
lib_ruby_behaviarol_test_runner, lib_ruby_behavioral_test_parser, bracketed_template_language_3, ruby_application_server_16
NSA reveals how Snowden accessed secret Prism files
I honestly love the kooky names you find with most open source stuff. I personally hate it when I get mired too deeply with an enterprise-y company where everything's name is an unmemorable three-letter acronym for some bull shit name that does not mean anything even when it's written out.
Please add the "before" as well.
Yeah, this will be great for a functional language. PHP functions tends to have side effects and their results often rely on variables outside of the function which means the tests will be wrong.
You are making a few assumptions. Terms are there to create users and legally protect both.
"You're going after him instead of his argument."

That doesn't make it ad hominem. That's a phrase used in the context of a debate. jessedhillon isn't after the argument at all. He's attacking a certain behaviour.

ad hominem: "Your point about global warming is invalid because you slap your children and I don't like that."

not ad hominem: "You slap your children and I don't like that."
How about the perspective of Joe Armstrong (Green Day)?
I could be wrong, but the op was asking for a book recommendation beyond the Rspec book, because the root message of this thread says: "The Rspec book is a load of crap."
Z-point energy: Biggest discovery of science
I can see that article fine with Ghostery + Adblock. I wonder what URL is causing the problem?
Ah, that makes sense - I should've said "I'm trying all of this from Firefox". And to think that I have fussed at other people for writing bad bug reports ;)

I'll probably take a look at this on my iPhone. As someone that wastes tons of food, this definitely interests me.
Social Fixer Page Removed: Follow-up And Responses To Questions And Comments
One-time pad using GIMP
This entirely depends on how you write your step code. If you treat it like production code and aggressively refactor it, so you have minimal reuse of steps, lots of one or two-line steps, calling clean well factored plain Ruby code that actually does the work, you'll be a lot better off.

This does take time to create, but in my experience having acceptance tests written in a form which is readable to anyone is very useful. I've even gone so far as to create a gem to display the features as the 'help' section of a website:

https://github.com/chrismdp/rack-usermanual
Shhh... Mods are asleep...