skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I interviewed with a company one time that ran with TDD and pairing like a religion.

The guy I was interviewing with didn't like the fact that I thought about how the problem might be shaped (and therefore made assumptions as to what I might want to implement and refine via tests) prior to “writing” that first failing test. It was absolute nonsense and I was rather shocked that the company managed to ship anything, to be honest.

I'm a big fan of tests; I'm a big fan of pairing. They are tools; nothing more.
I believe the Onion nailed it here a couple years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqggW08BWO0
Good designers, the ones you want if this is important to you, don't do contests.

I'm not looking for a good designer. I'm looking for a hacker (ideally a unix hacker) who happens to have some design skills.
The nice thing about touch pads for controllers is that you can create new button layouts, or have them change in game. I just bought FIFA 2014 for Android, and it really adds new possibilities. A low latency touch input with controller like feedback would add alot of interesting new control schemes...
... for well over $1000, for a computer that questionably performs better.
And now we know why Larry Niven hasn't won any awards for humor.
Does it show the bookmarks on top?
The app doesn't work. When you scroll up and down through the images it stops showing you new faces. The faces are not all there, it's a trick, just has a few hundred facebook profiles in there, does not have all 1.2 billion.
OK, we 're not really surprised, and as others say, the onion had predicted it years ago. What are the results? Can somebody ask for anonymized copies of these publicly-funded data? You know, for research purposes and all...
Having spent some time in meditation practice, I have come to the conclusion that this is true (maybe not literally, but at least in effect).

We all spend most (all?) of our time being driven by impulses and habits without realizing that we're doing so and without any choice in that matter.

Moments of mindfulness are the exception, typically caused by some "unusual" event - like somebody you know dying.

It's quite a sad state of affairs (IMHO anyway). More like living the live of an extremely sophisticated robot, rather than a conscious, living being.

Everybody should spend a few minutes every day reflecting on exactly how decisions throughout the day were made.
Your use case exists, but satisfying your (edge) use case doesn't create a $400B company. What Jobs&Co. did was to understand what would make the average user's experience better on a smartphone.
What's Wrong With Wharton?
When ECMAScript 6 "happens" (any idea when that will be?), will we actually be able to use it or will we have to stick to old things due to browser compatibility?
This article starts out acting like the release of Z10 was what killed blackberry. Hardly. They were dead long before the Z10, and releasing the Z10 with a keyboard was not the answer. To think it is is laughable.

As others have stated, they could have sold high end custom Android phones and done well. They have/(perhaps had) a good brand. If they had released a solid phone like a nexus or galaxy they would have done fine. The execs in the story admitted that their technology was significantly behind. Once they realized that, they should have pivoted to Android. Perhaps keep working on their own stuff behind the scenes to try to catch up. But they can't keep releasing inferior phones and expect to stay on top. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but there are a lot of people on the outside that have said blackberry is making the wrong decisions and headed to failure for quite awhile.
I think RIM didn't understand how the game had changed. They pioneered the market with secure communications, talk and text, basically a dumbphone +.

When Apple entered the market, they partnered with Google for Youtube content and with AT&T for a good data plan. They changed the game from talk and text to consumption of content: data, video, internet, etc.

RIM was stuck in the belief that phones were phones, and that their phones were better phones. The iPhone changed the market so that people wanted portable computers that they could access content with.

RIM never understood this.
Spaced repetition is just choosing the frequency with which you engage in an activity. Whether that activity is memorizing random-facts w/o context or something more in-depth is up to you.
If you are iterating their isn't always distinct prototypes — just quick first-draft implementations. Sometimes these are good enough.

In my experience once everyone is happy with the way something works then it is sensible to move to lock-down — tests, documentation, performance testing, refactoring.

Doing any of those four things is a waste of time and energy until the design is decided upon. In agile development the design is not decided upon before the first code is written. It is always jointly discovered through iteration and discussion between designers, user-testers and developers.

If you write your documentation first then I suspect you can get away with writing all your tests first. But that's not a process I would call 'agile' and I doubt it ever results in good software.
> Anyways, I ended up dumping SuperMemo because once my item database
> grew I became too lazy to spend 30 minutes (or more!) each
> day going through this drill.

Yeah, same happened to me. But I didn't catch on so soon, and I found myself spending 2 hours/day on it before I started to scratch my head.

When I started, it wasn't obvious, but clearly there is an upper limit on the rate of new entries that the system can support. Plus, you have to factor in time spent doing data entry. I think these factors combine to make for a life-time limit on the number of entries. Suppose you use SuperMemo for 20 years (7300 days) at 2 hours per day (14600 hours) and 100 new entries per day. That's only 1.4 million unique entries.. (this analysis is severely lacking and deserves more thought).

Insert here some humbling story about the benefits of improving meta-aspects of how and what you pick to spend time on. Obviously, inserting everything you ever come across into SuperMemo is a bad idea.

Anyway, then I realized this was all stupid because I remembered everything anyway. So now I'm off SuperMemo. Hooray memory!
Spaced repetition is great for material which is divided into very small chunks and where you have a ton of time for comparatively little information (Vocabulary, especially in languages you are not learning for a degree).

Problems arise in practical situations when you want to pass an exam. Or a couple of them in a certain period of time.

Proponents of SR will say that it takes at least 6 times the amount of time/effort over learning "short term". So if you are learning for an exam, you better have plenty of time to spare. And you better start early, like 6 months before the exam. All that makes it pretty useless in a lot of situations I've been in.

Short term learning isn't as bad as it looks. If you really "cram" for an exam, and you think you forgot all of it a couple of days or weeks later, that's not what happened. Instead, your brain is now primed for the material, and when you come into contact with it later, a lot of information is still there and re-learning will be easier.
Not discussing serious/legal issues over email is SOP at large companies, at least in my experience. Not because we thought we were doing anything wrong - it's just what the lawyers advise you.
This. If you read RMS' announcement for GNU [1] it had to have a kernel because in 1983 there wasn't a kernel. And an "operating system" was defined as its kernel, its compiler, and the tools around that and using it in day to day work.

So it starts first on a compiler, then to basic libraries, and then to a kernel. I applaud the team for continuing on the path set forth in that announcement.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6457525
Interesting, I may adopt a paper system. A few questions.

1. What do you do if you don't have a journal handy, but want to make a note?

2. What's the portal cover sleeve?

3. Do you keep a daily diary, or is it a collection of thoughts on various topics, or both?
Please stop saying "we are really not surprised", whether you actually mean it or trying to joke about it. It legitimizes such behavior for some people who are not very privacy conscious and it really takes out the sting from the gravity of such incidents.
Conscientiousness and online education
That's different from my review session.

I review all the due items in less than 30 minutes, always. Then I fill it up to 30 minutes with new materials, sometime going a few minutes beyond 30 minutes, because the materials sometime requires some time to learn.
> Yet it dutifully tries as hard as it can within this design goal by e.g making its == compile to JS ===.

Now we're effectively losing the "==" operator, which is behaving like in most other traditional scripting languages (e.g. Perl). What did we win by losing an operator? Why obfuscate that this is not the JS "==" operator but most likely the "===" operator?
austenallred you're the man! Thanks for your time reviewing our presentation. We'll fix everything soon.
I consider low rent a plus. It tells me that the owners are perhaps managing their cash flow to be maintainable, and take seriously the fact that people just handed them a heck of a lot of cash. (there is a lot of nuance I am not covering - of course a catered lunch can be a low cost way to get a bit more productivity out of a person, and so on, and things like bad chairs is just penny wise, pound foolish).
Nothing on tarsnap.com will load for me in Luakit (WebKit) on Arch Linux. Has anybody else had this problem?
> But to be truly agile (and I'm not talking about some written methodology here — I mean agile as in nimble) you need to work quickly, try things out and make mistakes. Writing your tests first is a encumbrance.

Perhaps it makes sense to be explicit about this when talking about it, as "agile" has a commonly accepted meaning in software development terms and this is not it.

> This is what everyone says the moment their dogma is questioned.

You have said "TDD is that it, fundamentally, isn't agile" and have asserted that you can't use it to be agile. I have stated (in a sibling comment) that TDD is a business decision, where you trade increased development time for higher software quality, and cited a study on the matter that is non-anecdotal. Your position is the dogmatic one by the commonly accepted definition of "dogmatic".
As someone mentioned elsewhere, what affects someone is going to vary from person to person. I've been lucky that iOS 7 hasn't bother me, considering I am the type of person who can't read in a moving vehicle.
Is my entire browsing history being sent to StartHQ?
> The plan was to push wireless carriers to adopt RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant messaging service as a replacement for their short text messaging system (SMS) applications – no matter what kind of phone their customers used.

I doubt that would've saved Blackberry or even that they could've pulled it off. How could they convince (extort) carriers? Banning non-compliant carriers from selling Blackberry? Good luck with that (especially with other phone manufacturers pushing too).
To pay someone $500 and then not want to spend an hour with them making them understand your product/idea/whatever seems like a bit of a waste of money to me, likely making the results hit and miss.

Or have I misunderstood and you're saying that for $500 finding a designer than can hold that conversation is unlikely?
But journalists are journalists. They have to have a superficial acquaintance with a large number of subjects that is at least mostly accurate. What you've taken years to learn they only have the luxury of a two week or three week deadline to learn. The reason they are not experts in your field is because, well, they are not experts in your field, and they have the unenviable task of communicating difficult subject matter about which they are not an expert to the general public in a short amount of time.

I don't think it's accurate to say that the news is mostly inaccurate. We just subject material about subject matter we know to a higher threshold of scrutiny than material about subject matter we don't know. We tend to see the inaccuracies as crowding out the accuracies because, thanks to our precise technical knowledge, not getting it exactly right is the same as getting it completely wrong. But to the layman, this is not true. 85% right is not the same as completely wrong and completely useless. 90% right is a good try, not a worthless hack pontificiating about a subject matter he could never possibly in a million years actually understand.

As usual it's all relative. But let's not let our cognitive biases make us too cynical. People generally are trying their best.
Proponents of SR will say that it takes at least 6 times the amount of time/effort over learning "short term". So if you are learning for an exam, you better have plenty of time to spare. And you better start early, like 6 months before the exam. All that makes it pretty useless in a lot of situations I've been in.

This is a bit of a strawman. If you need to pass an exam quickly, you should and will "cram". Afterward, you can resume your spaced repetition learning.
I find it rather bizarre, that for all the talk of flat design, simplifying, getting the interface out of the way, etc. in iOS 7 -- they upped both the "in-your-face"-ness and the duration of the animations. The effects don't make me sick or anything, but the zooming in and out of apps and folders seems just as superfluous and distracting as leather stitching ever was.
Show me the DOM
This is the first I've heard of any problems... please let me know if you figure out what's breaking for you.
mac applications that require/have one of the following will be dismissed immediately:
- comes as an installer
- needs third party library/binary (not bundled with)
- java runtime
I expect there will be some serious push for that. Not sure from which side, but at least the web frameworks and openstack will be interested. (unless they'll just migrate to tulip instead)
Can't do it -- beastie is trademarked, and Kirk only licenses it for BSD things.
That might work...but does it work in practice (i.e. do you have an example where this is being used?).

It is how the Delphi compiler works in the IDE. I used to work for Borland, then Embarcadero, on the compiler front end.

When the compiler is running for code completion (kibitz mode, it calls it), it does a lot less work. No codegen, no type analysis of function bodies (begin / end blocks are entirely skipped), unless the cursor location is discovered to be inside a function body, whereupon the it rewinds and does more complete analysis. Normally takes no more than a few milliseconds to finish.
You want us to lie?
Its not "Visualizing". Its called fetching random images.
The website is Dynamic. Thanks for the suggestion but I'm not sure how we can make a single call to the Database for multiple images and videos. Is there a blog I can refer?

Thank you
It doesn't have to be a terminal cancer.
Sometimes it's just the loneliness, or the facts that led to it - for example unwillingly hurting people I care about because I'm a bit ... deficient when it comes to social skills and no matter how much I fret, I will, eventually but invariably, say something stupid that will make someone hurt.
Stuffing me full of antidepressants won't solve the underlying problem
Neither will a chat on a hotline - you hang up and the soulcrushing memories of those hurt people are back right away
cigar smoker here. As others described, they are mildly addictive, but quite different from cigarettes. I smoke for nearly 17 years, started from having too much free time in a foreign country on my first expat assignment. During this time I moved from occasional smoke once a month, to a regular smoke once a week. There is however, one obvious trend that I noticed, whenever I have too much free time and cigars nearby, I would smoke one. As in, 1-2 cigars a day during vacations. On the other hand, if I am out of cigars, I forget about them for weeks and do just fine.
So was Nixon with the pulled out his ass war on drugs. And Tipper Gore for the "metal hurts our kids".
>>“The problem wasn’t that we stopped listening to customers,” said one former RIM insider. “We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did. Consumers would say, ‘I want a faster browser.’ We might say, ‘You might think you want a faster browser, but you don’t want to pay overage on your bill.’ ‘Well, I want a super big very responsive touchscreen.’ ‘Well, you might think you want that, but you don’t want your phone to die at 2 p.m.’ “We would say, ‘We know better, and they’ll eventually figure it out.’ ”

Seems like they never stopped to think beyond the existing limitations, and what people would put up with for a better experience with the phone. Incumbents [1] tend to imagine that the problems they have identified (and decided to be unsolvable at the moment) are unsolvable for any newcomer too.

1. Motorola had tried touchscreen smartphones before [2] and they had failed. They did not understand at the time that the reason for the failure was not because users did not want touchscreen phones, but because their implementation broke no new ground. It was simply an archaic OS running on a touchscreen that required a stylus.

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A1000
I thought this was a great TED talk on the subject. How Great Leaders Insire Action.
http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspi...
This is exactly why I wish HN had some way to "unvote" for the articles. Note this is not the same as down voting like you can already do in the comments.
Truth is, there are no formulas…it’s just a big huge hack.
I spent two months on the controls for SMB to get them perfect.
Everything from the weird “friction” that happens when you
change directions in the air to the 200MS delay that happens
when you’re on a wall and pull away is based on how it feels to
me when I play it. None of these formulas are based on physics
concepts, they are 100% based on feel.

I like this. It's brutally honest and sounds wrong, but the result speaks for itself. Super Meat Boy has _great_ controls and that really makes a huge difference. Here's to one perfectionist programmer who really cares about the nitty-gritty details of great game design.
Seems like something derived from this would be relevant

> scrypt(P, S, N, r, p, dkLen) = MFcrypt__HMAC_SHA256,SMixr__
(P, S, N, p, dkLen)

Another gem would be "pleaseletmein"

ref: http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf
It's great for learning facts and exploring a subject. Spaced repetition is fascinating. Especially in the realm of language learning. Vocabulary acquisition can be optimised by deciding the right order of words to maximise your ability to read a foreign language text. gwern has a link at the bottom of the article on modelling vocabulary lists as a travelling salesman problem. Feeding this into SRS Flashcard program is powerful. I guess one of the big problems ( if speed is your goal) is the creation of the cards themselves. The time to create the card is much greater than the time to learn the card and can be time a sink if you are trying to learn your first 3000 words of language.
Also keeps too much wealth from accumulating in one place, lest it go supercritical.
The problem with this article is that you could write about similar infighting and bureaucracy and failed initiatives at the most successful companies, not just the failures. It doesn't identify or explain what was essentially different about the BlackBerry situation.

(I don't have the answer. Maybe it's just randomness.)
Fashom.com. I've only launched it a few days ago. The issue is login and page load time because of the number of images stored. I was also suggested that I could use cloud servers instead. Yes we are compressing w/gzip. We are not scaling images in HTML.
well, that escalated quickly...
Exams don't reward critical thinking, they reward you knowing your stuff. Same goes for life. Understanding a topic isn't enough, and for example medical doctors better know more about the diseases they are treating than they understand on an academical level with lots of critical thinking.

This varies in different subjects of course. In computer science and business degrees you just don't have to be able to pull as many details out of your hat as in biology, medicine or law. The effort and work required to master a math-heavy homework assignment can be enough rote memorization.

I've come to think of rote memorization as actually the most natural way to learn in a time efficient manner. I have yet to witness this approach compromising my understanding in any way.
Or perhaps she's been compromised: Apparently, ex-California Representative Jane Harman made an appearance on a NSA wiretap (http://www.salon.com/2009/04/20/harman/). If you read that Salon article, after getting caught dealing with AIPAC, AG Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez intervened, and Rep Harman went on to "became probably the most crucial defender of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program".

To be 100% fair here, it sounds like some ethics and accountability offices did want to have Harman prosecuted, but the Bush administration intervened to get Harman off the hook. Apparently they went on to use that as leverage on Harman.

So, it's been done before. The results looked like what Feinstein is doing now.
An interview recently felt like that. I was just throwing together little bits of code to make sure I understood the problem clearly, but the interviewer seemed to be a bit agitated that I didn't write a test right away.

I honestly don't work like that. So I'm kinda glad I failed that interview.
No, I want you to acknowledge the gravity of the incident, by saying "oh I am really not surprised", you are in fact lying because you have no way to know for sure the extend of the privacy infringement. You might have thought "I bet NSA is snooping my facebook activity" but thats not the same as saying "I know NSA is snooping on my FB to such and such extend."
> Most other PHP frameworks just copy Rails, so why not just use the source.

I can't speak for anyone else but for myself regarding this but here we go. I have 12 years experience with PHP, it's my primary language, I know it's got pros and cons, I accept it for what it is and work around it. I know Python is better in terms of standards in languages. I know PHP started out as just a few tools and morphed into a language. But here's what's keeping me from switching to Python or Ruby, or heck even Node.js.. Experience...

Yes I can learn a new language basics pretty easily, but am I gonna be able to write a complete app in say RoR with very few google searches or even looking at the manual as fast as I can in PHP? No... I have been playing around with node.js for 2 years now, long enough to know it pretty well, and yet I can still code circles around node.js with PHP.. 12 years using this language as a primary, it'd take me at LEAST 4 years to even get close to the scale of how well I can code in PHP.

It's just not feasible for me to just up and leave PHP for something "better" based on a few cons and other peoples opinions.