skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TDD does allow you scope for exploration work. If you watch Kent Beck's TDD screencasts[1] you'll see him follow a workflow where he's exploring an unfamiliar protocol. What's interesting is that he first frames his exploration within a particular test e.g. delete item using protocol, and then writes implementation details inside the test itself until he figures out how it works. He then refactors the test so that the implementation code is moved into the driver that he's developing and the test itself becomes a proper spec. He's working in java but I tend to follow this workflow in ruby. With ruby you can fire up a REPL in the middle of your test code and gradually add to the test as you figure things out.

http://pragprog.com/screencasts/v-kbtdd/test-driven-developm...
There's a really well done terminal emulator for the Mac, with jitter, refresh latency and screen curve. It can pretty much mimic the VT102 I have connected to my Mac - I use that to tail log files.

http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/

Having had to work on early 80s ttys tends to train you against inefficient keyboard usage. I'll still tend to use history ^substitution^ rather than readline editing at the shell prompt, or avoiding slow sequences in emacs.
I found quitting smoking very easy. I felt weird for the first day or two and then I just wasn't a smoker. I thought it would be hard based on what everyone told me, but it wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be.
Hey, this looks really great! Very clean layout. Looks like you have a typo under "competitor analysis" though.
I'm really rather surprised that we're still talking about "is TDD worth it?" To me, it's a bit like asking, "is OO..." or "is functional..." or what have you. I should hope any developer I work with would know TDD and would know when to use it and when not to use it.

TDD is a style of development that emphasizes simplicity of code interface and accuracy and precession of results. However, not all project have these three things as requirements. In those areas where one has a distinct model of their problem, TDD excels and will save you tons of time over a long run of forcing you to consider corner cases and avoiding breaking existing code with new changes. It's excruciatingly difficult to test things in the fuzzy logic and statistical realms, as you always run the risk that your artificially generated data set does not reflect reality very well.

And none of this should be news. This should be standard information about TDD. It should be clear that TDD is a tool that makes sense when TDD makes sense. Just as it doesn't work well to write an OO abstraction of general-purpose sorting algorithms, and it doesn't work well to write a purely functional simulation of a car, so does it not work well to TDD certain things.
Find Ballplayers, Not Those Who Look Good in Baseball Caps
thanks for the feedback, git push coming up :)
I have become sensitized to race after coming across numerous narratives by friends and strangers, where they mention race or nationality though that has nothing to do with what they are saying.

> Greece's economy has been crumbling...

Your point? Did you mean that Greeks are succumbing to madness?

> how am I to know if someone is deranged?

I am not a psychologist, so I can't pass diagnoses either. But some words of lay language express anger or contempt.

> Don't force me to accept some verdict by law.

I have no idea what you meant by that. I did not imply any force.
I have to be persnickety about this. A patent is a monopoly in the same way all property rights are monopolies: you get the exclusive right to use something. That's different from an economic monopoly on say a particular market. Now, one can lead to the other. If you own all the land around say a train station, you can leverage that into a monopoly on retail for travelers. But that incidental to the fact that a property right in land is a monopoly.

As for the pharma industry in the US it's been tremendously successful. The US leads the world in medical technology. The flaws of our healthcare system are an access problem and a distribution problem.
Words Waiting to be Added to the Oxford English Dictionary
Yet Another Modest Proposal: The Roentgen Standard (1980)
I have a wordpress blog hosted on my PC. I backup the journal onto a remote drive service every night.
The economics of Colorado marijuana legalization
The Faces of Facebook – Visualizing 1.2 billion Facebook profile images
Show HN : Distributed News
Yes. As a PhD neuroscientist, I use reference to the triune brain as a sort of shibboleth: If someone mentions it, I can tell they don't know any neuroscience.
The tablet market is not like the phone market. In many ways, it will be easier for Android to gain market share, since the channel isn't controlled by carriers in some markets. Any OEM can enter this business, and many many will.

Tablets are the post PC device, and the skip-the-PC device.

Tablets will be the inexpensive personal internet access device for Asian markets that now rely on internet cafes. Apple will take only the luxury market here, but will make plenty of money at that.

Tablets will displace PCs from the desks and especially the non-desk-bound workers in enterprises who can't justify the support costs of a PC. Apple will be a stronger contender here because of their long head start, but Android has some technical advantages as well as cost and choice of OEMs.

One thing that's missing is software that takes advantage of tablet power and screen real estate. My prediction is that this will happen first in enterprise software where budgets will support more ambitious software development, and that it's possible it will happen on Android first because it's easier to make a suite of cooperating apps for Android.
Thanks for the shout-out. The film is also available on Amazon. The main web site for the film is here:

http://graceofgodmovie.com/
Spaced repetition for study and learning
"It's been three months since $425,000 was donated to this project and I still don't have a working version of HURD. I demand a refund!"
I think the trend is because designers see low contrast as "chic" and readable contrast as garish. But it's a bad decision.

Fight the power: http://contrastrebellion.com/
I don't think anyone of note has said Apple will dominate the tablet market forever.
Good luck using this on a smartphone.
A good way to make sure that the designer gets the full fee (without losing a commission to 99designs or by them participating in a design contest with no guarantee of getting paid) is to choose one designer and offer them the $500.

Does the interest in design contests stem from a fear of paying and getting something you might not like? Or not knowing what you might like until you see it?
> A cubic foot of soil is, in my experience, quite a bit larger than most laymen think

Larger than a cubic foot?
I own an Asus TS300 tablet, and one thing comes to my mind, Android is mediocre, I've tried the iPad and the Surface and their quality is 10 times better, so I presume this numbers are due the cheap $59 tablets that have become popular, but just for the price.
great job. was happy to tweet for you guys.
> The implication seemed to be that there were other things beyond MAOIs in tobacco that were (or helped nicotine to be) addictive; is that not the case?

Well, I don't know that it's not the case. There's a lot of stuff in tobacco, it wouldn't surprise me if there were other chemicals besides MAOIs with relevant psychoactive effects. But from the snippet you quote, I see why you might be reading that as a stronger claim than I intended. I'll amend that to '& possibly other compounds' so it's clearer.
I have no idea what I might like. I'm hoping to get some discussion and sharing of ideas -- including from people who don't have any interest in or ability to actually produce a logo themselves.

If I knew that, say, I wanted a graphic of a piece of tar being snapped in half, I'd look for an artist and say "here's $500, please draw this for me". But given that I have no idea what I want, I figure the more people I invite to provide ideas the better.
Ripple is officially open source
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/6578256...

"Designed to soothe and calm, the specially-designed blue LED lights have been suspended above the platforms of dozens of Tokyo railway stations in order to stem the nation's spiralling suicide rate."
Code repo here:

https://github.com/ripple/rippled/

Bitcoin Magazine writes about the announcement here:

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7275/ripple-is-officially-open-so...
How did you get into that line of work?
This is an unusual and insightful post for HN. Thank you for it.

"The power of regret," what a powerful force. It's not often that we are able to use it in such a tangible way. The filmmaker's attempt to make amends may help us all to stop ignoring our neighbors.
Stories like this are interesting me because while sales numbers show Android doing well, usage numbers from all over the internet seem to indicate that not many people are actually using their Android tablets, at least not in the numbers people are using iPads.

And then you read the last paragraph and wonder why you just wasted your time with this linkbait article.

>And while Android appears to be making headway against Apple and the iPad, the truth is that Apple remains the top selling tablet brand by a huge margin. While Apple sold the aforementioned 14.5 million tablets from April through June, Samsung was the closest competitor to the Cupertino based manufacturer with 8.1 million tablets sold. in the period.
Give me a break, you know what I mean. When you look at the page source, do you see embedded coffeescript? Can you debug in coffeescript with the standard tools?

I know these things aren't possible and shouldn't be expected b/c coffee is a "compiled" language...but you can do them in javascript, and telling the vanilla js programmer that they're "exactly the same" is being less than honest.
The most innocuous mention of Stallman's name inevitably provokes an emotional remark.

I was struck most by the date of that announcement. Stallman has dedicated 30 years "[putting] together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free". That represents a monumental commitment to principle.

You can call him unyielding, uncompromising, demanding, and I won't quibble. But unreasonable? That word has too many connotations of unfairness or lack of consideration, a bit ad hominem for my taste.

We need leaders at the extremes, the deep thinkers, the rabble rousers, for these are the people who actually change the world. The politicians moderate those influences, making the compromises that are necessary, preventing wild swings of the needle. Be glad that RMS isn't a politician - he is more effective where he is.
If you didn't check the literature and have your own understanding of what TDD is, then it should be no surprise that what you are talking about is different from what everyone else is talking about.
He did say "county" not "country", although it seems a typo. However based on Wikipedia data (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union) Romania and Bulgaria are the poorest countries in Europe by GDP per capita at only 2% difference(47% vs 49% of EU GDP - 12,100 vs 12,600 euro respectively). Compared to Hungary (14,700 euro), I'd say we're (I'm also Romanian) not far, but rather close to being the poorest economy in EU and we're also the 9th poorest in Europe (http://www.techscio.com/the-poorest-country-in-europe/).

That being said, I didn't know Maciej built Pinboard in Romania, that's pretty cool, I'd say. I wonder what was he doing in Botosani :)
> Tablets are the post PC device, and the skip-the-PC device.

It really depends what people mean by "post".

If it's post as in "will replace", then it's nonsense: laptops and desktops are going to be around for a very long time.

If it's "will complement the laptop/desktop market", then I completely agree.
Primer in action: http://conwaylife.appspot.com/pattern/primer
Why are you doing that? The sentence is "Greece's economy has been crumbling, and many all over the world are succumbing to madness."

Why would I respond to something you're explicitly divorcing from context? If you preserve what I say, you see that I clearly have an assessment nearing to the judgment that [many] in Greece are succumbing to madness.

Do I have a scientific basis for using words like "madness"? Well, would "deranged" be any better?

How about this?: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must passover in silence.

"But some words of lay language express anger or contempt."

wat ?

"I have no idea what you meant by that. I did not imply any force."

It is coincidence, then, that you suggest "deranged" which is in line in actual fact with his sentence: He was assigned to a mental institution. I can acknowledge that it happens, but I need not say it was the right thing to do. I can withhold opinion on the matter. "Deranged" suggests that he should be treated in a certain way — I have no opinion on how he ought to be treated, I just do not know, barring any generalization to similar cases.

But again: I say [Many] are succumbing, which translates to a statement like [Some] are succumbing, not [All] are succumbing, which is what [Greeks] are succumbing is most often interpreted as[1].

---

[1]: Please see: Predicate Logic.
All this time I thought it was tars-nap.
"Cooperating apps" is the key here, I think. I think it's idiotic that iPad is yet to have some semblance of an operating system.
The fact that when this blog post says TDD, it means "writing unit tests" is really annoying. TDD is a methodology of writing features by writing tests first to define the behavior you're targeting, then writing code to match that behavior. That is different than "write code, then write tests to assert the behavior of your code." You can have excellent tests and excellent code coverage and excellent behavior documentation without doing TDD.
> usage numbers from all over the internet seem to indicate that not many people are actually using their Android tablets

That's not true. US usage figures don't match up with global sales and people forget there's a big non-US world out there:

http://www.tech-thoughts.net/2013/08/reality-android-tablet-...

Also note that usage is a trailing indicator of sales since previously sold devices are still in use.
He's got something interesting to say about the event itself, too:

https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/09/xoxo_talk_notes/
We know that conway's game of life can support a turing machine, therefore everything that can be computed on a regular turing machine can be computed in conway's game of life. Want to know what's REALLY cool? Conway's game of life is a 2d world. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110] is a 1d world and you also can create a turing machine in it, therfore allowing you to simulate anything that we can simulate on a regular computer.
What happens if you want to add another slide? Is it easy for your additions to stay consistent with the design?
Conway's Game of Life is Turing Complete.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

So, what's interesting here is doing it more efficiently, or cleverly.
Is it just me or is everyone experiencing that the YouTube video is totally in the way of allowing one to look at this site? I can't even close the video window ("how to destroy a magnet") to actually learn what this post is all about.
What mistakes do you think AFNetworking has made?
My time with the Steam Controller
The title here was editorialized after this comment. Original title was "Best nginx configuration for security"
I've spent my fair share of time pouring over Parse's REST docs[1][2]. It's a fairly large undertaking to fully support all REST features, so it's still a decent trade-off to just use the JS SDK. If there are any Parse + Angular REST client projects, I'd be happy to contribute some code.

[1] https://github.com/adelevie/parse_resource

[2] https://github.com/adelevie/parse-ruby-client
My grandmother can't spin, even slowly, without getting sick. And I don't mean as an old woman, as a young woman it kept her completely out of dancing. Even a single, 360 degree movement over 2 or 3 seconds would put her in full-on motion sickness.

Yet she never got car sick, sea sick or air sick.

My wife, who also pretty much doesn't get motion sick in a car, gets violently sea and air sick and can't handle even a few seconds of an FPS game.

Motion effects affect people in a really wide variety of ways.
The article claims the average selling price of non-iPad tablets (which must be 99% Android) increased by 17%, while the iPad mini pulled the iPad ASP down by the same amount, so your theory is at odds with the facts.
Nice gesture but I'm a little surprised this made top of HN. Slow news day?
How to make contribution to GitHub correctly?
The problem is that most of the times suicide is not a rational decission taken by someone with terminal cancer to stop their fisical suffering.
Most of the times is the reaction of a malfunctioning brain. Most suicidals wouldn't have taken the decission in a normal situation (not depressed) , and those who failed to kill themselves are happy to be alive.
That's why it's so important to know the factors that trigger suicide compulsions, and the measures to better fight them..
A depresed person suicide brings a big suffering to the family and friends of the deceased, who most of the times don't know of the intentions.
The overall point here is that Depression has gestalt cause, and sometimes a society, upon depriving us of a raison d'être à vie (work, family, etc.) while emphasizing or even prescribing a monothematic lifestyle, that society limits the capabilities of our imaginations to perceive opportunities, of which opportunity discovery is itself a creative endeavor afforded by those justifications to life (work, family, etc.) being normalized.
Ops! Typing on an iPhone, tried to edit and hit send by accident :) I meant file system, which is key for any kind of real work on device. For instance, on an Android I can save a PDF file in say Work folder, then open it in one app to annotated it, in other to perhaps rotate some pages and rearrange content, and finally compress along with other files into a single zip and email it out.

In theory, I could do the same on an iPad, but it would be a really convoluted string of passing that file from app to app, as appose of have that file in one place and using different apps as tools, to work on that file.

With all the hard work apple is doing trying to make OSX users think that their hard drive starts at the ~/ folder, I don't expect full system excess here, just a Document folder and a Finder.app to manage it.
If you release devices once a year then on average they will be 6 months old.
This is actually one of the things that has kept from journaling. I can't write by hand fast enough, and I'm sick of the brightness of a laptop screen by the end of the day. I know, pretty lame excuses.
>In fact it only gets in your way. Solving problems that are new (to you) involves writing code to find out if a certain approach works, then throwing it away and trying something else. TDD makes that process a lot slower, and makes people more reluctant to throw away incorrect models of the problem that they have codified into tests without even realising it.

This is a giant strawman. Who is saying to write tests for your prototypes? You seem to be confusing a bunch of different methodologies here. You're talking about rapid prototyping to understand a domain before building a long term solution. That isn't TDD, and it would be foolish to write tests for an exploratory exercise that you're planning to throw away.

>TDD forces you to decide about one of the hardest parts of development (API design / where to place abstraction boundaries) up front before you have worked out how to solve the problem at all

How do you figure? If you've done a rapid prototype like you're advocating, you should have a better understanding of where boundaries lie and how the API should work. Further, you seem to be working under the impression having tests make it hard to change things. If anything, I've noticed the opposite - tests make it much easier to change code, especially when you test behavior, not implementation.
That's fair, but is it really so much work to enter three extra keys on a url? That doesn't strike me as a convincing enough reason not to attempt a brand change, if it otherwise makes sense. (Unless there are many frustrated mobile users somewhere who've decided they've put up with long urls far enough!)

Using an article such as "the" in a brand typically indicates a desire to lay stake on a common noun as a proper noun, or at least the definitive instance of the noun. It often doesn't make sense when your brand is obviously a proper noun or otherwise unique already, but I suppose there's plenty enough newspapers having a variant of "Guardian" in their titles to warrant a push to definitive-hood.

Edit: A friend also pointed out that "guardian.com" is already taken by another established organization. I think that trumps my silly grammatical analysis :P
There are quotes from Gruber and Arment elsewhere in this thread that say pretty much exactly that...
Nah, the only people who actually need a laptop/desktop instead of a tablet+bluetoothKeyboard are people who need a lot more power than tablets can provide today. So that's digital artists, developers with their VMware/VirtualBox/etc and servers. I look to my non-techie dad(though he use to do those punch-card stuff) as an example; got him an iPad and the only thing he misses from his previous laptops is the keyboard.

I'm very interested in what other people think about this. Does the general public need anything more than a high-end tablet + bluetooth keyboard? Or maybe, just because some people enjoy a big screen, a tablet with a docking-station providing the keyboard, mouse and big screen?(which is basically a PC, I guess). Some of my coworkers predict a day where smartphones are so powerful, that you'll just put them in a docking-station at work and it'll be just as powerful as a high-end notebook today.

Today's consumer laptops/desktop are like Adobe Flash. They're both dead and the tech to replace them exists, we just haven't completely agreed on how to go about it - but they are both definitely dead.
No, they said there was no such thing as a tablet market, only an iPad market.
It's not equivalent at all. It is an expected, clearly-defined behaviour - automatic, silent type conversion, with clear rules on how that type conversion works.
I'm sure it's a step up from no design.

But this "modern colorful web design" style isn't necessarily the best design system to present your business idea. It's a trend, so it looks familiar to viewers of your presentation, which is good. However, it also communicates young and inexperienced in my opinion.
Politicians and Diapers
I tend to vary the amount of refactoring I do depending on how much code is likely to depend on it. For instance I'd spend more effort in the DOM than I would in the controller (remember this is degrees of effort not lots/none). There's also nothing to stop you doing refactoring _before_ you start on a piece of code. Maybe you didn't think it would be worth refactoring at the time but now you're adding a new feature you can see that applying the refactoring would make it easier.
It's an obvious bum wrap...
A Surge in Growth for a New Kind of Online Course
I'm happy to go head to head with this link baiter on who knows Javascript better :). I'm not going to take "you might even learn something about Javascript" from someone who says that a simple transpiler is a "black-box" that's totally beyond them.

p.s and a link-baiter than has a loading screen on their blog that crashes Chrome on iOS
Glad to see Tarsnap investing in branding/identity.

I like how Colin adopted prgmr.com style of appealing to the technical minded for it's website design/documentation. A simple logo wouldn't hurt.