skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are correct. Although I don't think there are any TLD's with one letter.

Sean Hastings <sean@ai> seems to be real, and ai has an MX record.
I use a mixture. If it's a Java method, I use test-after, by which I mean after the method is written, some times after the core of the class. Most of the time I am not working from specs, so I find TDD interrupts the design/implementation flow. Often I dont know the complete signature until I have written it. If the method is complex, it often gets a couple of refactorings along the way.

The case where I consistently test before is a method doing database queries. I find it much less tedious to write and test pure SQL before any java.
I agree with you that tests will tell you when you break your interfaces. My position is that in some cases you don't want that.

mjd explains it well. Here's my attempt at elaboration:

It's only in a particular kind of project, at a particular stage: Imagine you are designing a project, in which you change the interfaces at the drop of a hat. Daily (or oftener). In this scenario, the "new task set" of the list of broken tests is extra work that increases the viscosity of your code. It's a distraction from your actual exploratory task, of trying out different interfaces. You are setting out to change interfaces, because you are experimenting with what they should be: that's your actual task. This only applies when you need extremely fluid code, and when it doesn't really matter if there are lots of bugs. Think of a poet daydreaming, or an artist sketching out a very rough outline, or the first prototype of an inventor (made with wax and strings).
It is considerably more than a handful

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Yahoo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Microso...
This seems pretty different to me than the use of single character operators in C-like languages. "odd+pr" has a completely different meaning than "odd + pr" (which might be 3 functions being passed into some other function). In the latter, "+" is the addition function. "odd+pr" reads more like a single token indicating a function. Kind of like the difference between morphology and syntax, where "(+ a b)" is a phrase and "odd+pr" a derived word.

So this dual level syntax is what I'm getting at. I know there is the expression/statement distinction in other languages, but this seems different. Perl sigils might be a closer idea, but those are more like case markers, I think. You can't use Perl sigils to combine multiple tokens into another token-ish thing, as far as I know.

Hope that made some sense.

The Rebol thing mentioned in another comment, by the way, does seem more like what I'm talking about.
curious: why is this [scribd] when the link is (thankfully) to a raw pdf?

oh snap! the [scribd] is a separate link. neat. i wonder if a raw pdf was submitted and [scribd] added, or if the reverse occurred or is possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_series_database

I suspect this is what you are asking for. This page has links to a number of time series database systems.
Is this a legally offered file?
Just doing my job. Didn't the world conclude that was not a valid excuse somewhere around 1945?

Also, I think the success of pre-paid accounts show how much many people despise all the dirty tricks with contracts (like the $5000 bill when you had the wrong data plan, SMS fees, etc.) It also proves the infrastructure exists to prevent these kinds of abuses. By that, I mean limits on how much of a bill you are willing to pay rather than the open-ended, oops you should have read the fine print, unlimited credit line.
His comments don't even make sense. He calls twitter hippies because they aren't starting a virtual currency business that his company can glom onto. If his company is so loaded, why doesn't he start his own virtual currency business? Oh right, because starting a virtual currency is hugely risky, full of regulatory hassle and not very interesting. If anyone should start a virtual currency, it is the game company that is going to use the virtual currency! (Like you know, MMORPGS already do...)
A cool feature poorly communicated. Perhaps one of the reasons FriendFeed has struggled to get over the early-adopter hump is because their mar-com has a few holes.

Not to discredit any hard work but I think FF should consider how this file sharing implementation is any better and/or more efficient than email, and call out those benefits to the end user. I love new technology but this blog post does not get me the least bit excited. What attracts me about FF's offering is the ease of which it is to share files across a (very wide) social graph.

But to the average user, the screenshot they include on their blog looks like your run of the mill email client. And to make matters worse, the two privacy locks by either name suggests anything but social.

http://images.colinanawaty.com/screenshots/a1c3721e8310e9e80...

My 2cents.
Agreed and understood. But for better or for worse, TDD is often used as a synonym for unit testing.
Facebook now offers way to share stuff with everyone or just a specific list.
How do I send email in 24 different colors with pictures of my puppy, then?

A more serious restatement of the joke: Other than HTML email, there is no functional way for the average computer user to send personal information with the following properties:

1. Rich text with embedded images (you know... HTML)

2. available at work without running into firewall or security restrictions (Websense)

3. Easy enough to compete with email.

4. Cheap enough to the end user to compete with email.

5. Secure enough to allay concerns about personal information making it out into the wild. (Never mind that email is easily interceptable: there is a perception versus reality problem here.)

A web application isn't going to do it. It's just too painful to attach more than two photos. A separate application isn't going to do it -- what corporate IT department is going to install it?

Livejournal comes close for tech-savvy people, but it's not in the average user's current skill level.

It's a fundamenally hard problem for social rather than technical reasons, and that is why people use HTML in email, and that is why vendors support it. Reducing it to a technical problem doesn't help.
I was vaguely familiar with that. To me that kind of stuff is basically 4chan jibberish.

The problem with this position, for me, is that all of those kinds of justifications are irrelevant as this is a Newsweek article. As well if this was such a sarcasm or parody, I would expect a little more of it and more wit. Here, it is just "Bad argument... prattle prattle ... Windows 7 crashed ..."
"People use banks because banks operates on certain standards and laws, which enables easier movement of money from one bank to another for bank customers. Cloud vendors should also frame certain laws and standards, that will enable moving of data from one cloud vendor to another in future."

I really like this idea, but how does one enforce/regulate those kinds of standards? I feel like google is putting forth a pretty good effort with their protocol based wave, but they have an amazing amount of clout to throw around and are increasingly being accused of being monopolists because of it. A lot of developers could choose to avoid any standard Google puts forward, because anything Google does is obviously only done to promote their own self-interest.

As it gets easier and cheaper to set up cloud servers, I can only foresee a further splintering of existing protocols. If I were to set up my own cloud server, chances are I would build some kind of personalized REST based platform because that's what I know and am comfortable with. It would serve my purposes, but it may not serve my competetion's cloud server. Who would build their own API. How does this ever coalesce into one standardized protocol?
Erik Naggum, R.I.P.
It also helps to break the ice with some smart/funny comment at your friend, but also hoping the comment reaches to the others as well. Sense of humor or good observation can be your ticket in to the network.
That would also be acceptable, and maybe better for most. I'd just actually prefer it be entirely gone. :)
Are you seriously comparing someone asking you for your SSN for a cell phone contract... with the Holocaust?
Can the Sense interface be disabled if you want to use the default Andoid interface?
As much of a douche as Jason Bailey comes off as, and as random an idea as virtual currency is for Twitter, there's this:

They do not need to rush into a business model, especially with their eye-popping growth.

Is that the growth fueled by celebrity curiosity and spam of all types? Do they really have unlimited runway?

The quality of Twitter is going downhill so fast that I can't help but think it may have already jumped the shark masked by huge amounts of worthless traffic. I know, I know, "you choose who you follow," but at this point I'm getting followed by so many porn bots that blocking them is almost a daily task.
Thanks, I knew it had to be a lack of the right Google keywords.
Startup Advice from NBA Legend Earl "The Pearl" Monroe - KEEP IT REAL
the 37signals post had one of the comments suggest the same, I chatted with a rep and found no OCR/search (though coming shortly ~summer, supposedly) and no reminder/alert (which would again be tied to the ocr capabilities)..
And unit testing is frequently used as a synonym for automated testing (at least thats my experience).
When it stopped to be exciting or relevant?
So protest is right if people go to kill their government by themselves?

And when they can't do it by themselves and call for help, this is treason even when they didn't wanted the government that rules them in the first place?

Now that's black and whit simplistic view of world.

Is the concept of treason even relevant when you live in a your country and somebody rules it without your (and other people living there) agreement?

I mean - I live in Poland, after WW2 Soviet Union ruled here (ok, not directly but by proxy:), is treason of such proxy government really treason? For me it's heroism, because people in Poland didn't wanted that government in the first place.

Also - for me peaceful revolution is better than blood bath revolution any time.
EA failed. All of the updates and add-ons (Sims 3 store additional content that costs $$ to buy) were uploaded to torrents as well. They think that pirates will still have to spend money on the game. They won't.
What you want is a database that supports the equivalent of a multiple column key. You can fake it by concatenating your key with a time stamp. Tokyo cabinet supports this with its btree+ store. You can select a range like thiskey-00000000 to thiskey-99999999. The latest is the last returned. Or give the latest the key thiskey-00000000 and rekey it when you do an update.
Agreed: this could be pitched in a similar fashion that Basecamp Journal / PBWorks (wiki?) / and even Yammer are -- more streamlined communication and possibly the value of ambient informational awareness.
Each of your two sentences answers itself.

This article is about language, history, and technology. These things are discussed on HN.
Yes, but that only works with their supplied phones. You can still use Skype on other phones, but you'll have to pay the bandwidth cost of £5 / month for 1GB.
AFAIK, HN sees a PDF submission and automatically sets up the scribd link. It used to be that all PDFs were automatically converted to scribd, but that caused a bit of an outcry.
This looks more like a solicitation for beta testers that fit specific criteria. If you do get selected, you get a pre-release of Office 2010 to use regularly, and then an actual copy of it once it releases.

By no means will everyone who submits a "real life story" receive a copy of Office 2010.
Panasonic Now Forces You To Use Their Batteries
£5 per month or per GB?
Has anyone seen the Maximum file size or any other limitations anywhere on the FrienFeed site? Or is that something not important enough to mention???
Which Web Business is Right for You
That completely misses the point. This isn't about software at all; this is about good business and good management. Sometimes you suck it up and call something in if you have to so you don't lose a customer.
You get a GB, which is valid for a month. If you want more, you can pay another £5. (or £2.50 for 500MB which is valid for a week)
Some protocols cannot do certain things. This is an unfortunate fact of life. If you find an ad-hoc workaround, don't be surprised if you have to jump through hoops to make it work and don't blame someone for breaking it when it was never supposed to work in the first place.
I think Cloud vendors should come forward proactively, and frame a set of standards for interoperability in the cloud. An inspiration could be taken from the Virtulization industry, that came up with OVF (Open Virtualization Format).
Facebook Launches A Live Stream Box, Partners With Ustream
I can hear the tweeners whining already, "But I want flash on my G1! Waaa!"

Honestly, this is all we would hear in app comments in the Marketplace, app after app after app. (Thank goodness Google finally added a "Mark as Spam" featuree.)

I seriously doubt the G1 has the memory and speed to handle flash adequately. We'll see.

EDIT: Hero vs. Dream has double the RAM and a larger ROM by about 90MB, which will likely be offset by a larger system image. CPU is the Qualcomm 7200A, which supports 30 FPS VGA video encoding (vs. 20 on the 7201A in the Dream). But no slide-out keyboard. So, I'm thinking the limited memory of the Dream is what will prevent it from running flash.
"Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.": http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why Twitter is Not Useful For Most of Us. YET.
This may or may not apply to your case:

About two years ago I implemented a database app (relational, Mysql) where tracking versions [of certain tables'] was a requirement. I solved it by adding a ValidFrom timestamp to the table, and now every row has an associated validity period, eg. the customer's address was X between T0 and T1, Y between T1 and T2. Unfortunately this is not some kind of convoluted backup solution, as the application logic sometimes needs to know these values at some prior time (it's a billing system).

Roughly, the basic problem is that simple queries or enforcing consistency requirements are now very complicated, since tables have to be JOINed and WHEREd on the validity periods. People (other than me) are unable to modify the data per command like SQL, imagine 3 normalized tables each with validity periods, and you're UPDATEing them but don't want to break time-consistency, it's frustrating. The client programmer basically failed at creating a usable GUI that was able to manage these versions, and I don't blame him (think of a case where you have a versioned table T1, a versioned table T2, and you're connecting them with a versioned has-a table T3). UI-wise it's kind of a nightmare.

Lesson learned: BAD IDEA. Don't do it. Fight with your manager to have the requirements changed. I've been thinking ever since what would have been a good way to do this, and I can't figure out a good way, hence I think this is a stupid requirement. Also, now I actually have a picture of the business process that drove this requirement, and although this isn't a trivial issue, I believe it could be solved by fixing certain business processes that require application logic to know about past data [in this manner].
I've used it to good effect, depending on the audience.

The type of meetings that this works in usually involve multiple levels of management and serve more as a forum for peacocking.
Remember the days of 640Kb of ram and 360k disks?

What did you lose by making your database not fit on a disk because you allowed 256chars for an email address and 32768 for a surname?
Here's the TechCrunch story: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/24/friendfeed-adds-file-sh...
IPhone 3GS JavaScript Performance Blows Away Rivals, Approaches MacBook Speed
Ask HN:  How to build an app/service that makes all users feel equally smart?
This is a particularly important issue with games since games of skill generally reward people with higher IQ. This is even true with games where reaction time is important.

But a game would sell more if everyone were to feel equally smart playing it.

I've been thinking of building a game that tests how random you are. I think this game of skill might be one where smarter people don't have an advantage.

Any other ideas (not necessarily games) in this regard?
If you're storing a key (say, a GUID) and a value (maybe a string), then all you'd need to do is make another field/column that handles timestamping. If you're using an ORM like Hibernate, it will handle (most) of it automatically for you.

Or, you could simply set your database up to use a composite key on the table (so the key becomes the key + revision number), though that isn't the best way since composite keys usually incur some performance overhead.
Worth the read just for "even the best of us sometimes make stupid mistakes that it would be grossly unfair to believe were one's true nature". I would never have expected to hear that from Naggum.
Family Feud specifically tries to reward regression to the mean. But smart people still have an advantage, I'd imagine.
Much more expensive? I've used MetroPCS for years and I just pay a flat $50/mo., which gives me unlimited national calling, texting, voicemail etc. If I had a blackberry I think the data plan is about $75/mo. I might possibly do better on some other carrier's plans, but the convenience fact or having a flat fee and not having to keep track of minutes is worth a few bucks to me.
You mean one company- blogger, right? Even that alone is enough justification.
You're right, it is a huge pain to do this manually, but depending on what languages and platforms you're developing for, there are libraries to handle this automatically.

I've done something similar with NHibernate, where you only need to add a couple of event handlers (maybe 30-40 lines of code + a bit of configuration XML) to set this feature up. I wish I'd heard of it earlier though, since it's really quite useful (though as you said, horrendous to implement manually).

There's a wiki on NHForge about it, though I don't know that it's really the best way to do it:
http://nhforge.org/wikis/howtonh/creating-an-audit-log-using...
Interesting, it says "HTC Magic" on the left navigation frame. HTC forgot to update its template?
I'm not sure I understand your use of the word 'justification'. (I'm don't know anything about 4chan or what someone there might try to justify.) I was certainly not trying to make apologies for the author by warning you away from the apparent meaning of the text. Quite the opposite: I thought the article had no value whatsoever - but because of the subtext and the context.
>> I've been thinking of building a game that tests how random you are. I think this game of skill might be one where smarter people don't have an advantage.

How do you plan on testing how random someone is? What if they randomly choose to give you the Fibonacci series? Or are you going to reward the complete lack of patterns and structure? In which case, I think the only people who enjoy that are people who are already familiar with a number of types of numerical patterns.

Honestly, I don't see this being any different than a game of complete chance, or rewarding various IQs equally.
> When I sit down at a Mac, I know exactly how to do everything because all the tools and utilities are organized in a way that I understand.

I do not find this to be the case. (I run both Mac and Linux using synergy).

I have found that I typically have to customize a Mac desktop before it is usable to me. About the same amount that I need to customise a Linux desktop.

On Windows I get frustrated and irritated because things that ought to be simple are hidden away in control panels that use non-standard terminology (ie. "internet zone").

Most usability differences between OS's are matters of familiarity, there are only a few examples where minimising the cognitive load was a design goal for a piece of software. And in the case of a general purpose computer that is not an interesting goal, since a computer is supposed to become whatever you tell it to become. In other words the cognitive load of a general purpose computer is infinite, because you can always send it more instructions... The trick is to carve durable bits of functionality out of that infinity.
That's also why they're never going to support HTML5, client-side storage, or geo-location in Mobile Safari.
The reason why the typeset is poor is due to the fact that all the mathematical symbols are in the "Concrete and Euler or Concrete Math", whoever published the pdf probably doesn't have that font installed. Hence the poor quality. I have yet found a version online that matches the physical book typeset quality.
There are statistical tests that are used to see how good random number generators are. I can use one or more of these in the game.

A game of complete chance would not have a sense of accomplishment. But being random requires effort -- though perhaps not high IQ.
The main problem is that rational agents should win. People with higher IQs are more likely to know the ways humans typically fail in attempting to generate random sequences. Testing for randomness would be a simple matter of computing the kolmogorov complexity of the total input, each time the score is recalculated.

Game speed may suffer.
I don't mean that AIM uses SMS to actually send/receive messages, rather that each IM is charged at the SMS rate (also each email sent or received via the built-in client is charged that way).

That's why, for example, it's cheaper to use T-mobile's $6 unlimited web access with Gmail's mobile app (which apparently uses http(s)), than to use T-mobile's email client and an SMS package. That of course doesn't apply to a phone with a required data/text package like the Sidekick.
I don't hate Flash, I hate Adobe.
And then you discover that the billing system automatically refunds (or refuses to charge) people whenever their account credit goes over $500. Or that somebody added one of those fancy assertion thingies to the code that simply does not allow Pre accounts to be created without a credit check.

And then somebody from accounting gets wind of it and shits a brick because the rules are different for money received for a service not yet rendered vs one that is.

Or maybe it's just a good business call. By not giving this guy his Pre, they incurred one hit of nerd rage. But they've ducked out on his followups about how unlimited isn't really unlimited, how megabytes aren't the same as megabits, how 3G speed isn't 2.99G speed, and so on and so forth.
Stunning pictures Taken From Space of Volcano Erupting
+1
I don't mind it at all.
If I would have read this story anytime before 2007, it would have angered me. But in the past few years, I've read about so many instances of poorly-constructed exploding batteries (most of which were from 3rd parties) that I have a hard time passing judgment on Panasonic for this.
What does it mean to be "random?"
Climbing the ladder to longevity: Critical enzyme pair identified
You're correct.

For someone who understand usability and interface design, the ability to customize will enhance productivity. Unfortunately, most users don't understand this, so the ability to customize generally leads to clutter (see myspace).
Debugging MySQL Stored Procedures
> If so, would you agree that it is unjust to tax someone for something he has no choice in?

Hmm. No one chooses their parents. Should rich kids be taxed like poor kids?

> Would you agree that taxes should be just?

I'll agree that "just" has no agreed-on definition and is used as a way to imply that the other person is bad. As such, I find it a useful signalling device in a discussion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_randomness