skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658
It should be noted that testing consists of such a wide array of tasks that it's often as hard to find the right people than it is to identify the right type of testing they should perform.

While performance and load testing on Healthcare.gov should be obvious tasks we get into murky territory when asking questions like: Does the UI need to be tested more than the APIs that power it? Will the value of automated end-to-end testing be deprecated after a UI refresh takes place? (Will there be a UI refresh?) How much time should be put into scalable UI tests? Are automated smoke tests enough?

I could go on, but the question I'd like answered is what did the actual testing plan consist of?
I don't see how Congress can be responsible for most of the reported problems. If the law was just too complicated, then I could see how portions would be inaccessible.

But what we see here are major UI failures, availability problems, losing applications partway through the process and forcing people to start over, and inexplicably inconsistent results and behaviors. These are failures of execution.
Also an example of single transposition:
http://crypto.interactive-maths.com/columnar-transposition-c...
And the government invested in the Transitor, Computers and DarpaNet; all things that were enablers for Bill Gates to make his fortune.

The same applies to every company that has to get their physical goods to market on the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System.
These guys knew exactly what they were doing. Nice fake pr apology trying to trick your users into thinking you are clean. Example of anyone can get addicted to bad tactics and $ coming in. But you need to remember to not get a lot of PR and do grey tactics at the same time.
Leiningen just insists you give your project a name. But, in the common case, you used `lein new` to create your project folder, and a basic config is provided by that.
> almost all things that require special syntax in other languages look like function calls in clojure

I would say that most syntax in other languages is there precisely so that not everything looks like a function call.
It pains me to say this, but most of the time the hackers will ask for payment in bitcoin which makes tracking much harder.
I'd rather be "destroyed economically" than thrown in a gulag.
Actually houses have gotten significantly larger since the 1950s.
Completely agree. To be fair, every government of major superpower also pursues the same policies of "embrace, extend, extinguish;", including ours, the US Government.
I highly recommend the book "Crisis and Leviathan", by Robert Higgs.

Everyone knows that government has continually grown in size and scope during this past century, but how and why has it done so? Is this growth inherent in the nature of government or because of some greater social needs, or are there other causes? In Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs shows that the main reason lies in government’s responses to national “crises” (real or imagined), including economic upheavals (e.g., the Great Depression) and especially war (e.g., World Wars I and II, Cold War, etc.). The result is ever increasing government power which endures long after each crisis has passed, impinging on both civil and economic liberties and fostering extensive corporate welfare and pork. As government power grows, writes Higgs, it achieves a form of autonomy, making it ever more difficult to decrease its size and scope, and to resist its further efforts to increase its reach, so long as the citizenry remain uninformed of its true effects. One of the most important books ever written on the nature of government power, Crisis and Leviathan is a potent book whose message becomes more trenchant with every passing day. -- http://www.onpower.org/about.html
The truth is, CS is not a "science" like biology or physics.

It is an education in understanding computation and software development.

I'd also argue it is not an engineering discipline either. It's unfortunate the terms "Computer Science" and "Software Engineering" were ever accepted. They're holding us back; we're stuck in an outdated view of the subject.
Oh dear. The schoolkid gets caught and says 'yeah, but Jim did such and such that's worse'.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043071/

Stop acting like a child just because reality doesn't fit your preconcieved notions of how things should be.
Some people invest in gold because they like the idea of hyperdeflation, like Goldfinger in the James Bond movie.

They're hoping everything will go to hell, the whole economy will switch to the gold standard, the price of gold will go up 1000x and they'll be the brilliant insightful people who profit.

The trouble with that scenario is that a few lead slugs can put an end to you.

Some bitcoiners believe in an attenuated version of that scenario which is technophillic, so the idea of a system in "which numbers we trust" fits into a strange ideology.
Didn't Wikileaks do the same? I think there was a good precedent before Snowden blew the doors off the NSA.
Nailed it. The sea of bad habits has bred an ocean of bad code.
These are just paid links. It falls under the category "exchanging goods or services for links". The "service" is a tweet or post on facebook.

You can report them to Google here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks
Houses affordable by single wage earning families? I think not.
React's DOM Diff Algorithm
Urls are encrypted over TLS
If I didn't use PHP, I would have to explain to my clients who just want a simple website for business x why it's written in a language they've never heard of, that they can't find cheap maintainers for, and can't host just anywhere they like. PHP has the advantage of being able to create "black box" solutions for non-technical clients because the hosting environment is ubiquitous and you can just throw a rock out of your window and hit a Wordpress developer, and 9 times out of ten all you need to deploy with is FTP.
The proximity of your handle to adriaanm's, Scala tech lead at Typesafe [1], made my first reading of your (good) posts very confusing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=adriaanm
Jolla Together - Jolla and Sailfish Q&A page
what a joke of a non-apology.
i hope the search quality team makes an example out of them.
The EU objection is pretty solid, sadly.
Your numbers sound high. The Nexus 4 was $299 at release, dropped to $199 nearing the end of its lifecycle. The new Moto G is something like $179. It was hard to find an unsubsidized phone a while ago, but that barrier is coming down rapidly. As far as service is concerned, I pay $45 a month for HSPA+ service on AT&T's network with Straight Talk. Unlimited talk/text/web (and they say "no tethering" but you have to do something stupid to get dinged for that), no contract. I could go to T-Mobile for $30 a month but their service in my area is much worse, especially inside buildings, and I'm willing to pay $15/month for convenience. Mobile is cheaper than my $80/month Comcast bill, and the only reason it's even remotely close is because my rMBP was provided by work.

I'd rather have a computer because it's better for me, but I would not be surprised at all to see downmarket audiences switch aggressively (and I've started to see it around me already, but I live in a very urban area with good cell coverage).
Thanks for the clarification. The algorithm is very clever and the performance quite impressive. It would be great if the legal status of the code were clearer so that there was more chance of it making its way into usage by people. Saying that the code is "free" in an article is not really sufficiently clear to alleviate legal concerns people might have. The word "license" is never mentioned anywhere in the page, while the code project version [1] appears to state that the article and its code are under the very unfortunate CPOL. If you want to make this code public domain – which is great, btw – then I recommend that you put it up on GitHub (or BitBucket, or something) with a LICENSE.md file that explicitly states that it is "public domain". Use that phrase verbatim – it will greatly alleviate the uncertainty and doubt about its legal status. Thanks for the cool algorithm.

p.s. I fully agree that code from publicly funded academic work should be open source – ideally under a very liberal license like BSD or MIT.

[1] http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/250566/Fastest-strstr-li...
I hate to sound like an apologist, but the fact it was 2 years of Rails code thrown out in 2007 seems highly relevant to the context of the article.

This was also a rewrite. He already shot himself in the foot with PHP the first time around, then chose this brand new thing called Rails as his basis of a new codebase about as early as humanly possible without your initials being 'DHH', then went back to PHP for several reasons, some of which are still hotly debated today (SQL vs ORMs, frameworks vs. custom code or minimal frameworks, etc).

It's disingenuous to draw any conclusions about Ruby or Rails today from its state 7 years ago (likewise for PHP).
Right.

Because there's no way, today, to pay for an EC2 instance without involving physical cash.
The Future of Computer Science
How far back would you be willing to go? The UK has been around a long time. Witch burnings in the middle ages? Land confiscation in Ireland in the 17th Century? Abuses of The East India Company in India? The Harrowing of the North by William the Conqueror in the 11th century?
> If the NSA is such a powerhouse with billions of dollars of assets to track every electronic communication, why aren't they focusing their entire resources on people like the sellers?

Because they didn't invest that kind of money to find the logs in a haystack that are eastern bloc cyber criminals. They are looking for a needle in a haystack dammit. A needle. (and possibly if some of their wives are cheating on them).
Well played. The Bieber song linked in the first paragraph is the one they wanted pushed in the first place to get their page rank up.

Looks like an apology but is a huge SEO push.
This site should be penalized up the wazoo. This "non-apology" apology, is the classic example of a tattletale at school...the classic excuse of its not my fault cuz everyone is doing it...more importantly, it is wrong, and demonstrates a "our sh don't stick mentality" exchanging a tweet for a link is considered exchanging services for a link, which does indeed fall under the buying links category.)
Furthermore, while links in twitter might not pass link juice they most certainly influence search rankings, whether its personalized search, or actual algorithms that take into consideration social signals.

The argument that you only tweet out high quality content is nil when you consider you were "Paid" with a link to tweet it out. How do you remove the inherent bias? Wouldn't you tweet out a high pr site you want more links from, even if it wasn't relevant?

You are in a high interest sector with SO MANY LEGIT STRATEGIES TO ATTRACT HIGH VALUE LINKS NATURALLY... Why are you wasting time with spammy strategies that haven't worked in several years?
This seems like a good SEO method - point out that you were doing something extremely minor in violation of Google's guidelines, then point out that everyone else breaks most of the guidelines. All the same time do this in a niche that is known for spam, all the while hoping that Google will read it and manually slap everyone else, giving you a better overall ranking.
No, I'd want to live in a world where said religious fanatics are not allowed to do that, otherwise you get evolution.

I don't like evolution.

I do tend to agree that we're pretty much screwed, though.
The lower middle classes can't afford a house/apartment in places with laws that make it difficult to build new houses or apartments, including many places with lots of tech jobs. But in rural areas, or many Midwestern cities, or much of the Sunbelt, a house is still very much within reach. But many of the most productive regions of the country are zoned such that very little new housing is built, and rising incomes for some just mean more competition for existing housing.
I don't find the example Clojure in the original article terribly readable, speaking as someone who writes a decent amount of Common Lisp.

My real entry into the Lisp world was via Perl and the higher order functions that I used there. That enabled me to grasp the overall semantic of Lisp; lots of time in the code did the rest.
This is a pretty half-hearted apology. All that has been proven here is that they knew exactly what they were doing the whole time. Additionally, I think they are doing themselves a disservice by comparing themselves to websites like AZLyrics, Metrolyrics etc, because those sites are not even in the same league as RapGenius in terms of quality of content, and it does not serve to justify their actions anyway.

Disclaimer: I use RapGenius every day and will continue to do so, unless they continue down this Metrolyrics-esque road.
Maybe making a first-class publishing house wasn't really what he wanted to do.
Increased standards of living are a kind of background element, as they are more or less shared by the population.

You seem to have gone backwards, and defined wealth as "only the things other people don't have", in which case of course it becomes a zero-sum. But that isn't what wealth is.

The modern understanding of Wealth is the abundance of valuable resources or material possessions. [...] In this larger understanding of wealth, an individual, community, region or country that possesses an abundance of such possessions or resources to the benefit of the common good is known as wealthy. -- Wikipedia
Interesting point, write a controversial article, get love link love then link out to your money page (ranking lyrics for Bieber must be a goldmine...)
I'm assuming that you work for a corporation. That corporation is made up of you, and a heap of other folks quite similar to you.

It's true that lots of corporations do unethical things, but you also should keep in mind that at its heart, it's people like you and I that are doing it. They respond to incentives like the rest of us, they (mostly) have a conscience, and generally try to do the right thing.

They're not always successful, but I don't think that your caricature is generally accurate.
Can someone actually explain or try to convince me why paid links are bad? What about non-paid SEO links? I am not familiar with the arguments.

Say I am running a blog and I am asking my friends to include my blog link in everyone one of his links regardless what. And we are just doing this to get each other noticed. Say he's writing a C++ tutorial and I will also cook up a Python equivalent and say "hey guys if you want to check out the Python one, go check out my friend's blog here."

It's almost like me asking someone to promote my Youtube Channel (hey guys please subscribe X's new channel) in the video and in description.
I feel for Rap Genius. They have a far superior user experience than any other lyrics site out there--but unless they use these tricks they'll never get significant organic Google traffic.

The problem is Google's algorithms heavily favor older sites that have been accumulating massive amounts of backlinks with targeted anchor text for years & years. An upstart like Rapgenius doesn't stand a chance.

Another problem is that Google seems to only selectively enforce "violations" of their terms of service like this. Some sites get away with these violations forever, so you'll never be able to catch them in traffic unless you play dirty too.

I should know: I have a niche e-commerce site with a blatantly obvious better shopping experience than most competitors, but unless I use similar tricks I'm nowhere to be found in Google's results. And "natural" link building doesn't really work for us, there's not enough people writing about my niche and quite frankly its not really that interesting--so it's not really possible to get "natural" links without coercing people.

Google, your system is totally broken.
As a casual HN reader and as one who doesn't post comments that often, I have to say, that shit exists here??? my god, so we're basically reddit? So do we have a hivemind too?

This isn't directed at you. I just didn't realize HN was part of that nerd subculture. I thought HN was for adults.
Very childish indeed, it was not an apology at all but a 'they're doing it too' kind of post. I've seen this type of childish behavior on a couple occasions with them (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo )... I'm quite surprised they decided take this approach.

Edit: mirror, since I'm betting the text will be modified soon considering the reactions here. http://pastebin.com/dMh7dgxp
As someone who has a client of mine who's been wrongly affected by Google's search update recently (because of inadvertent toxic backlinks), I have absolutely no sympathy for them.
The author's point isn't that int-or-string is a good choice, it's that there are a lot of choices and none of them allow natural abstraction over a deck of cards, the static typing encourages the abstraction down to a lower level - like ints or into a mashup like string-or-int.

And this is the really important point, this pushing the abstraction down to a lower level causes it to leak into the implementation of card games in ways that make the card games themselves harder to reason about.

Decks of cards have Kings, not 13's, and using 13 to represent the King is of type leaky abstraction. It's a muddy road leading into the swamp.

When I implement blackjack I get to write little balls of mud:

If card = 13 then 10

And in my card guessing game

If card = 13 and guess = King then "Yes, the card is a King!"

All that for a warning when I don't have a card 7, which is going to make Pinochle have to work around the abstraction - probably by bypassing the entire implementation when it chokes on two Jacks of Diamonds etc. in a deck.
Egghead.io Directives in 5 minutes
This is complicated.

1. rapgenius is probably the least spammy lyrics site on the internet, and definitely so amongst those on the first page of search results. As a consumer, I would not have a problem with Google, et al giving rapgenius results a special algorithmic bump to move them up. I also know that this is an opinion - it may be a popular opinion, but it is still inherently subjective.

2. If I was in rapgenius' shoes, I imagine gaming SEO would be a strategy to be seriously considered - one doesn't get into the music lyrics market without being aware of the current state of affairs. Barry Bonds believed he was the best hitter of his era, and if McGwire and Sosa were going to get credit for breaking the home run record while taking steroids, then damnit he was going to take steroids and hit 70 bombs. IMO, this is not a morality play.

3. But I do not care for the public personae of the rapgenius founders. They come off as juvenile and occasionally offensive, and I think they are bad representatives for consumer internet start-ups. I'm pretty sure this is a common opinion on HN, but I am not sure how much it should color our judgment of their actions.

As they say, the game is the game.
I think trans rights are something that in 50 years time will be like gay rights now. We'll look back 50 years to today and think the treatment by society of trans people was barbaric.

In 50 years time Chelsea Manning might get an apology because medication she needed wasn't given to her in prison.
This: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks
Un seems to be pretty bold. What it remains to be seen is if he is also wise.

Lately I haven't been paying attention to the speculations about the internal affairs of the North Korea. However it does seem that this year he has been showing a pretty brutal side.

He now has to show mercy and goodwill somehow. So the people that are ruled by fear, may rationalize it away with a reason for respect.

Disclaimer: What I am trying to do here is to have a rational debate about realpolitik. So please try to refrain from passing moral judgement.
Exactly this. A favorite local morning DJ of mine likes to call this the "gotcha society." The whole Duck Dynasty thing being the news of the week I think is proof enough of that - no one would even know who the guy was if it wasn't for some silly reality TV show, why should we care what he thinks?
I'm kind of disappointed that it didn't start with "Yoo waddup Googz!"
I desperately want you to be Ghostface Killah. Fantastic story by the way.

How did you acquire your wealth if you don't mind me asking?
Because if you do all of your internal calculations in cents, then the rounding errors add up to a significant amount in not very much time.

Let's say you have a service that is $20 per year. That is 5.475¢ per day (I'm assuming a year of 365.242 days; if you do an integral number of days and account for leap years, then it will be a different daily rate in regular years and leap years). If you are doing calculations which pro-rate certain things per day, such as allowing people to transition between different subscription types while applying their existing balance to the new subscription, and you rounded that down to 5¢ per day, then when you multiplied that back out to a year it would only be $18.26 per year, not $20 per year. That's a pretty substantial difference.

Where you fix your precision depends on how much error you're willing to deal with. In the article, he describes how using millicents leads to an error of 165m¢ (.165¢) per year, if you apply the rounded daily rate and multiply by the number of days, which is deemed acceptable for their purposes. For a much more extreme example of precision, Tarsnap quotes their prices in picodollars per byte per month (https://www.tarsnap.com/picoUSD-why.html) and performs all calculations in attodollars per byte per day.
No. This is a lie. Let's compare their original email [0] to their apology. While we're at it, let's look at their logical fallacies.

For example, compare Rap Genius’ (RG's) annotated edition of Justin Bieber's new hit single "Heartbreaker" – which dozens of Bieber fans have annotated with details of his break up with Selena Gomez – to AZLyrics’ version of the same

This is a false clause [1]. Nobody is doubting RG's content is superior. If anything, better content would be a reason not to engage in blackhat SEO.

Excessive link exchanges ("Link to me and I'll link to you") or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking

We don’t do this.

That is, links shared on Twitter may give temporary traffic to fan sites, but not long-term link juice.

Yet, in your email to bloggers, you promised to

get you MASSIVE traffic

Well which one is it, temporary traffic or massive traffic? This is a direct contradiction.

With limited tools (Open Site Explorer), we found some suspicious backlinks to some of our competitors:

Again, lyrics sites or shady. They also don't raise VC money from Andreessen Horowitz. You'll be held to a higher standard, and rightfully so, if you're truly hoping to become more than a lyrics site. This is bandwagon fallacy [2].

[0]- http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack-exposed

[1]- https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/false-cause

[2]- https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/bandwagon
Electrical to mechanical analogies
It's a step. A few years ago, they apologized for it, and people responded by demanding a pardon. Now there's a pardon. Maybe in a few years they'll pardon and apologize to everybody else who was convicted under that law.

Only a time machine can change what happened, but every gesture is something. It can't be made right, but acknowledgement of the wrong is still good.
I'd contend that it's the one approach we know does scale well. The largest systems we've built, such as the web, are designed around bare data structures, rather than objects.