skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, best approach to learn a new language is to read a book in parallel in both languages. I tend to use novels that were translated in both languages, this way I won't get into trouble with the way a particular writer uses the language. Imagine trying to learn English by reading Faulkner or Mark Twain.

For e.g, say that you are Dutch and want to learn Romanian, you buy a novel by Dostoyevsky (since this was written in Russian you can be sure it was translated in both languages) that you read before (this way you won't pay much attention to the story) and read it in parallel Dutch/Romanian.
This comment addresses that quite a bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762796
Do you find it jarring when you do see "the news" now that you're desensitized to it?

I find it weird that the do-anything-to-get-attention bias of "the news" so much more obvious now for me that it all seems like satire.
To be blunt, that means you've not been using it right.

I totally agree that feature or behavioural tests validate that customer requirements are met. But you shouldn't (and probably can't) test more in-dept behaviour in these.

For example, I wrote a shopping basket system for a site last year. There were feature tests in there - "When I click the 'add to basket' button then I should see the item in the basket" sort of thing. Those are great. But I also wrote a whole bunch of unit tests for this - checking that calculations were correctly performed, and the adding and removing items worked correctly, and that tax was applied according to the correct rules, and so on. These tests are super-quick to run and provide a lot of confidence that the API contract is being adhered to. We could have completely switched out the back-end storage for a third-party API or something, and the tests would still be applicable.

There are loads of reasons to test behaviour in layers - I agree that you can easily over-invest in effectively pointless tests, and I've seen that everywhere. But don't discard all unit tests as worthless.
Nothing hopeful about it. There's something like 8 million citizens who are licensed to carry concealed right now, plus no license is required in Alaska, Arizona, Wyoming, and Vermont (never was for the latter). I'm one of them, and we by definition don't routinely aim our handguns at police officers, else we'd at minimum lose our license.
> Why are people so offended by Crossfit? Who cares what
> other people do to get in shape? [snip] Why is Crossfit
> special?

Because there is a perception that Crossfit aficionados spend an inordinate amount of time telling everyone else how Crossfit is the One True Sport and that everyone else is fat and stupid for not doing Crossfit.

Proselytizing people should probably prepare for pushback.
There's a wealth of information on ketogenic (low to no carb) diets: http://www.reddit.com/r/keto

Everyone serious about this understands that carbs are the problem.
Is this something new for the American population? Hasn't this been known for years or decades already? That's why there are low-carb diets.
Put that in combination with calorie intake and exercise and your fat will gradually disappear. It's not exactly rocket science.
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Arecibo Observatory was used as a filming location in the climax of the James Bond movie GoldenEye (1995):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory
ASIC Development Costs are Lower Than You Think
RMS's guidelines are very very old news. His temper tantrum is now two years past.
Exactly how is this relevant to Hacker News?
I've often heard that Finnish and Hungarian are probably the hardest european languages to learn. I don't know any, but I've got some Hungarian friends and the few bits I've been teached don't show the opposite :)
>>The answer to every single complaint this guy has is that he is in a terrible crossfit gym with terrible coaches. Granted, there are a lot of terrible crossfit gyms out there and a lot of terrible coaches. That doesn't make crossfit in general bad.

First of all, Erin Simmons is a woman. Second of all, she addresses this argument in the very last paragraph. You may want to read the whole thing before commenting on it.

>>It boggles my mind sometimes. Why are people so offended by Crossfit?

It boggles my mind sometimes. Why are Crossfitters get so incredibly defensive whenever someone criticizes them? What's with the fucking creepy cult mentality?
Ref: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1871695
Not to mention but also my ATF movie, Contact
We are detecting something from a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
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You can support mandatory minimum sentencing without supporting drug prohibition. I think that preventing sentencing based on affinity is almost as important for minority groups as ending sending people to jail for drugs.
I believe the woman knows that he is into her. And she enjoys the attentions without having to commit. It is a very comfortable position. It remains an asymmetric relationship as long as the friend zoned allows it.
Would it be going too far to say the type of person who would most benefit from the nutritional advice of this column is also unlikely to be the type of person who reads the New York Times.

And to the person who says that what people put into their mouths is, "generally out of their control" - imagine a legal setting and some crime committed, the only way to claim diminished responsibility is to be a minor or plead various forms of insanity. Are we saying that most overweight/obese people are borderline insane when we're invoking the, "it's not their fault" argument?
Yes, #[deprecated="some text"] causes the compiler to emit a warning message (that includes the specified text) whenever, for example, a function marked with it is called.
The US started a war on poverty somewhere in the 50/60s, I think. And it's been increasing ever since.
So the problem is - the very concept of a species is not particularly well defined, and loses a large degree of meaning in paleontology amidst lack of fossil-record data (both extreme scarcity and geographical patchiness) and the additional dimension of time.

A species is a particular genetic type which does not routinely interbreed with other related types it encounters, and retains some physiological differences from them, as a forked, internally consistent genetic branch.

We're a hundred million years late to demonstrate that the sauropods were or weren't interbreeding. We don't have that behavior to observe. We don't have any DNA, a fairly accurate way of demonstrating breeding pools, to work with. We only have the occasional left third rib, and equations derived from the most similar complete skeletons we know of. Even when we do find a complete skeleton, we can only date it to a certain degree of precision, and while understanding that there is an evolutionary tree that is constantly sprouting and changing branches, we have nothing to really demarcate when one species "becomes" another - we are speculating about two specimens' reproductive compatibility with millions of years between them.

Could you breed with a proto-human? Would you? How far back? Would the kids come out alright? Would you call them a new subspecies or pick one of the parents' taxonomy? On top of that, to represent the last several millions of years of subtle changes, new branches, & trimmed branches in hominid genetics, what if you only have 6 specimens closer than chimpanzees, mostly age/sex-indeterminate, only one of which is a complete skeleton? How do you draw an org chart of the hominids then?

There are size variations corresponding to age and gender, heritable variations within a breeding pool, variations corresponding to differential nutrition & the good times vs the bad times for a population, variations corresponding to individual sickness and injury, variations corresponding to the entire population getting steadily larger or smaller for a thousand or thirty thousand or a million years, variations corresponding to sudden changes in habit associated with adaptations to rapid changes in environment, variations corresponding to drift from a parent population associated with permanent reproductive incompatibility as well as reversible reproductive isolation.

The historical paleontological record is thousands of times richer in micro-scale detail than we have the data to describe, even if we did have good words to describe it with that the popular media could understand. But they want to talk in terms of species, because that's what people are familiar with.
Why am I offended? Because I've suffered the pain of joints injured by high strain repetitive movements, and don't want others to endure the same. There's something to be said about letting someone make their own mistakes, but this is something that screws you over for life.

With regards to the "Just a bad gym; just a bad coach" argument... I think the article goes over that sufficiently. It's not just a gym or a coach which is the problem, it's the core philosophy of the workout that's the problem.
If you're an SRE wouldn't that be quite apt? Listening to Google tick over to catch the misfire.
>But whatever the overall argument, TDD certainly changes how things are designed

I think you missed this point completely, and you made it hard to ever get it when you compared TDD to a highly contentious issue in guns - rather than this just being an issue of methodology in coding, it's now a political issue as well.

Regardless, TDD doesn't change how things are designed. TDD is a methodology, a way of doing things. It's a tool - it can't change things without human input. TDD does not change design; it can't. It only amplifies a person's ability to do that by making poor abstractions and weak boundaries clear and that is the power of it as a methodology.
That's an interesting question, which simply answered is a plain yes or no.

If they use technology as we understand it, then presumably yes. Prime numbers are just a unique artifact of basic arithmetic. Our knowledge of prime numbers appears to date back to at least Ancient Egyptian times, so it's quite safe to assume an alien race capable of something as technologically adept as transmitting a signal with the purposeful intent of contacting another race would know what prime numbers are.

The issue is we're limited to our view point, we're exceptionally naive of anything different as we've never experienced it. So, is our technology the only way?

We're designing nanotechnology that could fabricate anything we could dream of, but what if an alien race ended up evolving a unique cell that could do it too. We have white blood cells, they have nanofab cells. Would they even comprehend math if they're just growing jet engines and rocket nozzles?

It's this latter, our unknowable unknowns that will broadside us. How do we relate to something that's unfathomably alien to us.

The good news is you and I likely won't be around to care when we find out what aliens are really like.
Let's say I own a hotel and I'm trying to decide whether to have someone at the front desk taking check-ins and providing customer service 24 hours a day, or only 12 hours[0]. I will have to hire at least two people (full-time) or more (part-time) to accomplish this.

I will only do this if the increase in business resulting from more flexible check-in times and better customer service will exceed the cost of hiring two more full-time employees. If a minimum wage is high enough that hiring these two people isn't profitable, I'll just stick to the restricted hours. Instead of being underpaid, the two people I would have hired are unemployed. Is that better?

Of course, if I'm successful enough, I might be able to hire more people by reducing my own income or deferring other ways that I might re-invest in the business, but why would I do that if I'm running a business, not a charity? Any analysis of a specific minimum wage must consider the effect on unemployment. It's probably possible to calculate with a fair degree of precision - would someone with a background in economics like to chime in on this?

[0] In the US, hotels without 24-hour check-in are rare; in Europe, they're common.
Very well said.

The consequences would be immense if we could override even one of these triggers.
I've heard some of those arguments to explain cheating; women marries a 'provider', and has sex on the side with a genetically superior men, so she has a win-win situation for her babies.
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UFOs that Crashed in China Could be Debris from Exploded Russian Satellite
F* me. Over here in Australia I'm still making somewhere just under your first range and it is not easy to find a new job. I'm 26.
Inverted Polymorphism With Pattern Matching
Calorie reduction and exercise will reduce your body fat even if you eat mostly carbs. The trouble is that it's hard to stick to a low-calorie diet if you're mostly eating carbs.
You actually want your deadlifts to be reasonably fast. What you don't want to do is attempt to explode off the ground. This leads to back rounding (I think this is what you mean, just clarifying).
That's exactly my issue with starting training. I'm very worried about back injuries and want to find a coach to teach me proper form but I've got no idea how to evaluate him.

It's a bit the same conundrum as a non technical founder trying to find a technical founder :-)
Obesity rates in Europe (2008): http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/50326000/gif/_50326564...

Why Italians, that eat pasta (carbohydrates) almost every day are so thin? Goddammit.
> Would it be going too far to say the type of person who would most benefit from the nutritional advice of this column is also unlikely to be the type of person who reads the New York Times.

Um, yes. I don't at all understand your point. That's the most ridiculous point I've heard in a long time.

Are you somehow insinuating that overweight people are not well-read or intelligent? The many, many overweight NYT readers I know (including myself) would beg to differ.

> And to the person who says that what people put into their mouths is, "generally out of their control"

Your attitude is a terrible example of the moralistic viewpoint which this article disparages. Being overweight is in no way equivalent to a crime.

Choice is not a binary. Of course people have some control over what they eat, but it's well established by science that different people at different times have different drives to eat. Or are you completely dismissing addiction as a phenomenon?
I think it's a mistake to be completely cynical about the motivations for the war on drugs. A lot of the lobby groups that now seek to perpetuate it were in fact created by it (e.g. the prison lobby). The problem is that it was a kneejerk reactiom to a real problem (addiction) that simply had massive unintended consequences, including the creation of cynical interest groups.

I think that when arguing for drug liberalization one should acknowledge the validity of the concerns of those who have heartfelt support for drug laws. The point isn't that addiction isn't a problem, it's that criminalization doesn't fix it.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

Btw. she put many awesome photos of the observatory on her flickr stream: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/

some are categorized in albums:

* Flying over Arecibo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/sets/72157642216845184/

* Sunday Platform Tour: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/sets/72157633399446014/

* Arecibo Observatory: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/sets/72157631700960474/

* The Platform After Dark: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/sets/72157631824663769/

* Sunset from the Lidar Lab: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/sets/72157632834643572/

an old Sun Sparc workstation: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/8111297074/in/set-721576... and https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/13952717471/in/set-72157...
And the Bay Area has a really good social dancing community - Swing, Salsa, etc. I am in Atlanta, which also has a good dance community.
My bad. Did not realize it was a woman. I did read the whole thing. Her last paragraph is like me saying, "If you do any sort of MMA programming it is terrible for you. You will get hurt. Period. No exceptions. Don't listen to your coaches." Just because she says something doesn't mean it is true.

Second point, I should have asked, Why are people so offended by crossfit in particular? Seems like a disproportionate amount of hate toward crossfit as opposed to other sports. I guess you could attribute it to popularity though. Bigger target, more pageviews/reactions if you bash it.
>> When you're refactoring code to reduce coupling, you absolutely HAVE to do it with system level tests.

I think this comes about because tests are written against every class in your system. I find unit tests are far more useful if you focus on testing abstractions rather than every single class e.g. you have a reporting abstraction in your code, instead of testing every class used within that abstraction you only test the public API that you want to expose. This allows you to do black box testing which is infinitely better when it comes to refactoring, you should be able to restructure the internals of that particular API without having to change your unit tests at all.

My feeling is that a lot of the frustration with TDD at the moment is that people are writing tests for every public method in their system. If you focus more on the behaviour of your abstractions you gain a lot more freedom when refactoring and can greatly reduce the number of tests you write without reducing coverage.
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I've been checking types in Python dynamically for years now. My library, Obiwan https://pypi.python.org/pypi/obiwan/1.0.2 uses type annotations, which I think nicer than decorators.
> Specifically, it’s the first law of thermodynamics

> exert willpower and eat less

> this advice doesn’t work

As we know round these parts, "Ideas are useless without execution"
> Everyone wants to be told that it isn't their fault that bad things have happened.

Actually, the general cultural attitudes are to castigate overweight individuals for some sort of moral failing. In reality, it is substantially harder for different people with different genes to maintain a lower weight. Disregarding that is purely callous and is equivalent to denying the existence of phenomena like addiction.

People are 100% accountable, but that doesn't mean we should ignore that it's harder for certain people to make the "right" choice. It also doesn't mean we shouldn't give them support and assistance to make the right choice.
The case of a large, already existing Python codebase comes to mind.
It's better for nobody to have fiber than for wealthier areas to get it while communities that can't afford it don't.

This is like saying that if you can't bring poor people up, the answer is to bring rich people down, keeping everything frozen until the technology is cheap. And I presume that the assumption that underlies this is that the wealthy have done nothing, or not enough to deserve the lives they lead?

Do you have any idea how vicious that sounds?

(Also, the revenues generated from early adopters often pave the way for later generations of lower-priced goods. Do you have any idea where we'd be if no one was allowed to sell smartphones until they became cheap enough for "everyone?" We'd still be stuck with those awful feature phones if that were the case.)
>Raising the minimum wage doesn't necessarily raise people's income. If your labor is not worth more than $25/h to your employer you'll just lose your job (or never get hired in the first place.)

What you're saying here is that raising the minimum wage doesn't necessarily cause a particular person's income to change at the same job that he/she had before. What it does is shift business models that depend on slave labor for their margins. It forces innovation and automation, and the people who can't acquire the skills needed can then rely on a basic income. I don't understand why the government subsidizes margins made on the backs of labor by supplementing their wages with welfare payments.

If the government is supporting people, it should be reaping the benefits of their labor rather than private interests. If it can't come up with work that they can do, it should make sure that they're comfortable.
sure, you could modify crossfit to make it safer and more effective but then it wouldn't be crossfit, would it?
I used to think the same, then I tried to actually get into environments with a more balanced gender ratio, and I realized that actually I was not faring any better than before. Apparently I have low desirability and have few unique appeals/provoke low unique reactions.

At the end, it's inevitable: even if just by mere chance, someone _has_ to be in the lower 5% of people who get the least successful interactions with the other gender.

(Anyhow, his problem seems very common to me, but obviously my POW is skewed, since I got to know most of my friends in one of these place with unbalanced gender ratio in the first place)
There's two parts to TDD: what it does for you when you are writing a new piece of code, or what it does when you come back to it.

IMHO, the advantages when you are writing new code are vastly overstated. A former employer mandated TDD, and I did my best to follow their practices. It doesn't lead me to better modularization, more maintainable code, or really, any less bugs.

However, going back to code that actually has a real test suite around it is invaluable. It's not really because the tests prevent you from breaking the code: More often than not, it's the test that needs fixing. The value comes from the tests behaving as living documentation. It lets me see why someone, at some point, wanted the code there. Then I can evaluate if the reasons are still valid, and wonder if the old requirements still make sense, or whether my updated requirements are going to be an issue, because someone forgot some byzantine case that the tests just reminded us of.

Now, the question is whether we are better off getting here through TDD and a quest for full test coverage, or something higher level, like Specification by Example. But either way, if the domain is complex enough, either will cover a need that static, non-executable documentation handles way worse, because old school paper documentation goes stale very quickly.

So how does TDD affect design? Mostly by making sure that you aren't writing pieces of code that are so complicated they are untestable, and frankly, you should probably be avoiding that in the first place.
>>Her last paragraph is like me saying, "If you do any sort of MMA programming it is terrible for you. You will get hurt. Period. No exceptions. Don't listen to your coaches." Just because she says something doesn't mean it is true

No it is not. The logic is both solid and easy enough to follow: Crossfit gyms are about Workouts of the Day. Every gym does them. And they are dangerous as hell. Therefore every Crossfit gym is dangerous. Another commenter gave this accurate analogy:

"It’s like saying I don’t need to visit every movie theater in America to know that they all show movies at regular intervals."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762796
It might just be me but $50/month for the lowest tier seems a little overpriced. I know it depends on how much utility one can get out of it - maybe I just can't think of $50 of utility.

I might not therefore be the target market.
Any chance we can get the lectures before #5?