skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually it was NASA built instrument that did the discovery but it doesn't really matter to me. Science is science, irrespective of the countries/parties involved.
Ah yes, now I know why xemacs and firefox crash so much.
Outlook Web Access requires Internet Explorer 6 or higher to allow you to use the full version.

That is more up Microsoft's alley. The article is a better example of doing good through some bad, a moral quandary.

Microsoft's schtick is to sit there and tell you with a straight face that browsers like Chrome, Firefox & Opera (and all Mac browsers) can't possibly display a calendar in a month view. This is a feature unique to the rendering powerhouse that is IE6 or higher.

It just doesn't seem like the same thing to me. One seems to further the progress of the web through less than reputable means, the other is intentional crippling for no gain whatsoever other than locking out your competitors.
I worked at Orbitz which has a huge Java codebase. It was complex and hard to maintain. It was loaded with abstractions, interfaces and unit tests. I believe the former was mostly due to the latter.

Not to say that the latter has no merits -- there are situations and cases where they are 'net win' good things. But when overdone or done poorly they make a codebase much harder to understand, troubleshoot, extend or fix.

I've seen this first-hand many times, though I notice it most often occurs in large corporate Java shops rather than with smaller companies or codebases or more nimble/concise languages.
What surprises me a little is why NASA would install the spectrometer on-board a spacecraft by an agency launching its maiden lunar mission.
Noup
They still use Wasabe. He mentions it often on his podcast.
And I don't think it is such a bad idea.
It is simply a translator from one languate to another.
Like GWT (Google Web Toolkit) They program in Java however the result is 'translated' to javascript.
That is how the Gmail UI was made.

So no that crazy
Google only uses GWT for their internal projects. Gmail's UI doesn't use it.

You're right, though, it's not that crazy of an idea.
Given that it's Wikipedia, it's more of a random sample of programmers who have got enough media attention to avoid deletion.

Though to be fair, the deletionists generally trust that the the community of editors who write articles about programming-related topics can self-regulate their topic area. Of 337 names currently on the list, only 16 have been subject to deletion attempts: Doug Bell, Brad Cox, Hugh Daniel, Andrew Gower, Paul Gower, Dave Hyatt, Dan Ingalls, Rod Johnson, Mark Overmars, Jacek Sieka, Mike Shaver, Audrey Tang, Simon Tatham, Andrew Welch, and Dave Winer. (Okay, technically someone tried to delete the Bill Gates article too, but that was clearly a joke). Plus they tried deleting the list itself too.

(To be honest, I myself only recognised about three of those names: Audrey Tang, Dan Ingalls, and Simon Tatham. The rest of them I had to look up ... in Wikipedia.)
On the topic of testing, it's only currently viable to write tests for bugs which occur in the future and that are properly caught (I recently caught one completely by accident because it wasn't caught by our alert system). Going back and trying to write test cases for everything I've written up to this point simply makes no sense; they should have been written before the code, from the start (or from a point that I knew the code wouldn't be re-written again).

Automated deployment has been less of a priority because I don't really have to re-deploy that often (meaning spin up a new server). However, if/when I do need to, it will be automated. Even if I haven't written the scripts yet, I will do it before the new machine comes up.

Back when the system was created I had never been a "TDDer" before and the tools that exist now did not exist or were not viable for production, especially in terms of automated deployment and dependency management. If I could go back and do it again (or just murder someone) I'd love to have good test coverage and automation tools. It isn't that it's not important, it's just that the ship has sailed on half of it and the other half is situation-dependent at this stage.

In summary, it is THAT important. I will go as far to say that I think these two items in particular are more or less vital to the long-term viability of a software project. Anyone maintaining a large, aged project that contains no test coverage and no automated build / deploy tools has my deepest sympathies; it's like stacking an infinite house of cards.
link from the AP feed
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MED_AIDS_VACCINE?SITE...
This pointless game Palm is playing makes no sense to me. Has nobody at Palm ever owned a Mac and a Nokia phone or Blackberry?

I just don't understand why they didn't take the obvious and professional route (that many other companies have taken), and just access the public XML file that iTunes generates to allow 3rd party syncing applications.

It would be a much more significant issue had there been no way for 3rd party devices to access the iTunes library. But there is, and its been there forever & is in use by other phone companies for the exact same purpose Palm is attempting to achieve.

What does Palm stand to gain from a feature that can break at another companies whim with no advance notice?

Its a shame too, because besides this one really stupid move, I'm really starting to like Palm's current direction. A new OS that is actually out, on new devices, with more in the pipeline? And I can actually hold this device with this OS in my hand rather than just reading about it? Bring on the new Palm.

Just drop this one stupid issue, PLEASE. To everyone but Engadget commenters, it makes them look bad.
I, for one, will simply refuse. You don't have to testify against yourself, and not drawing is a lot easier than drawing.
The point was that he exercised for 60 minutes today, instead of 30.
"a major complication is Debian's obnoxious segregation of headers into separate packages"

What's so obnoxious about this? The -dev packages will depend on libfooSONAME (and have far more stable names) so it's hardly more effort to keep them installed.
You Need a Debt Reduction Plan
To get out of debt fast and continue to live debt free you need a debt reduction plan.
Moral of the story: there is no silver bullet.

Use some template magic when you need it, create sprawling class hierarchies if required and write tests if you think they are necessary. In the real world, purity is a liability, not an asset.
If it's used to unnecessary change language or API behavior - not for justified performance improvment.
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Agreed. I wasn't really sure what I had just read. One thing I feel fairly certain about though is that these duct-tape people will screw up a project in the long run.
> When Apollo astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago, they brought back several samples of lunar rocks.

The Apollo Moon landing was fake.
Characterizing and grouping individuals is dangerous for doing business
Democrats nix putting pre-vote health bill online
It is often that way anyway regardless of planning. You get into it then your needs change over time. By version 2.0 a new foundation will last longer and incorporate things people have learned from the first version.
Some success: 30% effectiveness in that 51 out of 8000 given the vaccine because HIV positive, and 74/8000 given the placebo did. I presume that really is statistically significant despite the chance it could have just been random?

They also don't know how it works...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunascape_(web_browser) is unique in that it contains three rendering engines: Gecko (used in Mozilla Firefox), Webkit (used in Apple Safari and Google Chrome), and Trident (used in Microsoft Internet Explorer). The user can switch between layout engines seamlessly.
"Although the difference was small, Dr. Kim said it was statistically significant and meant the vaccine was 31.2 percent effective."

The confidence interval is determined by the number of people in the trial (N=16,400), not the number of people who get sick.
Boeing Submits Bid to Jump Into Commercial Space Segment
People lie if truth hurts their self-esteem.
That actually works on Compiz (Fusion) that is installed on Ubuntu and several other Linux variants.

More info on their wiki:
http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/Plugins/Group
Virtual pool, real-world interface
Ouch.

Someone linked to a wikipedia list of "most expensive objects" and I couldn't help but notice how many of them were a waste of good money.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world%27s_most_expensiv...
Ask HN: Need website screenshot generator
Need to take screenshot of a website every hour, which webbased service do you reccommend ?
So why didn't he get a motorized pump before the alarming need for it arose? Because, at the time, that money was better spent on other things that were more necessary then.
You could argue that existing MMO's already have everything in place for you to play them that way. These games already have tons of different objectives and ways to play, what's one more?

The best programmers write bots that can automate lots of characters to farm gold/money/valuable items/powerlevel characters which can used, sold to other players, etc. Whoever makes the most money "wins".
Rebuttals here
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801969
Yeah, according to Nostradamus, the Knights Templar and the Free Masons have joined forces with ancient Mayan spirits to put a telekinetic shield around the moon. Now if you spell all the nouns in the previous sentence backwards, add the EBCIDIC values of their consonants, then subtract 666 from the result, you will get the names of all the gays, gypsies and jews who collaborated in Roswell to kill JFK and 2 Pac, man.
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Speed Dial for Mozilla Firefox - Successful Update
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Toshiba Builds 100x Smaller Micro Nuclear Reactor

http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news-toshiba...
Isn't GWT used to build their wave client?
If the rate of infection in the general population was even lower, say 1 in 100,000, and they actually trialled 200,000 people, finding that the vaccine perfectly prevented infection, should they conclude this with high confidence? Or have I misunderstood you?

Besides, Dr Kim is quoted elsewhere as saying "the result could be due to chance" and the vaguely phrased "31.2 percent effective" is not encouraging. Add in the likely funding source of AIDS vaccine trials, the pressure to get results and the unknown mechanism and it doesn't look so great.
When Sarah Palin was running for office I heard a British politician remark that Sarah Palin represented the negation of politics. She appealed to people who were fed up with politics and politicians. For some reason Joel's argument reminds me of this. He seems to have examples of over the top designs gone bad but in the end I can't find much of real value to take away from this article. Is the visitor pattern too much? What about hibernate or other ORM tools?
That's a bad conclusion to make: it's the classic tradeoff between importance and urgency. If you only ever do the urgent stuff, the hair-on-fire-has-to-be-done-yesterday stuff, you'll never make time to get to long-term strategic projects.

The payoff for something like unit testing, automated deployment, and continuous integration are over the very, very long haul. If your cost/benefit analysis is always looking at 3- or 6-months out, it'll never seem like a win.

So if you only ever do the urgent stuff and never anything strategic, 3 years later you'll realize that if you'd just sucked it up back at the start and done that stuff, even if meant putting off otherwise urgent features, you'd be further ahead than you are now, because it would have more than made up for the initial investment.

So it's not that you don't do those things because they're not important, but rather because they're never urgent, and because most people's time horizons, especially in a startup, are fairly short.
I guess now Celine Dion can make whomever she's singing to love her.

On a less silly note, there's so many of these "found water on X" stories that as a lay person, it's hard to tell what's an exciting discovery. I mean, it took a quick Google search to find a "water found on moon!" article dating back to 1998: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/3299

What's different between the lunar water ice in the 1998 article and the finding of lunar water ice now?
I do not know the facts behind this, but clearly, they made the right decision.
Wow. That's the kind of discussion we should be having. I didn't quite realize that Pearl's causality cannot tell A->B->C from A<-B->C. On the other hand, no other non-experimental statistical technique can do that either. Also, many problems will likely have a very constrained set of causal graphs to choose from, like smoking/tar/cancer.
Check this http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-perl-737.html
But you've just confirmed the article here. Wasabi is exactly the duct tape he is talking about. FogBugz started as VBScript project, and when they needed to ship it for both Windows and Unix, instead of rewriting the system in two languages, they created a "compiler" to generate PHP code from existing code base. Later they added generation of .NET bytecode, and -- boom! -- instead of rewriting the whole FogBugz project they made it run on .NET runtime.

Wasabi is a duct tape.
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I just laughed for 30 seconds, to myself.
Iraqi Seizes the Chance to Make War Profitable
I don't know of any way to have apt always pull them in as dependencies, so I constantly find myself installing them manually.

Debian's policy of splitting all features off into their own packages (or disabling them entirely for ideological reasons), and having duplicates of many packages (with mutually-exclusive dependents) constantly fucks with me. I can't ever depend on its dependency tracking to actually give me what I want. It's not a good sign when all the digg-bait walkthroughs always instruct you to paste in a huge list of packages.
Bionic Eye: First Augmented Reality App for the iPhone
So why didn't he get a motorized pump before the alarming need for it arose? Because, at the time, that money was better spent on other things that were necessary at the time.

Might have been better spent. Might have. Say that it was better spent is just begging the question.

That he didn't get the pump can be blamed as much on poor risk mitigation as it can be on avoiding unnecessary expenses. Having a cavalier and dismissive attitude toward mitigating future risks can result in a demonstration of exactly how faulty one's prioritizations really were.

Don't fall into the trap of assuming just because things were done out of assumed necessity, they were the right things to do.
...and that works together with all the dependencies you've also installed, and the set of configure --options they were built with.

It's also a strong guarantee that if the package is built any different than the upstream default, you know exactly what changes are being made, since they happen on your machine.
You asked the equivalent of 'how is babby formed?'
McDonalds restaurants (per capita) by country

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/foo_mcd_res_percap-food-mc...
I'm intrigued.

Firstly, what's bad money?

Secondly, of that list, which ones do you think were a waste?
> Homebrew helps get you chicks
> here's no conclusive scientific evidence as yet,
but I firmly believe it's just a matter of time and statistics.

Geek humour is awesome!
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Im sure that many of us will agree that hacking is not limited to software.
Fair point with the motor pump, but it seems to me that we end up on square one: it might have been better to get the pump in advance, or it might not have been better. It all depends. With the motor pump example it sounds like a no-brainer, but even there it depends. If you have a very small boat, heaving a motor pump on board might actually sink the ship.

There are all sorts of risks, and it isn't obvious when it is worthwhile to get insurance and when it isn't. One risk is never launching.
Still, in 3 years the company might already be bankrupt, and nobody would care about tests anymore. Bankrupt is maybe too extreme, but the particular code module you spent 3 months writing tests for might be replaced by some open source solution or just not being needed anymore.

I kind of see your point, but I find it difficult to deduce a binding rule from all of this. Sometimes it is important to have tests, sometimes other things are more important. You still have to decide on an individual basis.

Thing is, the TDD and technical debt evangelists are typically consultants. Consultants usually earn more money the longer a project takes, and their income is not tied to the yields of the project. Just something to take into consideration imo.
The war toys and stadiums.
How memory works  - almost universal.
An augmented reality app for the Paris metro has been in the store for a month, as has Yelp's easter egg: shake three times to activate the feature so as to avoid the reviewers!

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/first_iphone_augmented_...

http://mashable.com/2009/08/27/yelp-augmented-reality/
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It's about as easy as translating from American into English.
Dopplr Acquisition A False Rumour?
Hmm... a volume in shadow, shielded from sunlight, should have low temperatures and be a water trap? Water molecules generated by solar wind or from comets should bounce around until they got there.

I predict that we will soon see designs for trapping (and harvesting) "dew".

This is like Herbert's "Dune", will they find spices, too? :-)
it is not actually THAT important. Otherwise you would make the time.

... that's just a little presumptuous, with respect to the concrete facts and motivations involved...
Overall quality of the article is suspect.

>"process that begins with using a subatomic particle known as a neutron"

Hate to nitpick pop articles, but this particular sentence fragment jumped out in particular, why can't they simply write neutron? Otherwise I get the impression neutron was known as Prince in previous life...
tell her I ain't here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKPW0dIaL2w
I don't get it. Is there really water like we know it from earth or is it just inside some rocks? This article doesn't tell us.
Nearest Tube iPhone App has been posted 2 months ago and I don't think it was the first iPhone AR app..
I ordered 30 pieces of this 1 month ago, hope they'll arrive soon! I've a much better telescope but this is portable, and it will make me able to introduce to amateur astronomy 29 friends of mine that decided to order one of this with me.

Of course a 50 millimeters instrument can't be ideal to see deep sky objects, otherwise this is a decent beginner telescope, especially since it is possible to mount standard eyepieces, so it is possible to "expand" it :)
Antitrust suits are brought by busted businesses, not consumer crusaders
I think the distinction is useful as it stands. Given that a lot of computer "science" is an applied "science" (I use scare quotes deliberately because I think some of the "science" content is dubious), the "theoretical" distinction makes it obvious that you're talking about a theory of computer science, not the application of those theoretical concepts to create things.

> It is my experience that people in casual conversations automatically assume topic to be complexity theory, despite I'm in Europe.

What one community decides to define itself as isn't really a concern of mine. I'm also in Europe and I've found that "theoretical computer science" is pretty widely understood to mean the kinds of things I'm arguing that it means.

> It would be a bit like calling category theory a "theoretical mathematics"

So why would it make any more sense to apply it to complexity theory? It's not like work on languages, semantics or logic are any more "applied" than complexity.
The Essential Guide to Flex 3 (book review)
So the US army is using Thai people as guinea pigs?
btw, isn't there a yc founded company that does this ?
I have to agree that the numbers don't seem to differ significantly enough to draw any conclusive evidence. I agree with your math in saying that if you had the vaccine, your chance of infection is .6375% and without the chance of infection is .925%. From this perspective I don't see any hard numbers to back the claim. I'll wait for a more better controlled experiment before I believe this one.
I've experienced plenty of different business and personal coaches, and probably the most important lesson (hat tip to Open Up Communication [1]) links into this article: "I create and choose the whole of my own reality".

Not just the stuff I can control. Not just the stuff I think about and want to create. The WHOLE of my life.

Of course, it makes no intellectual sense. And it's tempting to water it down into Stephen Covey's 'Circle of Influence'. But as a guiding principle it's awesomely powerful.

I go through life knowing that I can personally take responsibility for everything that happens to me. Which means I am empowered to change things, to make things happen, and to create exactly the life I want.

(Application of the principle is, of course, much more difficult. Still, even imperfectly applied, I see the results and I know I feel much better about my life than most of those around me.)

[1] http://www.openup.com.au/
That Paris Metro app is from the same makers: http://www.presselite.com/
Ah ok, fair enough. How hard is porting from Linux to BSD?
They probably sought them out for their high incidence of HIV -- it would obviously be unethical to specifically infect people to test the vaccine.
Why wouldn't they? They have not much to loose but the instrument. Lunar missions are not scheduled daily and if they are, it is a good idea to send your instruments with it.
I presume that the investigators used something like the t-test for a difference of means. You treat 1/2 the group and don't treat the other; if you selected these two groups randomly, then they should a priori have equal likelihood of infection. You then can create a confidence interval for the hypothesis: are the two means / rates different.

See the second use here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t-test
The result can always be due to chance. Confidence intervals let you estimate how likely it is that your results are due to chance. In this case, the results are unlikely to be random -- but it's always possible. That's all he was saying. Maybe this study was the 1 in 10,000 that would randomly show a 30% difference in infection rates. Is that likely? No. Is it possible? Sure. Anything's possible.

Confidence intervals get smaller as you include more people in an experiment, but they get smaller more slowly as more people are added. So it's fairly easy to go from a 2% to a 1% confidence interval by adding a couple thousand people, but it takes a lot more people to go from 1% to 0.5%. And of course, it's asymptotic -- you'll never get to zero.

That said, in this case, the point is academic. This study was large enough that the confidence interval is going to be well below 30%.
Even the biggest skeptic I'd think would find it hard to still believe that the moon landings could be fake.
The difficulty is that you always know what's urgent but you cannot be so sure about what has longer term importance.

In the case of unit testing, though, long term is short term enough for me to recognise it as urgent.