skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably not many, but I don't think that is necessary. He just has to show us a convincing list of projects (e), and demonstrate how these projects improved with the introduction of TDD, WITHOUT blurring the line between TDD and unit testing. Not student assignments, but real world projects where real jobs, real money, real stakes are on the line. The problem here is that if TDD is as effective as the zealots and XP gurus claim it is, then the evidence for it should be overwhelming.

Edit:
(e) Listing projects that are: 1. real (not just student, testing or open source projects); 2. large enough that real stakes are on the line (I want to see an example of a 2 MLOC system before and after TDD, not the 70 KLOC of Fitnesse) would make me pay attention. Then I want to see how TDD improved the state of the project (and that picture has to include things like productivity and cost analysis of test first testing everything). Then I want to see why the same results could not have been achieved with "test last" or "test whenever" unit testing. Then I would want to see an explanation for the rate of success other people have had without ever practising TDD - because if TDD is as effective as the zealots claim, and if the zealots make a living making those claims, then that explanation HAS to be there.
Doesn't seem like it would be a lot of work. Just tell Finder to ignore folder/file-specific settings when accessing files/folders on a network share. That way all preferences just go to your defaults, though you also can't change the preferences and 'make then stick' it might be a compromise solution.
We Tried Baseball and It Didn't Work
This article tells the reader nothing except 'The App Store isn't a free ticket to millions of dollars'.

If that realization is the only thing keeping someone from going broke for having tried iPhone development, they'll soon be broke from some other idiotic scheme. Bridge ownership, perhaps.
" But the reason why your question is another question is because it has nothing to do with my question, not even when phrased as an extension to my original imaginary dialogue."

I never said it did (I am saying this the second time). You have a right to your opinion.

You were using a rhetorical device to put forward an opinion. So was I.

I wasn't aware it was somehow offensive, especially since I made it clear I was borrowing the device and not attacking your points and apologised for any inadvertent impressions to the contrary. . If that still offends you ... [shrug] whatever.

"I haven't read his work in enough detail"

I have.

"but I certainly am open to the possibility that some of the proponents of agile methodology do so on the basis of very scant evidence while rejecting other approaches for lack of substantial justification."

Fair enough. With that, I exit this thread in the interests of harmony and not wasting time hairsplitting.
While I agree that the code-splitting in GWT 2.0 might help you, you may also want to see where the slowness in loading is really coming from.

For example, is it really the size of the app that makes it slow to load, or is part of the problem that you're not using lazy-initialization judiciously? If all of the possible widgets are eagerly created, that could make it appear to be loading slowly.

Another possibility is the number of HTTP round-trips that have to be made. Do you have a lot of images? If so, are you using the ImageBundle facility? (It's awesome: the compiler automatically makes a CSS sprite image and generates the code to slice the images out automatically.) If not, you should.

Another possibility is whether you are using any 3rd-party GWT widget toolkits. Some of them are wrappers for other, more traditional javascript libraries, and those will really bloat the amount of code the browser needs to download! Stick to a widget kit that is actually written in java, or create your own custom widgets as needed.

Another possibility is that I once accidentally left my compiler configured to emit verbose javascript. Make sure you're emitting tight, obfuscated javascript.

Finally, make sure that the HTTP daemon that serves the files are configured to gzip the javascript for those browsers that are capable.
No arguments, just an observation. Sorry if it seemed like I was disagreeing.
Some data. Here's Amazon's US & UK affiliate compensation charts. In the US, 10% on Kindle purchases, one of their higher payouts. I assume the UK program will offer specific Kindle payouts soon now that the Kindle is going international.

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join/comp...

https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/gp/associates/join/co...
Yeah definitely, you guys are head & shoulders above the competition - but you are not available, where can I get it / work with it? In Feb it will have been a year since you've announced demo'd it.

edit: I see you guys just changed the 280atlas site.
Maybe you're right. Apparently Pareto originally used his distribution to describe wealth allocation & intuitively it seems fair to assume that 20% of the developers account for ~80% of the earnings. But are you sure?

Btw, if developer talent is normally distributed (talent, it seems, usually is), shouldn't developer earnings also be? I'm not a statistician but it's an interesting question..
A parable explaining away all the Agile projects that failed. What I find interesting about this is that it can just as easily be applied to all the Bondage and Discipline--pardon me, Big Design Up Front--projects that failed.

Perhaps--and this is pure conjecture--the biggest problem the industry has is that people rarely take a process or methodology and apply it as written, but insist on customizing it for their convenience and according to their conjecture even when they have very little experience with it in practice.
DISCLAIMER: I haven't worked at Amazon for some time now.

The author makes a number of unsourced assumptions about the business models involved, as well as his moral rights. You'll have to decide for yourself if those are correct:

"The US Kindle store caps book prices at $9.99 even for hardcovers that normally have a retail price of $23.95 and which would typically cost $16 in dead tree format via Amazon. Amazon gets the books at this price by taking the publishers for a huge [...] discount"

That is a fact, is it? Publishers happily sell their books for much less money so they become Kindle bestsellers, thereby undermining their traditional distribution models and pissing off every bookstore? REALLY?

"and by saying "screw you" to the small fry like me, who are looking for our points on the referral scheme"

Because Amazon has given you a few % off sales coming from your links, you have the moral right to extend this scheme to all future ways in which Amazon will ever sell anything? How is that a "screw you" in any way?

"One nasty suspicion of mine is that Amazon were demanding discounts so ludicrous that publishers would be making a net loss on each book sold after expenses and royalties"

Publishers are just lining up to make heavy losses so they can sell electronic content, i.e. they are just desperate to subsidize Amazon's ebook reader? Think this through for a minute.

"what have I got against Amazon's Kindle?

1) DRM. (It's unethical, immoral, fattening, and a royal pain in the ass"

That's strange, since most of the complains seem to be about the cut from referral fees he's not making anymore. A point that, coincidentally, doesn't appear anywhere in the conclusion anymore.

"4) They're using their monopsony position to fuck over their suppliers (i.e. the publishers) "

You'd think someone from a publisher (horribly leak-happy companies, the lot of them) would've let something on by now. Strange how nobody's done so.
Their memories might be just fine, but over time they might have realized the glory came from living through danger and not from shooting someone.
Harvard sells exclusivity, period.
Creating a startup is an endurance sport
The unemployed people I know of aren't people I would describe as "talented". Talented people generally aren't unemployed unless they want to be.
Well, you can start playing with the framework from here:
http://cappuccino.org/

And they just announced that Atlas will be available November 15 in beta for $20.
10 Seriously Ridiculous Hacks
Anyone telling you that the App Store is still a gold rush is trying to sell you something.
No, it's basically a list of foods commonly consumed raw. The chicken was far more likely to make you sick when consumed raw, but the salmonella died somewhere around 150°F.
I don't understand why someone wouldn't be able to create more than one GMail account and use separate accounts for separate google related purposes? (Use one GMail account for RSS and a seperate GMail account for App Engine, etc)

There is still the possibility that everyone you give information to is tied to a single GMail account (for your own convenience), but that is still your own fault, not Google.
Bjango wrote what I thought was a good, brief response to this on their site. http://bjango.com/articles/golddigging/
(a) Amazon is a monopsony (Amazon sells $5 billion of books per year, out of a $13 billion ecommerce book market, out of a $30-40 billion total book market).

If you want to sell ebooks right now, the only way to do it (and actually get significant sales) is through the Kindle, isn't it? Lots of publishers with only one viable reseller - sounds like a monopsony to me. The question isn't if they are one, it's if they're abusing their position as one. I'm not convinced by this article that they are, but the potential is certainly there as the popularity of the Kindle goes up.
It sounds like they gave everyone significant raises after 6-9 months (seed round) and again after another 12 months (series A). I'd be more willing to take equity in place of salary if I knew it was only temporary.
I mean, they should be able to dodge bureaucracy; they run the company. I'm missing what's so amazing here.
DRAM Errors in the Wild: a large-scale field study [pdf]
10 old deliberately staged gag shots from around the internet (mostly thereisfixedit). One to a page to maximize ad delivery.
I'm worried they will end up like TripIt.
That's based on nothing. Turn off wireless on your kindle; it's 100% your device that as far as they're concerned, no longer exists.
The issue is convenience I suppose. Having everything tied to one account makes it quite simple to jump to your calendar, your voicemails, your checkout, etc.

I really like the author's idea to (at a minimum provide) an alternate gmail password that mail clients can use. That would alleviate most of my concerns.
Data mining resumes, linkedin for product features
This is a great article, but keep in mind that the numbers are illustrative of one type of company. Mint was dealing with financial information, so they had to get "serious" fast and that means spending on things that, say, a Facebook or Twitter would not have had to spend. They project $30/per user for user acquisition (if I read that right), which again is very different for different kinds of companies, and different business models. Extremely high value niche companies would pay hundreds of dollars per user. On the other side Twitter being a mass player, would spend far, far less. Financial sites are valuable, so $30 seems like a good deal.
I'd hope at this point, anyone looking to get into development is grounded in the reality of the market.

This isn't going to change anytime soon and it's going to play out across ALL platforms. The AppStore just gets the attention because it has the biggest "easy success" potential to a developer. A crappy app that nobody wants is a crappy app that nobody wants on any platform.
Yeah, it's kind of like saying "De Beers has so much money, why don't they use it to mine more diamonds so everyone can wear some." It is the scarcity that makes them valuable.

Despite having gotten a lot out of Harvard, I have not been whipping out my checkbook when they ask for alumni contributions, because it's hard to see how even an extra billion would make any students' lives better.
Given the steady barrage of stories about the difficulties some (just some!) Americans have with evolution, it is heartening to see some positive news about the contribution America makes to Biology.
Animal Rights Resources
this is such a smart and enlightening comment - why has it just got 8 votes?

(sarcasm)
Boy reading that piece really brought me back to my own struggles. Truth is you probably have a 75% chance of failure.

It is surprising to me that many years after the fact that you only remember the highs and not the lows.
I think it would be nice if Google provided a rsa key fob for those of us who do keep a crap ton of stuff in their gmail.
It is interesting to see how the author handle memory management issue.
At the same time: extensions are a poor way to communicate with the user, largely arbitrary and very fragile.

If they were going to make a change in the name of consistency, they could have done better.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded for the structure of the ribosome
The application does take a while to load, but the bottleneck seems to be browser javascript performance, and mostly in Internet Explorer. In fact that might well be the biggest issue we have with GWT, and we have to resort to a few tricks to make the application perform acceptably in IE when trees and dropdown boxes get large enough.
What sensationalistic statement? If Windows offers what functionality? He only mentions Windows twice in the whole article, both times comparing Snow Leopard to Windows 3.0
Haha, I'm doing the same thing right now. When one feature costs > 10% of dev time, and you can afford to get rid of it, do it! In my case, I was spending 50%+ of my time for a few weeks on stability issues caused by a feature that <10% of my users need. Bye!
I didn't take offense, nor did I actually argue against your point. I was aiming for vigorously trying to drag the thread it back to my point. I can understand your desire to call Mr. Martin to task for making bone-headed statements. I would join you, however I have made enough of my own mistakes that I have very little room for other people in the part of my brain devoted to bone-headed writing.
In my opinion Argentina is cursed more for its lack of direction than a deficit in education.
During the 20th century (and 21th) its has been a common practice to destroy or undo the previous administration efforts.

Almost every group that had governed Argentina, gained power, rebuilt everything (laws, institutions, education...) until it got replaced or defeated.

A century of this, has left the country walking in circles, incapable of taking advantage of the oportunities that had appeared, and that might had improved its situation.

Nevertheless I don't lose my hope in my beloved country.
> IMHO trades way too much usability for what I perceive as mere prettiness

I don't disagree with you. I'm going to try and find the time to add a toggle b/n list view and grid view so the user can save their preference. Then if it seems that most use the list view, I might just make that the default.

> Also, I'm very skeptical of the usefulness of the thumbnails altogether

Thumbnails of designs are a pretty standard convention with "design gallery"-type sites (http://cssremix.com, http://www.unmatchedstyle.com, etc). It's meant to do nothing more than give you a small idea of the site you're about to visit. The only alternative would be listing the site's title or URL and that certainly wouldn't be any more helpful.

Thanks again for the feedback.
By Bianca Schroeder (University of Toronto), Eduardo Pinheiro (Google), Wolf-Dietrich Weber (Google).

Abstract:

Errors in dynamic random access memory (DRAM) are a common form of hardware failure in modern compute clusters. Failures are costly both in terms of hardware replacement costs and service disruption. While a large body of work exists on DRAM in laboratory conditions, little has been reported on real DRAM failures in large production clusters. In this paper, we analyze measurements of memory errors in a large fleet of commodity servers over a period of 2.5 years. The collected data covers multiple vendors, DRAM capacities and technologies, and comprises many millions of DIMM days.

The goal of this paper is to answer questions such as the following: How common are memory errors in practice? What are their statistical properties? How are they affected by external factors, such as temperature and utilization, and by chip-specific factors, such as chip density, memory technology and DIMM age?

We find that DRAM error behavior in the field differs in many key aspects from commonly held assumptions. For example, we observe DRAM error rates that are orders of magnitude higher than previously reported, with 25,000 to 70,000 errors per billion device hours per Mbit and more than 8% of DIMMs affected by errors per year. We provide strong evidence that memory errors are dominated by hard errors, rather than soft errors, which previous work suspects to be the dominant error mode. We find that temperature, known to strongly impact DIMM error rates in lab conditions, has a surprisingly small effect on error behavior in the field, when taking all other factors into account. Finally, unlike commonly feared, we don’t observe any indication that newer generations of DIMMs have worse error behavior.
But might the political instability also be a symptom of the educational level?

(Anyone want to plot education-in-1900 vs. coups-in-20th-century?)
This sort of article always struck me as silly. Is it really that surprising that not all developers on the iPhone are wildly successful? Or even that most aren't? Welcome to capitalism -- not everyone will be rich.

Not all developers on [insert platform here] are getting rich. But some are. Not everyone who starts any type of business will strike it rich. But some will. Why is this news?
I read

"An Initial Investigation of Test Driven Development in Industry" by Boby George and Laurie Williams, and "Realizing quality improvement through test driven development: results and experiences of four industrial teams" by Naggapan et al.

and I am not too impressed. The first study has 6 TDD teams and 6 control teams. Our null hypothesis is that these teams produce exactly the same quality of code, measured in defect rate. Now, any sane study would take a look into (statistical) power, ie the probability the test will reject the null hypothesis. If we further look at the box-plots, we see that the overlap between the "treatment" and control group samples is pretty big. Hence, we will need to test for any statistic significance before coming to the conclusion. In fact, it may even be that we can reject the idea that writing in a TDD style takes 16% more time on average.

The second study is much worse. It quotes studies secondhand, only has 4 studies (with 4 "controls" being completely different systems). It generally fails to the problem of lurking variables, or confounding: That some unmeasured external factor affects the study. For instance, it is put forth that the Microsoft teams in the study employ many methods for minimizing program defects including static analysis. The other grande problem here is that there are no assesment of the control-group systems at all. They will, invariably differ in more than one variable and the question is: Have we measured to benefits of TDD or have we measured the benefits of something else? We can't say for sure.

Finally, we only test statically typed languages with a subtyping construct (Java, C#, C++). I think (and I stress it is a hypothesis) dynamically typed languages would benefit considerably more with a TDD system in place, and I hypothesize more expressively typed languages (ML, Haskell) would benefit less. But I have no good idea of how to design an experiment that can show this hypothesis true.
I got to the 2nd one, the gag "Hand-free Cellphone Kit" pic that is literally 10 years old and then gave up. It was clear this was a garbage article.

If someone ever develops an AI blog auto-content bot beyond basic scraping, the output will look much like that link...
Wikipedia strives for neutral point of view. You don't have to strive for that in a blog post. Try it with someone else who also feels the same passion or has a stake in the outcome and you may see a different effect.

My experience has been that collaborative efforts have been helpful in improving structure, adding examples or references I hadn't thought of, strengthening explanations, and in general strengthening the effect or purpose I wrote for. This is distinct in many ways from improving technique, which is also important.
this abennet character does nothing but spam links to that same website.
The common iFart example isn't a reflection of the store, it's a reflection of culture.

In 2007, "Pirates of the Caribbean 3" grossed nearly a billion dollars while "There Will Be Blood" never even got to 100 million. "Two and a Half Men" is a hit TV show and Arrested Development is off the air. The Arcade Fire were lucky to go gold with "Neon Bible" while Fall Out Boy went multi-platinum the same year.

Given your logic, nobody should bother creating anything of quality. Sometimes quality is successful, sometimes its not. But it's always regarded.
Good question, may be even build on Tornado, though it seems that Unicorn is written in Ruby.
Those "lesser qualified" students still end up being pretty successful. Rich people tend to stay rich. Admitting rich kids isn't hurting their reputation, and most legacies I met at my school were fairly indistinguishable intellectually.
A bit quick to skip the trial and go straight to the hanging... As the other poster stated give it time. Look past the SMS / IM social butterfly aspect to the big picture.

I think its the best damn thing I've seen come down the Internet pipe in a loooong while. Hands down.

IM+WIKI+Shared+Whiteboard+Email+
UserGroups+MailLists+Documents +
Campfire + Backpack + ... -> Wave

The really good stuff, is still off on the horizon, Robots for all kinds of clever things. Huge explosion there. Huge.

Patience, its more than a Wave; its a Tsunami.
If You're So Smart, How Come You're Not Rich? [Hennessy in Video]
"There Will Be Blood" isn't exactly a good example, I think.

That movie was horrible.

braces for downvotes
He went to Princeton, so I'm thinking he had some cash among his friends and family.
I think the forum approach is also a good one for the purposes that you envision. I was also trying to suggest that collaborating more deeply also has benefits. It's also good practice for teamwork in startups where you often need to reach a working agreement on document content against a deadline.
What surprised me about the article was that I didn't see much 'capitalist drum-beating'. His argument is that the performance of Argentina versus the US can be entirely explained by education levels. Schools are typically provided by the government, and the idea of universal education was initially regarded as a radical one, often associated with early socialists.

I'm not sure if I agree with the hypothesis, but I'd rather hear a specific counter-argument. Your condemnation seems more suited to a rebuttal of the typical 'Argentina is poor because it's socialist' idea.
If I recall correctly, AGP, the older graphics interface was very lopsided with respect to bandwidth (very fast to send data to the card, very slow to get data back). As far as I understand, the newer PCI Express (newer == several years old now), has more balanced (and fast) bandwidth.
My reason for not taking it is not really the possible creativity loss. It's just that Adderal could have negative effects, and that I don't want to subject myself to that risk just so that I can conform to the system.

But I'm curious though, what type of ADHD do you have, inattentive or hyperactive? Why/how does Adderal help you?
MU Researchers Create Smaller and More Efficient Nuclear Battery
The Art of the Spectacular Fail
Finally:  Street View in Canada