skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The link is worthless. Some researchers say runners live long ... because their model says runners live long. Tautology.

Why didn't they just look at dead olympic athletes? That would be an interesting and potentially worthwhile study. Actually, I know why: that study would have been hard work whereas for this garbage all they had to do was plug a canned data set into some silly unverified pharma model they tweaked for their own agenda.

http://www.theheart.org/article/243897.do

Endurance sports can mess up your heart rhythm.

Here's the first google result for "runners die young":
http://eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/ehn273v1.pdf

"The current report demonstrates a high prevalence of advanced
coronary atherosclerosis and myocardial scar formation in see-
mingly healthy marathon runners aged >50 years."
Now I remember why I am ashamed to be American.
IPhone's Flash Apps: Let the Games Begin
Oh the software's legit - I ran them all and nothing bad happened :) It's just not very stable or easy to get going with, is all.
these are the kind of discussions i find worthwhile: an honest look at how something works well and how something fails. too often i see blog posts pitting A against B, or simply claiming A sucks.

(i guess A v B is a good/bad look at a higher level concept C...)
I have sympathy for the author insofar as some people (myself included) don't plan ahead that way. Hacking just happens. We try this and that, something works and gets committed, something else doesn't and gets reverted.

My working copy is littered with uncommited files nearly constantly, simply because I work and play on many things in parallel and committing every time I save a file would be a noticable overhead, just as merging between topic branches all day.

I'm not complaining, we get along, my working copy and I, but I agree in some situations git could be more helpful than "xxx needs update" - and that's really just one symptom of many.

I've been playing with mercurial a bit recently (yes, heresy) and can see why the git guys despise it, it's just not as pure. The main thing that stuck with me though, is that even though it's roughly comparable to git in terms of features, it is mindboggingly much more intuitive to use.

Git could take a lesson from that and would not even have to give up much of the purity. Yes, "everything" should still be possible - but they damn sure could make the beaten paths a bit less spikey.
yet economists do make predictions, and they make them based on abstract models. Read the krugman piece for some examples of such models and their predictions.

One concrete example, when the fed raises or lowers interests rates it's based on a prediction of where they believe the market is going, where they believe it's at, and a prediction of the effect of the rate change. Otherwise what is the profession doing?
Maybe a better way to put it is that testing GUI components is not a complete waste of time, but it gives you a lot less bang for the buck.
Even an extra few hundred per computer is virtually nothing. You can outfit a whole 5 man shop with top of the line Dells for what a McDonalds pays for one deep fryer. My startup quite literally ran for about 6 months on what one top of the line commercial fryer costs.
"There's a fair amount of this on the right, as well--a lot of your goldbugs and "Austrians" are, like Krugman, taking one side in a 1930's era doctrinal dispute and ignoring the last several decades of economics."

Can you show me a goldbug with a Nobel Prize in Economics and a column in a New York Times-class newspaper or other similar venue?

I know what you're saying, and it is literally true, I don't deny that. But Krugman should be held to a higher standard.

Personally, I find him very disappointing. A guy with a Nobel Prize in Economics ought to be making compelling arguments that are a surprise to me, and thus contain information in the information theoretic sense. (That's my favorite way of looking at information in an English context.) Instead, I can predict in advance what Krugman's position on a topic will be now with virtually 100% confidence, which should not be possible if he's actually writing with insight that someone of such stature should be bringing to topics, as I most assuredly hold a Nobel Prize in absolutely nothing. Even if he chooses doctrinaire liberal choices completely reliably, he should be able to defend them with far more interesting arguments than I actually see from him, the kind of interesting that even when you disagree you at least stop to think.
It sounds like you are looking for a roommates / shares site, not an apartment search site.

A Craigslist aggregator with spam/scam/bait_and_switch filtering would be really cool, but that's a different startup.

At least we agree apartment hunting should suck less (especially in NYC). That's what got us started and that's what keeps us going!
Good point on the idea that a coop might have a longer-term planning horizon. However, the point that a corporation has only short-term profit in mind is overstated. Drug companies take decades to bring a product to market, that's some long-term planning.
http://populet.com is in beta right now. Soon it will be an amazing apartment search site (not to mention great tool for landlords).
OK, but why?

Is it not useful to know that various operations and navigations through the GUI still work as expected?

And if it's a matter of a poor benefit/effort ratio, why are GUIs so hard to test?

Tools like Swinger are pretty easy to get rolling with for testing Swing UIs. Where do these things break down?

Are these things worth fixing?
I imagine his bot has undergone a couple of revisions since then.
This guy got downvoted for giving the most informative comment in this thread?
Have you seen the charts of the amount of banking regulation per year, as measured in lines of regulation? I wish I could Google it up. The repeal of Glass-Steagall isn't even a blip in the graph, IIRC. It might be lines of above-average importance, but net-net the Bush administration continued piling on the regulations at pretty much the expected rate; I doubt a Democrat would or could have done much more.

The other major problem is that it wasn't regulation that failed, it was regulators. Many regulations that already existed weren't enforced. Looking at the rate of regulation increase it isn't hard to see why. How do you propose to solve this problem with more regulations? There's a real engineering problem here or even a computer science-style information theory problem with information flows totally exceeding the ability of the processing nodes to handle. Clearly, adding more processing work to be done isn't the answer to that problem, and we probably can't afford enough processors to make even our current set of regulations actually get enforced.
Often, there is benefit, but it's quickly swamped by the maintenance effort.

In the group I'm working with now, we're transitioning to all interactions with the user being abstracted into an AppModel domain object, which will describe user interaction in an abstract, non GUI or other interface-specific way. We will be implementing meta-level and meta-syntax-driven automated coding standards to detect probably violations. In addition, our (now incomplete) Unit Test suite will be run against a Code Coverage tool against the change requests. So any new change requests will have to have coverage in a Unit Test, which will be detected by a nightly script. (The above tools are based on the Smalltalk Refactoring Browser parser & libraries.)

One benefit -- we will be able to test everything in Unit Tests and leave out GUI specifics!

Another benefit of the AppModel architecture, we can eventually publish our abstracted applications as Web Services, and get out of the business of maintaining nitty-gritty GUI code. This will make that group 10X more valuable to their corporation, and they will eventually be doing only half the work!
The profession is still in the stage of gathering data and looking for patterns. Some theorists believe they have testable hypotheses, but this is debatable (in my opinion)

The Fed makes forecasts but monetary policy is based on consensus among various schools of thought, not models. It doesn't work like NOAA.

If you could reliably predict the markets you'd make a fortune -- and the markets would adjust and become unpredictable again. This is a basic feature of markets, agreed to by all comers, last I checked.

IANAE, but I'm hearing over and over again that Krugman is making political points, not economic ones. That's fine, but it makes it difficult for laymen like myself to determine if we're having a political discussion or an economic one.
Why does the guy sound like it's all a joke though?
Unclear on how anybody can cite the author of the latter with any kind of reverence, but I see that happen all the time.
Original, for reference: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/msg/88fa108450...
Another datapoint on the Vibram Five Fingers; I got a pair of them about four months ago, initially for running only. I quickly realized they were great for anywhere. They have been my regular day to day shoes for most of the summer. Now that it's raining more often I'm back to more regular type shoes. I still use them now and then though, and look forward to next summer.
The demise of the dollar
This comment makes me smile. Recent comments across HN have been rather immature.
Venit Vidi -- On the Path to Gmail, I met an Android (2)
Just FYI, that stuff to which you refer is a teaser for CS5, the next iteration of Photoshop...due around April, most likely.
Open Source DIY Non-Lethal Weapon
The form-factor of a laptop is still a kind of workstation, though it's a portable one. It's designed to absorb all of the user's attention. A tablet is more conducive to manipulating data while interacting. Many of the advantages of an ideal tablet should be the same as that of a clipboard.

- Low time/effort overhead.

You don't have to sit to use it. You can be walking, stop for a moment to jot something down, then keep walking the next second. You don't have to wait for it to reboot or even come back from sleep.

- Low attention overhead.

This partly results from the low time overhead. But computers and mobile devices are constantly asking for your attention. A clipboard is just waiting there for you to look stuff up. Low attention overhead enables better in-person interaction. (Ever notice how some meetings with laptops tend to degenerate into people sitting there next to each other IM-ing?)

There are also some advantages that a clipboard won't have. One could imagine a device without handwriting recognition, which only captures and indexes everything you write down. This would be valuable in itself. Add some time and location awareness, perhaps with some multimedia recording & manipulation ability, and this becomes an idea worker's fantasy tool. ("What was that great idea when I was discussing with Bob? Wasn't it in the afternoon the last time I was in Chicago at that contention center? We were talking about eggshells. Let me put in those search parameters!")

You could also sell these like hotcakes to teenagers & college students in coffee shops! (And get tons of $$$ from Facebook and MySpace in the process!)
All I can say is that was a fantastic post and thanks for sharing.
I disagree with this. I actually really like the asthetic of having a mostly blue selection screen, rather than the jumble of clashing colors. I won't go so far as to say that one SHOULD use blue, but I don't believe there is anything wrong with it.

I would actually argue to stay away from the color black. Looking at my current home pane, I tend to forget that I have AirCam and Rev, AirCam in particular because it melts the most into the black backdrop.
They break down because UI testing tends to rely on Strings: either labels for controls or embedded ids of them. It's really, really easy to have those change on you, and when they do the tests become difficult to debug: if the button with the id "Search" isn't found, is it because something broke to cause the button not to show up, because the id has changed to "SearchUsers," or what? And if I need to remove the "Search" button and replace it with somethine else, how do I figure out which tests to change? The high-level nature of the tests inherently makes them much harder to debug, because the test could have broken for any of a hundred reasons.

In other words, with unit tests the linkage between the code being tested and the test tends to be pretty tight; with UI tests it tends to be very, very loose, and that makes the tests correspondingly more fragile and much harder to debug.

We essentially do typesafe metaprogramming on our web UI that generates compile-time-checked constants for all the labels, buttons, etc. so that our tests don't compile if the UI changes, which has gone a long way to keeping the tests stable; it's the best solution we've come up with, but it's a huge investment, and our attempts to do testing of our Swing client have met with less success so far.
Your option three reminds me of T.S. Eliot's review of George Orwell's classic Animal Farm.

Eliot wrote: “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertai...
9 meta-careers:Finding the Sweet Spot
Yes, but it's amazing how often people don't bother to move on to C. They'd rather see the A vs. B slugfest and contribute to it!
However, these arguments do not in any way point toward a need for an entirely new interface.

No, but the sum of the arguments does.

I'd wager that most git users feel that the UI is more complex than it should be and outright hostile in many situations. The problem is that not many people are deep enough into all the concepts to make a coherent proposal for something better. And those who could often don't see the problems anymore because it's just the way it is for them (can we coin the term VCS-blindness right here?).

It's sort of a chicken/egg problem and hard one.

I, for example, am not exactly happy that my standard procedure for pushing changes upstream has to involve 7 commands and two rebases. But so far I've had neither the time nor the insight or motivation to come up with something better. My general feeling is that git is still exposing itself at too low a level. That's also the reason why so many people are using it "wrong" (wanna make a bet on how many projects on github consist of only a master-branch where everything happens?).

Consequently my best stab would be that git could perhaps use a bit syntactic sugar for the most common workflows. There are not so many of them after all - why does almost everybody have to repeat the same 7 commands every day?
It depends on what you're using it for. Unless you need the bleeding edge of new stories, 30-45 minutes between each scrape is probably fine. If you're looking to stay on top of 'new', your best bet is about every 10 minutes.

More frequent than that, and you're just causing trouble for the server with no real benefit for yourself.
In my experience, I have sunk a lot of time making sure that foo div has bar css class when the quux link is clicked... but it has never saved me much time. I have to click through the site regularly (content changes, "does this work in IE", etc.) anyway, and errors are usually noticeable immediately.

Other problems I've noticed are that they are either so specific that they fail for no reason (it was supposed to be red, not green!) or too general that they don't catch issues that would annoy users.

If I could have these tests for free, I'd take 'em. But since they're expensive and don't get me much, I don't bother.

(BTW, if you have complicated algorithms in your JavaScript; refactor so you can test them with Rhino on the command-line. Don't do this stuff in the browser!)

Anyway, I would be interested in hearing your UI testing success stories.
This is yet another reason that I worry about one day sending my pre-school aged sons to public school. Conform, conform, conform. My experience with large companies tells me that such training might serve them well, although similar experience seemingly had little effect upon me (I hope.).

Last year, my wife and I toured the local Montessori school, and I asked whether students would be required to take the Ohio state-wide standardized tests. The teacher, thinking that I was concerned that their "performance" would not be measured, said that they could optionally take them. When I explained my relief that their time would not be wasted, she chimed in about how much she hated the tests as well.

American society is so obsessed with measurement that it ignores the nuances of what it seeks to optimize upon. By definition, any outstanding achievement lacks a convenient standard of measurement.
Tablets are mildly popular in my grad school classes. I would love to say "goodbye" to paper notebooks.
I vehemently disagreed with this post when it was originally written, but then at the time I was just being introduced to Scrum. I've since come to understand his point, and oddly enough, the part at the end where he talks about project management via queue theory and index cards is precisely what my startup (http://agilezen.com/) is based on. :)
> The problem with your argument is that the high percentage of females refusing to associate with different races (even their own race) is essentially dictating who other people have sex with.

Sorry, but your posts come off as really creepy and strange. I hope you realize that no one has a right to sex with anyone else, whether a particular person or a member of any arbitrary group? How do you propose solving this "problem" of women apparently being relatively less interested in non-white men?
Sounds like hyperbole, but this technology has the potential to change the way people use language and speak and think.

Ever notice how many Americans use "like" as a preamble to a reenactment of a scene from a TV show, or an event, or even an abstracted, generalized occurrence? "It was like..." then on to the enactment. People wouldn't speak like this if it wasn't for ubiquitous video entertainment.

In David Brin's Uplift trilogy, uplifted sentient dolphins sometimes "spoke" to each other by mimicking echolocation returns and beaming pictures and scenes directly into each other's heads. If software like this gets good enough to compose scenes for us on the fly, it will drastically alter the way we speak, just as television did.
FTC to Regulate Blogging
But if you can develop rapidly, you can quickly refactor and add what you need. As a result, you spend all of your time building or morphing into what you need, and zero time building what you don't. And believe me, building what you don't really need is a big problem in most software development.
Never understimate Adobe. Despite their misguided stabs towards DRM (oh god when will they learn) they have some good engineering there.

PDF, Photoshop, Flash, despite all their flaws and sometimes dubious origins, wouldn't have dominated their respective markets for decades if there wasn't also at least a bit of quality engineering in each. ;-)
I'd be overjoyed if he just started blogging again.

I never made it through all of the "Programmer's View of the Universe" series, but I loved reading nearly all of his other stuff.
Austrian > Keynesian
For the love of God, submit a link to the Apple resources on iPhone development in C. "Objective"-less, good ole C.
6.01 Course Notes (MIT's intro EECS class)
In today's hypercompetitive world, branding is key. Compare:

"Photorealistic image composition from simple sketches"

vs.

"This Is a Photoshop and It Blew My Mind - Photosketch"

Which one would you rather click on?
AVG launches free antivirus suite as Microsoft crashes its party
this was well worth my time, thank you
Wait, custom porn is evil? I guess I'm the only one who's tired of all this cookie-cutter porn.
I generally take a middle road - I write code that is unit-testable, but I rarely take the time to write exhaustive tests. When bugs arise, I start writing test cases in various components until I find them. Thus, the debugging effort is what grows the test coverage. Of course in a vacuum it's better to have the cases earlier rather than later, but I like this approach as a speed/quality compromise. The key to making this work is designing in a test friendly way - that is the true art.
Django for Rails devs
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=843543
Ariel Shamir (4th author listed in the paper) also worked on Seam Carving (http://www.seamcarving.com/) and Improved Seam Carving (http://www.shaiavidan.org/papers/vidretLowRes.pdf), two widely publicized papers from the past two years.
I need to be thankful for the song "The Lakes of Pontchartrain." If it wasn't for the line "handsome young creole girl" I wouldn't have been curious enough to date my present girlfriend, who is African American. We've now been going out for almost 3 years, and I'm happier than I've ever been. I've also discovered a lot about what subconscious racism I've been carrying around in my head.

There is racism. You can't be black and have a conversation with your sons and your brothers in a parking lot. The police will come by and harass you. This despite the fact that my girlfriend's uncle is a wonderful, industrious, upstanding ex-military man. You can be white and do this, though. (This was not some seedy parking lot in a run-down neighborhood in the big city. It happened in a rural town of only 16,000.)
The former, obviously. This is why I can't have nice things :-D
I laugh when I see positions advertised with "senior" in the title that are only asking for 3 years experience. Around here, that's normal. Does this happen in other industries?
I can imagine kicking back on the couch (or in bed) with a tablet, reading or doing flash cards or playing go on the internet. I don't do that with my laptop or my iPhone. I just haven't convinced myself to pay close to a thousand dollars for a computer dedicated to that purpose.
I think this post is worthwhile because Steve works for one of the best software development companies around and because he's an excellent programmer with a lot of experience.

He obviously knows what he's talking about.

I think what's missing (perhaps because he's not the best person to describe it) is what a company on the wrong path can do to set things right.

Google has obviously made a very conscious effort to keep their successful model as they've grown, bit many companies (especially those not started by techies) have made bad decisions.

How can an IT department -- assuming the department itself gets it -- make things better?

Unfortunately, lame parties are about the extent of the power most IT departments (or development team managers) have. They can't shift the entire culture of the company or start handing out astronomical rewards.

There has to be a middle ground, and it's this middle ground that's so elusive.

I would be interested in hearing how anyone has driven or been part of a lasting, positive change within the confines of a larger organization.
Great post, especially the bit about life at Google:

- developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.

- Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously.

It's brilliant management I think: Hire talented engineers, give them extreme freedom, and choreograph the dance with clever incentives...
Unit testing is the only way to scale lines of code without scaling your team.