skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This formula is really, really simple:

S = 25 * N

Where S is the amount of savings you need, denominated in anything you want (present dollars, bars of gold, whatever) and N is the amount you want to spend per year.

The derivation of this formula is decidedly less simple. It comes down to "The overwhelming majority of portfolios with a standard 60:40 stock/bond allocation which model the historical returns of the US stock market will not be depleted within a human life span if you restrict the withdraw rate to 4% per year. Go above that and things start to become dicey, quickly. This is backtestable but, obviously, not forwardtestable."

Thus, if your desired standard of living requires (present day dollars) $40k a year, you would want a million present day dollars saved to retire today.
Logic cognition, are you quick and/or accurate?
You've flipped my statement which changes its meaning. I said I'd question the design of any code base that large. Some would pass that questioning. I did not say that all large code bases have questionable design.

I won't debate a strawman anymore so I'll move on. Btw, are device drivers counted in that millions of lines of code? If so those are very independent things.

This thread was about test coverage, how many of those millions of lines of kernel code are covered by a unit test?

EDIT: so you agree with my original assertions that large test suites may not be worth the cost?
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Please don't talk about what you know nothing about. I'm in college in part for film. It takes hundreds of people to make a good movie. I'm not just talking about technique: Citizen Kane wouldn't have been Citizen Kane if Welles hadn't had a dozen brilliant minds helping him and influencing his style. Similarly: The best web sites on the Internet are designed by multiple people.

It does sound Randian. Like Rand, you're ignoring the sheer enormity of what it takes to make a masterpiece.
I was simply providing insight into the status of my established site. I also happen to be the direct subject of the topic, so why not speak up?
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Whatever we learn we will share. I will be meeting and recording conversations with a few investors in the first week with that very question you ended with. Interesting to see how much that would hurt (or help?).
This ability is what differentiates smart thinkers. Many of us just can't think meticulously when making important decisions under pressure.
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I would love to see that book.
It is if part of his point's that the Internet's letting itself get worked up over what a not-completely-mature kid said.

The fact that Hacker News and other sites have had this raging debate over Dustin's writing belies the fact that basically he's a college student mouthing off a big company, and that we're assuming against the odds that he knows more than an industry professional does. At that point it's absolutely appropriate to remind us of who Dustin is.
"how many of those millions of lines of kernel code are covered by a unit test?
"

Not many. And yet the kernel is an awesome piece of code. That was the point. I don't have the time to debate test-driven/test-coverage fanatics either.
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If I may respectfully say that the domain name is terrible. There must be a nice .COM brand name for such a concept?

I was curious about the Hacker News backend, interesting to see it is open source. I really like the http://slinkset.com hosted service which is essentially the same functionality.
Ask HN: Manager making me jump through hoops, is it worth it?
I am working in good "fortune 500" company. I have had this job for past 1.5 years. Now its time for long-over-due hike and promotion, but instead, giving the deserved hike, my manager dangling a new carrot in front of me each time I start this discussion. This is getting stupid. I mean, I like the company and possibly if I play the game I may get the hike, but somewhere I am not comfortable doing all this.

I want to know your views on this are, is it worth it or should I just move.
Fair enough -- look, the counter point to this is that films constantly get absolutely destroyed by producers. And those are the decisions that matter -- how the movie ends, what gets cut and what stays, etc.

I think again you're getting hung up on the little things -- I'm not talking about how you need great grips and cinematographers and editors, and I'm not talking about how you need pixel perfect comps by 10 visual designers. All of that is micro.

An auteur has final cut, and if even one of those 100 people screw up, then the auteur says fix it or its not ready.
A friend of mine used to live in NY and he tells me how lots of people think that Giuliani, by fighting crime, ruined the city. By making the city safer, the residents had to start dealing with the influx of annoying tourists that they couldn't avoid, whereas once you learned where trouble was, you could just keep away.

Also, his argument is that the city lost lots of "colorful characters". People that were not exactly dangerous but were not exactly postal card-worthy. The city is just not the same without those weirdos, he said.

Perhaps that is the also the reason that my friend likes (Cambridge's) Central Square so much. Not a day goes by without some freaky (and usually funny) event close to the T.

The point is: amichail is a colorful character, yes, and the place wouldn't be the same without him. But does it necessarily mean that it would be worse?

Also, would you encourage "more amichails", or one is all we need?
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Oy, Kyro. Usually I side with what you've got to say but this time I think you're in the wrong.

> Let's say for a second that Dustin really is a ridiculously ignorant designer (he's not)

He is in that he's never worked for a major company in a design position.

> He's a customer who is really displeased not only with the AA website but with the total experience.

I've had to deal with customers before. I've had customers tell me to fire everybody in a movie theatre for incompetence. Usually we pretend like we care in front of them, then roll our eyes once they're gone.

> And the majority of the comments on the other submissions were about how even people here hated the company, before you found out about the firing of Mr. X.

There was just as much criticism before. The summary of mass opinion is: We hate American Airlines and their design, but the issue has been oversimplified here.

> I know it violated the contract, whatever, but that just shows us where AA's mind is. Mr. X didn't say anything that made me look down upon AA.

The deal is when you sign an agreement, you follow it. What if Mr. X had been an Apple employee leaking a new product? That's what he did here. Perhaps not as severely, but it's the same corporate crime. And his response let Dustin write a second article bashing people at American Airlines, so it invited even more bad PR.

> If anything, it made them look more humane.

Mr. X was paid to design web sites. AA has other people who're meant to make them look humane. Right now they're sucking, but it's sound in theory because it lets everybody know what they're supposed to do. It works well for other companies. AA is bad, but they won't fix the problem by growing laxer.
This is the tone that every language/framework comparison should take. Thank you, jacobian!
It's always the crazy ideas that get marginalized by the majority, because chances are the majority are right. However the ideas that turn out to be great initially manifests as crazy to the majority. Rather unfortunate "adaptation" but the one way we can avoid killing potentially great things is to not discredit something until it can be proven to be bad, and to not discourage "weird" behavior.
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the point isn't to be right, but rather, to convince others of your position

He’s trying to convince us that AA’s strategy is dumb

From the article,

Unsolicited designs, if they’re going to be done at all, should be communicated with class, humility, and a ton of research.
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But you're conflating two different roles. Actually, the point you're making works perfectly to disprove what Dustin wrote.

The producer is not an artistic role, he's a business one. Most producers are a lot smarter than you'd give them credit for, but they ignore their artistic sensibilities and focus on the bottom line. Before you get to them, you have lots of brilliant collaboration: Directors and writers and cinematographers and directors of photography and sound editors and actors, of course actors, all dance together and form really incredible things in tandem. Very rarely is a single voice dictating. Even in the case of the great auteurs there's collaboration: See how David Lynch works in tandem with Angelo Badalamenti on most of his projects. So that all works perfectly, right till you hit the business people.

Dustin's writing from the assumption that making a web site is all about the design. He's treating web sites like you're treating film. And, like you, he's assuming that the reason AA's web site sucks is that the artists are terrible at their jobs, and he's railing blindly at them, when in fact the people in charge aren't tasteless so much as they don't care about taste as much as the artists do.

I actually wrote an off-the-cuff post about this a little while ago regarding the music industry, how problems in perception start because we don't realize just how much more important business is than art for most companies/people: http://marinich.tumblr.com/post/200996589/talentless
Because it suggests to me a lack of strategy. You're not pitching your product to us. From what I've seen of your site it's not something that would appeal to most of us. So it's a tad misguided to be making your sales pitch here rather than in a forum where you're more needed.
Well I think most of its shortcomings are due more to paradigm rather than quality of the tool. I love Visual Studio and I learned GUI development on Windows using it, so the general concept "feels" natural to me because that's how I learned. On the other hand, XCode works well for the way the GUI system works on OS X (i.e., outlets, actions, etc.).

I think it's a bit of Apples to Oranges, especially since (a) they view the GUI and code interaction quite differently and (b) .NET is managed whereas XCode's languages usually aren't, making the toolset behave differently (for example, the .NET debugger can do a lot more introspection than the XCode debugger can in some situations).

In any event, I dig VS.NET and use it for any Windows development I do. But I think your perspective is skewed a bit. I came from VS to these other tools and love them, but I'm a bit of a simplicity nut so it might just be my preferred workflow. :)
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Has Japan designed the world's best bike shed?
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You're right that these things happen in cycles -- just like that "The Office is like the office" quote -- things get big and degenerate.

But something about accepting it as unchangeable fact does not sit well with me.
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Amen. I recently dove into Python/Django (for a startup) and the whole experience really has been a blast, in no small part due to Django (I have a strong penchant for good tools).

Now that I've got a bit of experience under my belt I'm looking for more opportunities to work with this community and I love what I see. I feel like working alongside these guys is making me into a much better developer.
I had that idea 3 years ago and even sourced the tailors in Vietnam :-) I want to Saigon with a backpack full of GQ, Esquire, and tons of catalogs. All that came out of it was some tiny tailors started making fashion-house suits in some Saigon slum and nothing was exported due to the messy business that is Vietnam shipping industry (they work best when you stay in the country and show up at the port. Vietnam Post is unreliable for frequent small shipments, for made to order garments. If you're gonna do business with locals make sure they have a $ stake in the venture, and foreigners there are slacker-type teachers, isolated in their own expat-communities and are not very business minded.)
Silly, I should have included a link.

Also very cool: I just tried out SnipMate fully expecting it's tab command to conflict with supertab, but no conflicts at all.
AA is not doing as badly as it does because its homepage is messy.

The user’s experience is always more important than you think it is. First impressions are always more important than they should be.

In this case, I genuinely believe that AA will live or die based on the experience their customers have. Fixing their homepage is the start of a systematic change they need to make. However, if they don’t regain their customer-experience focus, I think it will doom them.
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I actually agree with you there -- the people in charge don't care about taste. But I think one aspect is that experience is the product. And the people in charge should care. They should care a lot, and it's why Virgin and Jetblue and Southwest eat AA's lunch.

The website is only one aspect of a panoply of experiential factors that the management of AA should care about. It is their product. It's their reason for being. But they don't care.

And I think for Dustin, that is the problem he's calling attention to.
That's exactly what I wanted to know! Do you know what this formula is called and/or where is is formally derived?
Unless HN somehow selects for people interested in lisp-like things...
This article is spot on.

It's a tribute to Rails' genius that so many people view it as a threat. You still see people who seem genuinely afraid to let go of their massive, overly complex frameworks, or optimizing every little bit of their PHP app. People afraid of relinquishing the slightest bit of control for convention.

What I actually see, when I hear developers decrying this stuff, is geeks afraid that they're going to lose their Genius cards now that there's an easier way.

The fact is, Rails doesn't reduce the amount of hard thinking required to write a reasonably complicated web app, it reduces the amount of boring boiler plate code. For heavy lifting Rails still gives you the tools you need, there's a reason Rails Metal and find_by_sql exist. There's a reason most of the core parts of Rails are interchangeable (esp. with the upcoming Rails 3). Solving any worthwhile problem generally requires real work. Rails doesn't change this.

The brilliance that Rails brings to the table is balance. Many of the design decisions of Rails just hit the sweet spot for a large category of apps, and remove so many of the pain points in development.
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The the service does not require you to have a client cert then you are safe. If you are not sure about whether or not you need a client cert for a service then you probably don't use one. As mentioned previously, the only commonly used systems that have this vulnerability are SSL VPN setups with the paranoid bit turned on.
In the glory days of Microsoft (circa Windows 95), the company culture was very different than in the Ballmer Administration. There used to be a class called 'Precision Questioning' that was specifically about being very efficient at asking very pointed, very direct questions. To the uninitiated, it came across as incredibly rude and disrespectful.

But it was effective. Things got done fast, and BS was caught immediately, because the questions that got asked were rude, disrespectful, but vitally needed to make the right decisions. It cut through to the truth as quickly as possible.

I think there's something happening here -- being direct and truthful hurts, but to create great things, you have to set aside feelings.

Since Ballmer took over the reigns, Microsoft no longer teaches this course to its managers. Kinder and gentler, he said -- but there's a very real cost to kinder and gentler.
I love that the O(n^2 / 2) algorithm for this problem is modded 4x the O(n) one.
How about the Closure web browser which predates both Clozure and Clojure?

http://www.cliki.net/Closure
Yes here's the link http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/podcast-50/
From what I have heard from the SO podcasts, being the returned site from Google is _exactly_ what they want. So it sounds like a roaring success, in those terms.
That's why I'm sort of conflicted about this argument. On the one hand, I think AA's web site is a shitty mess. On the other, I don't know enough about AA to know that their web site's what's bringing them down, and I wouldn't be surprised if their current site was somehow very effective. Look how many people go to see Michael Bay films. People like bad things. This might be an instance of a bad thing that lots of people for whatever reason use.

The other side of the problem was also illustrated here, which was that Dustin provided a very shallow analysis at first, and that analysis hasn't gotten much deeper. His take on things moved from "the designers know nothing" to "the CEO knows nothing". I suspect he knows even less about business than he does about design. It further irks me that at no point in this conflict has he said "I'm sorry that I said some stupid things; let me rephrase myself." Instead it's "This guy makes some good points but I'm still in the right." It's as smug and insincere as his shallow article designs that get so lauded.

(At that, I think I'm gonna bow out of this argument, at least for tonight. The snippy emails Dustin sent me in response to one of my comments is making me look only at the flaws in his logic, so I don't think I'm being as bipartisan as I'd like to be. Because I won't be able to edit this in the morning, I'm sorry if I came across as a dick in this discussion; I really enjoyed having this debate.)
My apologies. It was not my intention to make a sales pitch.
How do I get my viral facebook artwork to not get in trouble with facebook?
I made a fake profile on facebook called Art Dova with the login and password revealed.

It's based on the idea of an asyconous anonous collective, as well as the idea of there is a sense of person on the internet.

I'm getting positive reactions. And people who see the profile, for the most part, are making changes, or doing things, without me making them. it's a bit strange, as an art student.

However, it may be going viral. I'd like it to go super viral. Facebook, however, doesn't, because then I am spam.

In reality, I'm probably closer to www.0100101110101101.org

How do I convince everyone of this? Without blowing up the internet too much? I'm really stressing out over this...
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Get a Sony Ericsson Walkman W980. You can even write your own apps for it with Java2ME with no "app store" bureaucracy.
It's all cool. :-)
I get concerned that these minimisers and js to js compilers will introduce subtle bugs and changes into the behaviour of my code. Is that concern warranted?
Really begging for a well thought out response. My artwork actually terrifies me a little, and make me proud, because of that slight sense of loss of control. At the same time, I'm not mean, nor spam.
Yes and no... for most of the sites syncing svn from site to site is pretty simple and usable, even if it can take a bit of time.

For bugs, code.google.com has a export mechanism and you can kind of gin one up for sf.net via its feeds (I've not done it, so ymmv).

For wikis, we (google) store wiki content in the vc, so that's easy and so we're pretty happy with the ability of people to pull info out of code.google.com.

I think it is a non-trivial problem to take bugs from any bug tracking system to any other different one. There are too many customizations and changes even within single projects to make it a simple task. I think of taking a bug from a Demetrius project to , say, jira and that strikes me as being a poor match from a data perspective.

Backing up your data off of the hosting site makes a lot of sense to me, which if Eric can make his program do, then that would be more immediately useful than host to host migration. In my experience, people tend to stick with hosts once they have an established project there.
The Rails novelty I've been most thankful for is their initial popularization of the use of non-monolothic web servers. Every webapp running on your machine doesn't have to be served up end-to-end by a single Apache config, much less with your goddamn programming language runtimes linked in to the same binary -- but nobody seemed to know that at the time.

Yes, there was plenty of emotional bullshit in the community as solutions were hyped and abandoned. I think Passenger was initially a massive logical regression when it was mod_rails, but now that it's mod_rack it no longer agitates me so.

Thank you, Rails, for helping the world realize how awesome HTTP is as seamless, simplifying middleware.
We're still expected to simply trust that they're sufficiently anonymized

Actually Google fought in court to make sure that it didn't have to anonymize its logs, ever. So it's a safe bet to assume that your logs are not anonymized.
They also have those for cars in Japan. You drive your car into what looks like a lift/elevator and they then move it up a multistory building. You can get your car back later by typing in the position it's stored at.

http://japanesenostalgiccar.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009...

or

http://misspentlife.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/car-park....
Yes, crazy either way. Happy that HN was able to provide a sanity check.
It seems like the technology could be improved upon drastically. From what I saw in the video, the storage density was pretty low. Bikes are hard to store, though.
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that's my startup's field as well (although not point-and-click since I believe that concept has failed in the past). i suspect there are quite a few people here working on similar things, just not discussing it on HN since there is very little overlap with the target customer and therefore little insight to be gained. feel free to contact me to chat.
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I find flip phones awkward to use with one hand (perhaps lack of practice) and typically too small for my fingers.

I like my G1, but have on occasion ass-dialed people because of button location. If I think that's likely (depending on where I'm carrying the phone at the time), I set the phone to require a pattern be drawn to unlock it. The pattern I use is simple enough to draw with my thumb, so it's easy to grab the phone, unlock, and use with one hand, (mostly) without looking.
Similar systems are also used a car factories to store finished cars. This is how it looks like at Volkswagen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Autoturm_von_Innen.jpg
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