skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you put the ultimate company name (the service the customer is trying to contact) and then your phone number then that's passing off, tortuous malfeasance in European TM law (and I'd be highly surprised if it's allowed in the US).

If you want to advertise a business lookup service the ethical and legal way is to put your own name, then something like "contact Mountain View Cars through SuperHappyConmen.com on 123-456-7890, we are not associates of Mountain View Cars".

If people want to buy tracked phone numbers for their ads they will, I'm more than happy for you to provide them. But it's not your choice whether they take on your service or not.
You don't get to choose what ideas apply to. It's a matter of logic, not taste.
Yeah, but regardless of ethics it seems like an incredibly small price to pay to avoid negative publicity and a possible lawsuit.
Your new employer can be held liable for employment taxes, plus interest and penalties, if a worker, you, is incorrectly classified as an independent contractor and paid via your LLC. The penalties can be reasonably high.

The IRS definition is here:

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=99921,00.h...

There will also be a state definition to consider.

The one year period isn't a rule but more of a generally accepted guideline.

You can get around most of these in your contract with the hiring company and your LLC, but again will need their cooperation to properly structure the relationship to minimize their risk of losing an audit. It's really a bunch of hoops for them to jump through to get you on-board. If it were my company, it would be unlikely that I would go through the effort unless you were a key man.
Celebrated American Artist Becomes Guy Serving Krispy Kremes in Tulsa
The 7 Survival Habits of Byzantium
Way to lead by example, Obama. It's kind of pathetic, but this story (assuming the right people hear about it) could actually open some eyes. His kid gets a C, and he doesn't just get angry at the teacher and demand a better grade. What a concept! Too many parents don't believe in education or skills; they think education is a sham, schools just anoint "winners in life," and public schools have no business discriminating when they hand out tickets to the middle class.
The Problem With Unit Testing
Pirate Party gets second seat in European Parliament
It seems that this sort of nastiness is becoming a defining feature of their media culture.
Er, might i recommend macports? It has valgrind and who knows what else.

And if you dig a little, can't you find most of the stuff that is in /proc?

I suggest digging a little more.
Will Our Universe Collide With a Neighboring One?
You want Speakeasy. It's much slower and much more expensive than you'll get with Comcast, but you can use all of your pipe all of the time with no strings attached.
I re-read your post and wanted to clarify what you meant by:

Apple (and previously NeXT) inarguably demonstrated its
value and ease-of-use over the past 20 years. Producing
x86-32, x86-64, armv6, armv7, and PPC binaries all from the
same source code -- and having them work the first time --
is incredibly simple on Mac OS X.

Presumably you aren't under the impression that FatELF has anything to do with making source code easily compile to more targets. FatELF merely allows you to combine the binaries that would result from taking a source code base and compiling a binary for one arch and then another and gluing those together into one file.

The wording on your post wasn't entirely clear, though I'm guessing we're on the same page.
No such thing as a sure-fire hit, especially in the mobile world. Verizon's Droid looks like the best Android phone to date, but that won't make it a hit in-and-of itself.

The Droid's best feature, over the iPhone, may end up being it's ability to actually make and receive phone calls.
Yeah. I hear double clicking on an rpm/dpkg is really difficult.
I think Microsoft is right for once. I'm very disappointed in Google Docs and Zoho is only slightly more useful to me. If MS Office Online is on par with say Office 2000's feature set it will be way ahead of its online competition and have a huge competitive advantage tying into a fully functional desktop application.
I do agree with the idea of throttling, but the strict cap enforcement on top if it is ridiculous. There should be no cap with "throttling". I don't want to see capping options here in the U.S. at all.

I cannot guarantee that there will never be a month that I don't exceed 250GB. I used to think that sounded like an insane amount, but it really isn't when you are dealing with legitimate large downloads and viewing media and that is just for business purposes.

How about someone with Netflix? If you watch ONE standard definition movie a night, that is approximately 60GB/mo. of usage (estimate is from here: http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2008/09/comcast-to-cap.html) or about 24% gone right there.

I've never noticed if Comcast tells you how much bandwidth you use on your statement... anyone know if Comcast shares bandwidth usage with the customer?
It doesn't necessarily solve the 'every distribution' thing. And most commercial developers don't support multiple architecture s in the first place.
Good post, but I wish it addressed the accessibility argument a bit more thoroughly. Although in fairness, it does not seem that Mockingbird is terribly useful for visually-disabled users in any case.
Just write GiB but pronounce it "gigabyte".
I'm helping a new non-profit startup get going and we ultimately went with Atlassian stuff since we just plain and simple cannot afford FogBugz.

I've used FogBugz and like it quite a bit, but the email response I received from them basically reiterated what was on their website: no discount for groups over 2 people.

If FogCreek came up with something competitively priced as Atlassian's "starter pack" I'd consider switching, but there is also a significant cost of moving all the data over the more we grow.
Yeah, teachers know who the dumb kids are and this kind of thing will add repulsion to the mix.
How is it not surprising. He worked tirelessly to improve Microsoft's image with developers and others.
Kindle International
Fads aside, IT is not a fashion industry
If that's part of the "satire" then congratulations, you officially don't know when to stop. If it isn't then congratulations, you're an absolute moron.
I couldn't agree more with Francisco's comments - it's not native controls that users want, it's controls that feel "native". As someone who used to work extensively on an enterprise app in Flash, I can say first hand that users just expect certain behavior from the UI controls.

I have had to implement countless hacks to circumvent the (many) limitations of Flash; like getting the mouse scroll wheel to work in a scroll view. Once users realize the control conforms to certain usability and accessibility expectations, they are far more appreciative of the app design.

Cappuccino provides a perfect compromise, with controls that look consistent across platforms, but behave predictably, like so-called native controls.
180kbits? Are you sure? Because that seems to me to be the reason for your slow download - you need more upload than that to handle a fast download.

(A download from a single server probably isn't being hurt, but if you connect to multiple servers then you need more upload to handle each download stream.)
Hello, I explained in the article that all the stuff in /proc are exposed by Mac OS X as well, just I like more the /proc interface that allows to work in "discovery mode".

About macports, I specifically mentioned find and homebrew, but just this are not the same quality of apt-get and many things are missing.
A good follow up question would be: Will the US economy be able to absorb these skilled laborers upon graduation?
Indeed many points are about C, but the point about apt-get is really about configuring a web development environment with any language and apache module in minutes.
Its probably the same old "made in china" story most people face trying to get stuff built there. They'll promise you a rocket ship to the moon for $20 the first day, but the more you invest yourself in the project, the more the price will go up.

At a company I worked for once, we called it "the ransom". This was the extra money the supplier would demand at the very end for "unforeseen costs" to release your completed units.

In china, the signed contract is just the beginning of negotiations. You're not done until the completed devices are in your warehouse in the US.
This is an excellent comment, and you are correct that we forget too quickly the abuses of the past. Like Socrates' Apology.

I am reminded of the post a while ago regarding a man whose family was hounded out of their home at gunpoint by the Feds, and their lives systematically destroyed until he was forced to move out of the country, because one of the companies buying hosting from the host he had founded was found doing fraudulent business.

If we're lucky, we'll die before the countries we love turn to tyranny. Will our children? Will our grandchildren?
You know, I sometimes find it difficult to find local numbers for things like City Hall, Utility companies or even Police and Fire stations. I'm going to setup a service similar to HelpHive to help the reach these services are getting into the public and I'll list my own number so I can show them metrics about all the good things I'm doing for them. Maybe, just maybe, I'll record the call too.

Yeah, I know that's extreme, but this whole thing just reeks of wrong to me. I'm siding with the Plumber on this one.
Summary: another post saying that "unit tests aren't a panacea".

Which is true, of course. But that doesn't mean that unit testing isn't terribly useful.
HTML output would be valuable even if it were as simple as possible and completely unstyled. That's still a tedious step I don't have to do.
Isn't it a bit more "all or nothing" when it comes to market share and revenues though? I mean you can't just say you've got 100th of the audience of Google and thereby generate 100th of their revenues because of the way advertisers work - they'd probably still go to Google as they have 99% of the audience. Unless you were going for a niche market. Does that make sense?
I know people who work in social services who have noticed a change in the last generation. Before, you would think twice before telling a working class parent that the child misbehaved because the parent might discipline too harshly. Today, the parents always assume the kids are right when they come home whining about how mean the teacher was. Don't know which is better or worse....
Valgrind

Works with OS X nowadays. Plus, Xcode has the benefit of Clang's Static Analysis being built right in. You really can't beat checking one box and having it automatically scan over your code when you build to point out a lot of mistakes (like leaks or logic that's never hit). True, different purposes. But, you can install Valgrind. And in the meantime, Clang will catch some things for you, before you have to find them with Valgrind.

// edit: Whoops, I was wrong: Valgrind doesn't work on Snow Leopard yet, like I initially thought.

Apt-get

If you're targeting another Mac system, do you really want to ship your own version of Tck/Tk? Do you really want to use a custom library for your own development and another for shipping? Or do you want to use the one the system provides? Hint: The latter allows for much smaller downloads. Lets the user start using your software much quicker.

API stability

Theres applications out there that work on PPC and 32/64bit Intel, on any OS from Jaguar on. 7 year old applications that still work perfectly fine, across OS's that have had major changes, seems to be pretty stable API-wise to me. Not to mention, there are API's that have been deprecated since 10.3, but can still be used (even though you really shouldn't use them) in 10.6.

/proc filesystem

See the `sysctl` command instead. Bonus: You can access all this information with a sysctl() call in code too!

Compiler

Given Xcode ships with gprof, I'd be highly surprised if it doesn't actually work. And theres always Shark, that can be run without having to add special profiling flags when compiling. Or Instruments (ie: DTrace).

As for -arch i386 not working? Thats just not true.

bash:~ Zach$ gcc -arch i386 foo.c -o foo
bash:~ Zach$ file foo
foo: Mach-O executable i386
Wow this is just disgusting slimeball behaviour on the part of helphive. A business' phone number is an important part of it's identity. Business owners pay to have memorable numbers (repeating digits etc.) - not to mention numbers like 1800-PLUMBER to help people remember the number.

Now this mafiozi wedges himself between a legitimate local business and their clientele - it's so plainly wrong!

What happens when this bottom feeder (helphive) goes out of business? How many people have now got a number for a local business written in their diary or on the fridge, which no longer works?

This is without a doubt unethical and I imagine illigal. Let's hope there's someone out there with deep enough pockets to sue this guy into bankruptcy!
- VidoEmo - Emotional Video Unity
The Incompetence of American Airlines and the Fate of Mr. X
So why don't they advertise it like the datacentres do? "512kbps burstable to 16mbit" or some such.
I think it would be nice if additional memory checkers and profilers worked on Mac OS X, but the article doesn't mention the (extremely powerful) suite that does come with the OS: Instruments.

API stability is a question of the framework, I suppose. Objective-C as a language isn't really in the same league as C as far as API stability, because it's fairly easy to deal with evolving parts in a semi-dynamic language. Perhaps that is why Apple is more careless when it comes to changing things.

Package management has a place in my heart, too, though. I have seen many attempts to do this that fall far short, and not just on Mac OS X. I suppose what I'd really like is something as powerful as apt-get, but merged with some kind of App Store; and I hope that Apple is working on such a thing.
CrunchPad Feeling the Cost Crunch?
That is indeed a devilishly clever idea.
Compared to the amount of value it represents, gold is not heavy. On a dollar-to-weight basis, it is as heavy as carrying money in $20 and $50 bills (US bills weigh a gram each, and gold is worth roughly $35 dollars a gram). For comparison, the lightest form of fungible contemporary currency is the 500 Euro bill, worth 743.6 US dollars per gram. Diamonds are lighter, but they are not fungible. There used to be US bills of higher denominations, but they are no longer worth anything.

I might be forgetting about paper stock certificates, but...they are not always anonymous or easily come by.
Posted in response to
"Musician makes 26.3% of his net income from just 40 hard- core fans"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=922535
i like unit tests only after my design has solidified.

they are a big slow-down when i'm doing exploratory programming and getting a feel for the problem. but after i've figured out how it all works together, i'm cool with writing them to ferret out errors and stop regressions.
Or do you want to use the one the system provides? Hint: The latter allows for much smaller downloads. Lets the user start using your software much quicker.

This is certainly what I try to do, as well. However, it is not for the faint of heart. For instance, I had to be extremely creative in order for my app to use the system Python, and yet work correctly (it was bound to C++) on Mac OS X 10.3.9 through 10.6.
Hello. Valgrind for Snow Leopard was broken and in the latest weeks got a patch that's just an initial support. Don't know if things improved in the last week or so, but last time checked it was not ready for prime time.

About -arch i386, sorry my English is poor, what I mean is, gprof is not working even with binaries compiled with -arch i386.

Edit: forgot to mention that there are things in Mac OS X that are missing on Linux and I like a lot. For instance dtrace and leaks. Leaks is really cool since it can check memory leaks at run-time with a standard executable, and works very well.
This is funny, but I doubt there is any actual security flaw. I expect that Microsoft will verify these transaction later on with the vendor and throw them out.
I agree also. Francisco clearly has a vested interest in this opinion, and like you say he's absolutely right about implementation making the difference.

I have given a Cappuccino app to people to use, and they didn't even realise there was a difference from the native controls (after the widgets rendered - which DID throw them).

Even though I fundamentally agree that re-implementing UIs from scratch is not optimal, Cappuccino had a valid reason for doing so, and its implementation doesn't harm usability.
I wonder why the apparent point of failure is so far removed from the actual point of failure. With my work that is rarely the case, and I wonder which of us is the anomaly.

Don't get me wrong, I write tests, but not nearly as many as a lot of people propose. I do a lot of social sites, so the context may be different, but it's not uncommon for a release to introduce a bug immediately comes to my attention when a user hits it. I can usually deploy a fix very fast, and I feel this is a more effective approach than maintaining a test set approaching comprehensive coverage. People usually fail to mention the time it takes to maintain such a test set over time, which is higher than the time it takes to write the initial test.

Note, I always thoroughly test high impact pieces of code. i.e. account creation, anything involving money or personal information, and data validation code. Having said that, the bulk of the code is controller and view code which isn't earth shattering if it breaks for 10 minutes.
Because that would make it sound worse than all their competitors' services. The only way to get truth in advertising is going to be regulation, and even if that happened lots of people would ask why their speed "went down" (when it really didn't).
that is such bullshit. When google acts as proxy I dont associate the proxy link as the actual link to the resource I'm looking for.

This fool has wedged himself between the client and business and in the process has hijacked the business' phone number. When helphive goes out of business how many people will still try to contact their local plumber, get a no signal tone and assume the plumber is no longer in business?
Feet in the Clouds: A Story of Fell Running and Obsession by Richard Askwith is about the British pass time of running up and down very steep peaks, fells and hilltops. He says fell runners usually peak in their mid-thirties to fifties. Youngsters don't have the stamina that a Bob Graham (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Graham_Round) or Joss Naylor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joss_Naylor) have.
"How will we prevent this bug from ever reaching customers again?"

I think the cost of this is far higher than it's worth.
Given PyObjC didn't start shipping with OS X until 10.4, I would agree that you would have to be creative to make it work.
A tip for Rubyists.. there's a library that does stuff like this: http://ruby.sadi.st/Heckle.html
It's the reason I'm working full time whilst studying for a M.Sc. in Software Engineering full time. Just because the world is in a recession it does not give any person the excuse of not learning new skills or not applying their current skills to interesting problems.
More interesting to me, the email that got the guy fired: http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html

An articulate explanation of how good intentions at big companies can often be implemented only slowly.
I'm a relative newcomer to unit testing and man.. has it saved me a lot of time already.

Forgetting the gigantic advantages it gives you over mere bugs, I'm just as impressed at how it helps you resolve higher level issues.

For example, recently I moved a project I was working on months ago from one machine to another. Tests had lots of failures, despite no changes. Turns out I had an unpatched library installed, a few libraries of the wrong version, a slightly different database version, stuff like that. My tests picked all that up and I could vendorize stuff or tighten up my dependencies. Without the tests, I'd have been scratching my head for ages figuring out "what" wasn't working.
Wow, people are still writing more and more words on unit testing with absolutely no new ideas.

Nothing to see here. Move along.
How to Kill Mysql Performance
Facebook and MySpace security: backdoor wide open, accounts exploitable
I've noticed that code connectedness has a huge impact on the kind of test coverage needed. For example, if your website back-end is fairly stable and the API rarely changes, then you don't typically need 100% code coverage on each page. As you mentioned, if you fix a bug, it won't randomly break later...

On the other hand, with a bunch of connected objects and events that fire, causing other events... it's very possible for a change in one system to affect others. In this situation, I recommend a ton of unit tests _and_ acceptance tests. In addition, decouple the components in the system and stabilize your base APIs. This will allow you to write a new feature without affecting stability elsewhere.
I used SWIG to build the bridges, and compiled multiple interfaces; the right one is chosen at launch time.

10.3.9 was especially interesting because it doesn't support universal binaries either. :)
Pay your taxes, Bill Gates
Gantt Software
What's the best Gantt software (Windows) out there?
Helio Gracie comes to mind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helio_Gracie). Apparently he was still training at the age of 95. Some of the videos of him in his 80s in YouTube show him still to have been a force to be reckoned with.
I hope Virgin hires this guy and makes a media event out of it. I will now never fly American Airlines ever again in my life. This sincerely pissed me off.
Quite the contrary. This attitude in a MSDN blog, from a Microsoft employee explain a lot of problems their users have.

Way to go, Microsoft. Testing is for sissies! Real Men write correct code.

Now I can use Exchange and know why it sucks so bad.
Being a huge testing advocatem I agree with this post ...for the most part (and it's easy enough to disagree with if you didn't read it all the way). There are just certain parts of code that are just more trouble than they're worth to test.

However, I'm surprised at just how small an amount of code that really is. In fact, it's really difficult to say what those portions of code are unless you stick to TDD.

Another thing that I've noticed is that not only do functional languages lead to a more testable design, but testable code tends to be more functional in nature. So perhaps tests are design tools.

Plus, while unit tests really only catch a small number of bugs (I think studies have shown something like 25%), they're the fastest way of catching and preventing the bugs they prevent. Words can't describe how frustrated I get when I deploy to the test server and get an error because I mistyped a variable name in some obscure part of my code.

Some times I think programming in a dynamic language without unit tests is like screwing without a condom. Sure it feels good for a while, but eventually it will come back to bite you (no pun intended).