skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not following what you think you are avoiding and how you think you are avoiding it. For example, I used to work on radar signal processing code. We had several global constants that were used in various calculations in the processing pipeline, one of which was the speed of light at various altitudes. Regardless of the manner in which these constants were inserted into the program, changing one of them was going to have direct effects on several calculations and ripple effects on others. It is just the nature of radar equations.

Thus, if you have a program that has an immutable global constant it is likely in the same situation. How do you ever change that value in any way without retesting everything to see what the effect was?
So good, they discussed it twice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807497
A philosophical comic on Questions vs. Answers, http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park
> How come we have ten numerals? Could it be because we have 10 fingers?

Objection! Counsel is leading the witness, Your Honor.

Rhetorical questions are really statements in disguise: "The fact is such and such, don't you agree?"

The students should be given an opportunity to form their own hypotheses about why there are ten numerals, otherwise that particular element of the dialog is not genuine "teaching by asking".
Just for the record: Greek governments did demand war compensation before 1980, but Germany argued that that question has to wait until unification. After 1989 it was "too late"
>But global variables and SL are not the same thing as side-effects.

They're examples of side effects. It's not good enough to set the values of a global variable or register some service purely for the purpose of a test, because the test then does not reflect the runtime behavior of the code. The benefit of a unit test is to assert that code behaves the same way all the time - not just for specific values you use at the time of testing.

> Your example (of testing a database) seems very confused to me. You're talking about coupling now. Not global variables. Why would you suddenly need a database connection? Why does the existence of global mutable state mean that nothing in your code can be tested independently? You seem to have a strange idea of how software works.

Global variables increase coupling - code which consumes a global variable now has a dependency on all of the code which mutates it. You simply cannot test the consuming code in isolation without regard for the code mutating the variable, unless your test is exhaustive of every possible value which the global variable may contain.

My example was not of testing a database, it was about testing algorithms or logic that might exist inside some class named "Person", but which has a data dependency on an actual person (held in a database). If one wants to test the logic only, then mock data must be supplied instead of the real data from the database - else you're not testing only the person, but also testing that the database is connected and querying it is successful. The correct way to test this is to decouple Person from the database, usually be means of a mock object, or by passing the mock data into the person directly. Either way, it seems the blog author does not do such unit tests, as he doesn't use mock objects.

> I do not use mock objects when building my application, and I do not see the sense in using mock objects when testing. If I am going to deliver a real object to my customer then I want to test that real object and not a reasonable facsimile This is because it would be so easy to put code in the mock object that passes a particular test, but when the same conditions are encountered in the real object in the customer's application the results are something else entirely. You should be testing the code that you will be delivering to your customers, not the code which exists only in the test suite.

The problem with the author's philosophy is that it means when problems do arise in his applications, he must perform whole system testing/debugging to find them. He is missing perhaps the main benefit of unit tests - which is that, when a bug arises, you can quickly eliminate many possible causes because unit tests against those parts of code have succeeded (unless your unit tests were wrong to begin with, which will more or less be the case if they're testing against code which depends on globals).
I guess after "Object-oriented CSS" it was inevitable we would get Functional CSS...
On monetary issues I think it's fair to say that many European center-left finance ministers (excluding perhaps French ones) are rather towards the right, at least since the 1990s. On fiscal policy center-left European governments are left-ish, supporting high taxation which pays for a social welfare state. But when compared to Americans on monetary policy, they tend to have positions closer to the Republican Party than to the Democratic Party, closer to orthodox neoliberal views (Milton Friedman, etc.) than to Keynesian or MMT style views regarding proper management of government debt, business cycles, and recessions. Which I think is one of the disconnects: even when Varoufakis advocates pretty mainstream Keynesianism that would be center-left in the U.S., he's perceived as being quite far left. (It doesn't help that he occasionally describes himself as "Marxist", but his actual proposals bear a lot more resemblance to Keynesian economics than Marxian economics.)
The Essence of Peopling
Hmm, you do realise that when you say "Greece borrows 100 EUR from a bank ... " you actually mean, "bankers bid competitively for greek government bonds - and were so eager to buy them that the spreads to german bonds were ridiculously low 2000 to 2008".

And there was very clearly a shifting of "bankers losses onto public books" when Greece was pushed to repurchase bonds from banks at values far above their market value with money lent to Greece for that express purpose.

And yes I think that we exactly agree that other countries could cover the losses that the banks incurred on their bad investments in greek bonds. But I, very clearly, think that the other countries should not cover those losses on bad investments, but rather demand payback of bonuses paid 2000-2008 to anyone responsible for the greek government bond investments.
Not sure I add much worth to the view portrayed by this article.

However, as you progress in your career become a specialist in a particular field. Avoid becoming a general programmer. So far I've had two programming careers, the first was a games programmer, a very specialised area. The current is building high performance trading system in the financial sector. These are both very liquid and specialised area.

This will increase the likelihood of you being in demand, and afford you the luxury of options.
StackOverflow Developer Survey 2015
Well, Instagram and Twitter are converging in terms of feature set. They're pretty well indistinguishable now.

They've not totally converged in terms of audience, but I think have surprising overlaps. Lots of Twitter data use cases you can get from Instagram, I bet.
Skeleton (http://getskeleton.com) is pretty nice, as lightweight CSS frameworks go.
Calculator Reboot became the default calculator on Ubuntu phones
I tried this out last year in my daughter's third grade class, and it was a total hoot. I still hear back about the event from time to time.
It's not fear-mongering, it's just looking at historical precedents (eg Argentina). Do you think you can just default, and then everybody will do business with you as usual? Do you think that Greek bonds were only in stupid French and German banks, or that they were the main investment of Greek banks - which would have all defaulted, leaving Greek people and businesses without any money, and forcing the government to leave the Euro (as to be able to start printing money).

There is no mathematical proof for what I'm saying, but even the economists who suggested that Greece should have defaulted and left the euro were saying (I would say they were aware) that things would have become much worse before they became better.

That is as certain an economic forecast as one can be - the point some economists were/are making is that in the long run Greece will come out better from a fresh start with a default and outside the euro, with a devalued Dracma that would make Greeks poorer but more competitive internationally. But there is no guarantee that Greece would actually recover from an event like that and come back to the first world - especially if it alienates the whole EU in the process.
Yes it can with the built-in omni completion (Ctrl-X Ctrl-O keybinding), I invite you to read the 'compl-omni' section in the Vim help.
>However, as you progress in your career become a specialist in a particular field.

It's hard to predict the lifetime of the field you are planning to become an expert in.
My biggest problem with vim is that I can get it configured with all of the plugins to emulate a GUI IDE, but it does nothing to help if I can't remember the shortcuts. Off by one character? Whoops, you activated the RootNuker Plugin on Buffer 3. Discoverability is terrible, one of the few things that I feel is actually faster with a mouse.
Deep Habits: Listen to Baseball on the Radio
So after default, where would the money have come from to pay teachers and police salaries, pensions, public services, etc? And how would the country import oil, medicine, technology, etc?

Even if current Greek debt was wiped out overnight, the government would still need loans just to pay day-to-day bills. It's hard to tell how much since lying about government spending is a Greek institution (for example, they've "revised" the 2009 deficit number 3/4 times since then) but conservatively a few billion a month would be required even if they had no debt.

The unfairly vilified troika not only gave Greece the money to pay off all their loans at very reasonable rates but also promised to continue to lend money to give Greece some time to sort out their primary deficit (deficit without interest payments). No Syriza is telling the rest of the EU that they will reverse the moves to fix the primary deficit but that the EU must continue to pay for it.
The funny thing is that I mentioned throwing money off helicopters ironically, but probably it was lost for the downvoters.

I suspect this was Poe's law in action; some of the current fiscal policies are so contrived that it's hard to tell theonion-style sarcasm from the real thing.
2008 - Facebook had a meeting with us Crowdstar describing how our current business model (quizzes) was getting their own section in their TOS, and would cease to exist.

2010 - After switching to a game model and doing quite well - neck and neck with Zynga. We were walked into a Facebook meeting room and told a bizarre story how Mark was upset about friend feed forms. They explained that we could only share (by means of post feed forms) our games with people that already had our games. Pleading did nothing, they ended that model. Zynaga is still flailing around.

2012 - I changed companies and focused on mobile advertising. Another decent path with 12 employees or so. We got a phone call . [EDIT REMOVED REST OF STORY]

2015 - I received another phone call from a large company (They deal in search) . I wont go into this one.

* Phone calls from large companies are extremely bad. That means they don't want things in writing.

So sure, have fun with working with large companies. Just remember one thing: they hate you.
Agree, this effect should be configurable.
If the ecosystem you are in provides good tools and you know how to use them, this is actually not really a problem. I work with C#/Visual Studio/Resharper/Moq. I generally don't have static mock object implementations because I can use Moq to dynamically create them. Resharper gives me the ability to press ALT+END to go to the concrete implementation of a method. If there is only one implementation of that method that it knows of it will go straight to it - which is the case much of the time since I don't have static mock implementations. If there are multiple implementations it will let me choose which to go to.
I started out with LyX, but as soon you need to do something out of the ordinary it becomes difficult, and you have no idea why things behave the way they do. So I'd rather shave off that experience and start dig in to LaTeX. Can't recommend http://www.sharelatex.com enough, it's great. Start with the simplest template and go from there.
how long until the slate author discovers the secret language of pacenotes in rally car driving and someone posts them here?
As always, few years behind PostgreSQL.
Yes, they do. They purchase access from commercial telcos. Even in cases where they operate their own equipment, they will lease dark fiber from a telecom.
I don't see how, perhaps you could explain further. Both packages are powerful, both packages have many features, both packages require time to acquire fluency and productiveness. Experience suggests that people will pick one and stick with it, making it impossible to measure the difference in productivity.

Writers from academia are effectively forced to use LaTeX. Writers who just start writing will use Word, because that's what's on Windows machines, and that's what they immediately have to hand. Besides, why should they know of the existence of other options?

They don't. Word will remain "popular" because even though everyone I know who uses it "in anger" hates it, nevertheless, people don't know of any effective alternatives. Those who use LaTeX will continue to revel in the power of it, and shrug about how many people are hamstrung by Word.

I, for one, would love to see a genuine and informative comparison. This paper is the closest I've seen, and while many people sneer at it, no real alternatives have been offered.
as you allude to in your final paragraph, the unfortunate reality is that unless you're specifically assigned the task (in this case, the VP was), it's not your role to dictate the plan or criticize it to the level you did. at most, you can make your observations known once. this sort of thing very rarely ends in termination or quitting, but usually a sort of political/social alienation which you describe.

in reality, your only two options are either quit, or be the VP. as a non-executive/manager, you don't run the show, end of story.
I share my contact details because I want to give people the ability to follow up with me privately on a submission or comment I made. HN is a wonderful community and I treasure its openness but sometimes you just want to be discreet about certain things. It's also a good way to prevent thread hijacking.

I'm also explicitly seeking someone right now (a co-founder) and leaving contact details gives an interested person a way to follow up with that.
I don't know the details but those Wikipedia articles might help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_exchange_point
I found it insightful as it makes you realize the following important takeaway: we can still improve bandwidth, but not latency.
"No one will call you a shit-eating bastard if there's a minor bug in a game (I assume)."

Oh boy, are you in for a surprise.
The term you are looking for is neoliberalism. A set of thinking that has spread across Europe since Thatcher did her union busting.

Unless you are on the fringe left of parties, you adhere more or less fervently to the idea that a minimal government that buy services from private companies is the way to do things. It is "utility maximizing" taken to the level of religion.

This has lead to ever more measurements and goals in government, often referred to as New Public Management.
How to get rich with your talent (Read this story)
In classic CS, when you have two or more things in one place, that could potentially be a "pigeonhole" situation, no?
Honest question, because I'm neiher american nor familiar with their common law:

Let's call the company that called us [redacted]

Does that really hold water, legally speaking? Because we all know what are you implying...
Startup Mentoring Lessons: Blind Spots and Briefing Your Mentors
Win a MacBook Pro
Usually some crap like, "I feel like I end up putting team success over personal success and sometimes that feels like it hurts me professionally."

Personally, I'd prefer your answer.
The State of Probabilistic Programming
Spam victims don't care what business unit is responsible for the spam
AFAIK that wasn't technically a default.

Edit: yes it was a partial default, so what I meant is defined as "disorderly default".
I made a mistake in my comment. It should say that any particular floating number is no more likely to be picked than any other with the same exponent. (I think that's right? So basically any representable number could be chosen, but ones in 'sparser' rangers will be more likely to be picked than a single number in a 'denser' range)
It's also a lot easier to get started with LaTeX than it used to be -- e.g. with cloud-based compilers such as Overleaf (https://www.overleaf.com) which remove the need to get everything installed and working locally before you can try it out.

(Note: I'm one of the co-founders of Overleaf, so any feedback is appreciated, thanks. My co-founder has also put together this free introductory course for anyone that's looking to give LaTeX a try: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/learn/free-online-introductio...)
22 killer tips for successful blogging
I don't have flash installed at all. I don't miss it, there are a few sites that require it for some stuff (Facebook I'm looking at you) but in general I haven't missed it. Good riddance.
> On the other hand, if you want to type a bunch of text with semantic labels (title, section, subsection, etc.) and use a journal-provided style file to format that text in precisely that journal's style, LaTeX is really, really easy.)

Note that this is also really, really easy in Word.
Of course you should never ask to be subpoenaed. You inform the Plaintiff that "I would never would willingly testify about all the illegal things I saw at former employer, you'd have to subpoena me to get me to talk!". You can then answer that question honestly with "No, I told them I'd never talk, but they subpoenaed me and forced me to."
In addition to whatever else (like reading the company site and researching the people I'll be meeting with), I like arriving 20 minutes early and going for a walk.
Or a hardware manufacturer working with them long-term. (Dell with it's "developer" XPS versions would be an obvious candidate)
Do you run a Tor relay? If your IP address is listed as being such, you'll see that message on lots of web sites. Apple's support site (although not their store, interestingly) and phdcomics.com are other places I've run into it. If you have a static IP address on your home router, don't ever start a Tor relay at home, or you'll poison it, evidently, forever. :-(
I think you don't understand his point.

There are loads of technologies that already automate safety and allow to be safe than sorry in a way that don't upset users. When something goes wrong, you can postpone the update and continue using your machine.

Yet, when you check on mainstream distros, there are no traces of such tools to be seen. Every update is "pray for it, so you won't have to waste a few hours fixing problems to have system boot again (oh, and PM doesn't officially support downgrades)". All the necessary primitives do exist, but you _still_ have to built your own, every time.
I'm not bending over backwards. They asked a question. Yes, my account was banned, for very questionable reasons. Read my post history.
+1 for Lyx

Well, I learnt a lot about LaTeX while using it for writing my undergradute thesis.

As much I admire LaTeX for its power/customizability, for typical non-tech/business docs I prefer Lyx nowadays. Feels like using MS Word, but powered by LaTeX :p
Yes, you've correctly comprehended the literal explicit question, that's all there is to it, isn't it?

Except it really isn't about the explicit literal question, it's about the unasked real question.

What happens when you don't know you don't know something, or when asking what would be unacceptable?

A proxy question is substituted, and you hope someone hears what you're really saying.

Also, from a literal sense, I'd say whether you feel the choice is authentic is actually all about career impact. You're choosing to make your career something which isn't you, or something which is. What is the impact on you, and subsequently on your career, for each choice?

Thanks for saying that you're right and that my answer isn't addressing the question. I invite you to create an answer that addresses the question you see, so we can learn from you! :)
Let's look at Dependency Injection using a functional analogy.

Imagine you wrote a function "add1" which adds 1 to every element of a list and returns a new list. This is inferior because it has a hard-coded dependency on the specific function object (lambda (arg) (+ 1 arg)).

The dependency inversion way is to write a function "map" which is "configured" by taking a functional argument. Then you call (map (lambda (arg) (+ 1 arg)) ...) if you want to add 1 to every element, but of course you can use other functions.

Now if we actually read the source code of this map, it is confusing compared to the code of add1. "What does this do? It calls the function that is passed in, but that could be anything! Why can't this damn thing just call a specific function? All this program ever needs is to add 1 to a list; why build this whole useless pattern?"
Yeah, I edited that in to make it clearer. This is one odd thing about Europe: in some ways it is left of the US, but in other ways quite right of the US. To take an example I'm familiar with in academia (I've worked in both American and Danish universities), Danish universities are more progressive in one sense: there is no tuition, education is free and universal. But in return, they are also much more shamelessly neoliberal about the goal of the university: the goal of universities is to increase the Danish GDP. Both their educational and research activities are measured by the extent to which they "create value for Denmark". That view exists in the US too, but only the right wing really buys into it full stop, whereas in Denmark even the Social Democrats hold it, and have recently initiated a set of university reforms on that basis.
Have some fairly strong feelings about how much of a bad idea this is for twitter in the long run - posted here: http://www.3scale.net/2015/04/loosing-innovation-twitters-fi...

I have no idea if DataSift and NTT were good partners, but not having anyone else access the Firehose suggests they think they can cover all significant use-cases. This almost always turns out to be wrong.

It also sends another chilling signal to say "we're a platform, but when we feel we want to roll over part of the ecosystem we'll do it".
Given the nature of the post and its emphasis of technical details over business ones, I think the motivation here was to learn new technologies and perform a task (novel or not) with them.
And you'd have no argument from me there ! :) How would
you consider each were you in this situation?
Duolingo adds Klingon to its language-learning platform
I, an amateur, have thought of multiple questions and arguments which I later come to find have already been explored in the literature. I've seen students in undergrad classes anticipate moves made by famous philosophers.

It's bizarre to me that you treat this as an indication of philosophy's easiness and not its difficulty.
It would be super easy to convert this to html if you wanted to because the format is so similar. But also, at this point, wouldn't it just be easier to just write it in HTML and make the actual product or use a framework like bootstrap? Im just struggling to see the value add. Maybe there is something I am missing. Would love to hear your reasoning and what led you to create this.