tieTYT

Devil's advocate: When's the last time a fringe* conspiracy theorist's agenda has been able to effect legislature?

EDIT: Added the word "fringe". As in, a conspiracy theory that doesn't get media coverage.

Nice. What libraries/technologies are you using to render the front end?

> Zetes is a crossplatform lightweight framework which allows the user to develop console or native-looking GUI programs, written in Java, that could run on a machine without any JVM installed.

Awesome, sounds great.

> And in addition it has a beautiful GUI (based upon SWT).

Hm, I had a bad experience with SWT (which was over 10 years ago, so probably irrelevant). But what annoyed me is that if Windows could do X and Y, and Linux could do Y and Z, then SWT could only do Y. I found its lack of features a problem. I felt like I had to create my own components by hand a lot of the time. Swing, on the other hand, would let me do X, Y and Z and make sure they look decent on both OSes.

> The main feature of the library is that it makes a thin wrapper on SWT and basic system libraries that makes it possible to make an app which has a native look-and-feel under different platforms. For example, the "Exit" item is in system menu on OS X, but in "File" menu under Windows; about box has "OK" button in Windows, but doesn't have any on OS X and so on...

Mind, it's been over 10 years, but how is this different from plain SWT? Is it just that it can run without a JRE?

> The problem with integration tests as discussed in the talk it they take a long time to run and give imprecise results.

I think you left out the main complaint: It's impossible to cover a majority of code paths.

> it's interesting to see that testable code and good design kind of line up

They can line up, but I'm not sure there's a causation. There are many different ways to write tests the wrong way. It's taken a lot of trail and error for me to get better at it (I can't even say I'm "great" yet). I'd have given up long ago if I wasn't a passionate developer. A less passionate developer would think the whole concept is BS and give up long ago if he took my path.

One of the first mistakes I made was using a mocking framework to test my implementation. The test read like, "first call this method, then call this, then call this". Needless to say it was worthless. I was just writing my code twice.

Then you can use mocks inside-out and end up writing code you don't even need to call, etc.

I'm sure there's many ways to do TDD right, but from in my personal experience, there's more ways to do it wrong.

I believe that's called BDD. Behavior Driven Development. It has a separate name because TDD-ers kept making this mistake.

I test your way, but if you're not aware of it you might want to watch this talk called Integration Tests are a Scam: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/integration-tests-scam It may explain why the "gearbox shit the bed" and how to fix that problem.

If you want a talk that preaches to the/our choir, check out this one: http://vimeo.com/68375232

It's interesting how different they are. Mutually exclusive in fact. But is one wrong, both or neither?

Where'd you get these numbers?

I hate the ones that require you to give an in person interview with them before they'll suggest you for an in person interview with a company. Can someone explain the reason they do this?

I don't know how Netflix figures out that it's Verizon that's slow, but lets say it's with some software that anyone could use. Wouldn't it benefit the entire Internet to open source that software so that anyone could use it? Or, barring that, provide an API that anyone can query.

This way, any company can use the software and report the same thing to their customers. Lower the barrier to entry for Amazon/Google/Hulu/your startup to join the fight and inform the people.

Is doing this against policy or encouraged? I don't see it mentioned here^1, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place.

1: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm pretty ignorant of both languages (but I have novice experience in both): Moving to Haskell, don't you miss Lisp macros? How do you deal with that?

> There do remain times when JSON is a better fit than something like Protocol Buffers, including situations where:

> * You need or want data to be human readable

When things "don't work" don't you always want this feature? Over a long lifetime, this could really reduce your debugging costs. Perhaps protocol buffers has a "human readable mode". If not, it seems like a risk to use it.

No, i assumed that these problems also applied to the Web Audio API. Thanks for the info

I'm a hobbyist game dev, and although I appreciate this, I'm disappointed that sound works so poorly on mobile in html5 and I actually consider that a bigger issue than this (after all, my game already renders fine in the 2d canvas). Why don't others seem to care about this issue? Is it because they plan to use WebGL for something that doesn't need sound or is it because they know of some sound workaround that I've never heard of?

Here's the details of my complaint: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19365175/with-html5-audio... and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19365931/does-phonegap-co...

I should have mentioned that

  1. I am already using set -e
  2. That `err` function has an `exit 1` as its last step, 
  which forces the program to stop running when combined with the first point.

> Now, on to your shell script example: in practice you'll never see an error because both grep and sed return true even when no matching or substitution is done.

That's not what I'm seeing:

    > echo "hi" | grep "bye"
    > echo $?
    1

I'm typing that into my shell.

Thanks for the reply, it was very helpful.

I wrote my first shell script that actually matters a few weeks ago (in other words, I'm a total newb). Its purpose is to validate the configuration of another app. It seems to me that "set -o pipefail" would get in my way, because I'm often doing things like this:

    adapter_properties_home_community_id=$(cat ${EXTERNAL_VARIABLE}/adapter.properties \
    | grep -P '^HomeCommunityId=' | sed 's/HomeCommunityId=//g' \
    || err "line $LINENO: Could not find HomeCommunityId in the adaper.properties")

If I "set -o pipefail", won't any failure in this chain of pipes halt the program? That will prevent the user from seeing the useful error message that says "Could not find HomeCommunityId in the adaper.properties"

I'm also concerned about "set -u". That EXTERNAL_VARIABLE is set external to my validator script and available to the shell. Any appliance with the app should have that variable set. I have a check to make sure it's set and it's valid, but if I had "set -u", wouldn't that prevent me from checking its value because it hasn't been defined in the script? What's the work around to this, because I see how "set -u" would be very useful in most other situations.

How is it doing that?

I probably should be too embarrassed to ask this question, but why can't I use script tags in the second test? I don't understand what's preventing me from doing that.

Sure, but like I said, "Long story short, I tried installing ~10 libraries with Cabal and only one installed smoothly."

Personally I had so many issues using Haskell libs on Windows that I gave up on the language.

I've documented the details of my complaint here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5615516

I've got the right level of understanding of Git to grok this article. I really liked how you talked about cherry picking before you talked about rebaseing. I'd like to request you include a section on why/when you need the rebase --onto argument.

> I believe the Haskell investment is one that every serious programmer should like to make as it should make your both work easier _and_ more fun.

As long as you're developing on linux. IME, trying to use haskell libraries on another OS is hell.

> Maybe that’s what streaming games on Twitch is like for the current generation of kids. But even knowing that 60 people from around the world are watching you set new records in Call of Duty, I wonder how it stacks up to an actual crowd of people standing directly behind you, as you listen to them whispering to each other about how good this kid is at this game.

This is still the case depending on the genre. If you go to a fighting game tournament (street fighter, tekken, soul calibur, etc.) you fight in person because at a high level the lag over the internet is not acceptable for competitive play. In that situation, you have people looking at you over your shoulder and thousands of people watching you on twitch at the same time.

Bonus Justin Wong vs Diago Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeM0rH_4ung&feature=kp

Nice. When will there be a grunt plugin for it? I'm using the qunit plugin right now and I notice that it's 10x slower to run than viewing it in the browser. This 10 second feedback loop is driving me crazy.

> Console stack traces

> console.error, console.exception, and console.assert logs in the console now include the full stack from where the call was made

But what about if I use `new Error("something");` ? That's how I let errors bubble up in my app. Am I doing it wrong? According to this, that won't show a stack trace.

I deleted my comment after realizing I missed that sentence.

Is this going to be recorded so I can watch it later?

> Your first issue with Haskell is a plus! Everyone in #Haskell on freenode are incredibly helpful, and well, if they're all professors you likely to get some quality help, right?

Eh... The Haskell community is amazing and always willing to help. They get an A for effort, but they often have the curse of knowledge[0].

> The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that leads better-informed parties to find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

shrug Just different experiences I guess. I should note this isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison. I am using a lot of discipline in my JS project. I'm writing the code test-first most of the time, and I only have one global variable in the whole project.