skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wait, so the author says we should design our own schema definition DSL, write some JSON that uses that DSL to define a database schema, and implement whatever transformations are required to generate a working migration from that DSL?

How is that lazy?
They actually didn't build much of their stuff, for example, Turbo Pascal was built by a contractor, and they tried to build Turbo C for quite a while before they bought that as well.

What they did have was glow-in-the-dark PR and Marketing.

Didn't HP spin off the electronics test gear?
I agree with Scott. Money will complicate things. I think YCombinator and PG have better options for revenue than ads here.
In Haskell you can easily fake an environment with a bunch of mutable global variables avaliable throughout the program, although this is frowned upon. Since global mutable variables are discouraged even in imperative languages, I agree that the argument is a strawman.

There is however a nice property that Haskell makes it explicit in the type signature if global mutable state is available to the function. This makes it a lot easier to guarantee that large parts of a program is indeed side-effect free.
I don't think Jeff Atwood was asking for additional features, merely fixing some of the obvious issues with the original specification: anyone who has used it a couple of times will have run into the weird_filename_italics_thing.

If the down button on the Apple Remote didn't work, that wouldn't be 'minimalism', it would be broken.
This looks at the tax from the perspective of those who will inherit, and concludes that since spoiled kids don't deserve big inheritances, the estate tax is fair, just and moral. But what about where the money goes? Does the government deserve it? I don't think so. One might be able to make an argument that the money should go to society, because the system is what made the creation of wealth possible. But that's not what the estate tax does, the estate tax takes the money to the government. Arguing that spoiled kids have not earned it is a lot easier than arguing that the government is deserving.

What about looking at the tax from the perspective of the individual who created the wealth? What the tax does is encumber the creator of the wealth from deploying it as he/she sees fit. Why do we want to encumber creators of wealth?

TO CLARIFY: the gift taxes that are part of the estate tax complex encumber creators, not just corpses. If you remove the gift tax, I have no problem with the estate tax because nobody would ever pay it.
I've written more C# than probably any other language, but I've never seriously considered it for anything outside of my day job. I like the language and the tools are nice, but for pure web applications I feel that there are far nicer options out there.

Deploying applications on Windows is pretty easy, but there are far fewer hosting options for Windows; and the options that are out there will either give you a very locked down environment or require you to have a dedicated box.

Beyond that, it's kind of a pain in the ass to do a quick edit of a file to fix something when you're on the road if you don't have all of your tools available. It's just not a big deal to make single file changes in Perl, Python or Ruby because most people don't use a full-featured IDE to edit that code and as a result files are often structured differently (which is to say generally broken up into smaller chunks).

If you're thinking about starting up on the .Net stack, there's really no reason not to if that's the stack you prefer to use. Bizspark is a nice program which allows you to delay the purchase of most licenses for 3 years. Microsoft has a long history of providing nice tools for its developers as well.

There are definitely some big sites out there that are using .Net as well (Loopt, Newegg, Woot), and there are tons of developers out there that are familiar with the stack.

I would say if that's what you are the strongest with, and you like it, there's no real reason not to use .Net - as long as you don't mind using a proprietary stack. I haven't used Mono seriously, but I've heard good things about it. However, it's still a second-class citizen when compared to the canonical .Net stack.
Thanks to John Haugeland for a reformatting of it that works much more nicely on the web.

Where does "basic HTML" come in the matrix?

PS Flagged, dupe.
Whoosh, you missed the point. The point is that we can build abstractions to make our code smaller and more elegant, this leads to greater productivity.

I intentionally picked these examples to show how good programmers are at making nice abstractions to reduce the amount of work we have to do.
I've noticed a trend in people calling themselves minimalists. Well, there's nothing in the minimalist movement that dictates making block quotes obnoxious to read.
How Algal Biofuels Lost a Decade in the Race to Replace Oil
That is truly amazing, scary, and brilliant. I'm not usually impressed by these sorts of things, but this one seems like a really big deal.
So the government should get it (in the form of taxes)?
This reminds me of something my brother said about living in a foreign country with a very different culture. (At the time he was a Canadian living in Taiwan.) He said that you really need to immerse yourself in that culture because then your reactions will be right. When you get into trouble is after hanging out with people from your old culture - then you slip back into being a Westerner and things would start going wrong.

He had several examples of this from his personal experience.
Habbo Notícias  - Novidades quentes já estão a caminho
The author (me) is being lazy by not writing this. I am outsourcing (hopefully) the implementation of an idea.

Also, the transformation into a db schema is only one alleged benefit.

E.G.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
json_def 'user_model.json'
end

display_form(@obj)

etc
The next step beyond refutation is synthesis; often intractable arguments are sustained because both sides have a good point that should be acknowledged but is all mixed up with not so valid assumptions.

I also think that "neutrality" or "objectivity" is an impossibility, especially in arguments about social problems. We would all benefit by admitting that we have interests at stake, and that EVERY argument usually has outcomes in terms of who gets what, no matter how "objectively" the arguers try to frame it.
Do you care though? Because as far as I recall you can change all those things in QT as well, so all he really has is accepted some defaults that he can change if he wants to.
In four lines of code he's hidden a ton of complexity and can now completely avoid thinking about all the low-level garbage.

Markdown similarly hides (automates) all the details of how it generates HTML from source, and in exchange you give up control over (many) aspects of what the target HTML looks like.

My car abstracts away from me the details of fuel-air mixtures, gear shifting, battery recharging, and so forth.

In all of these cases if I want more control I can go get it. The point is that I don't _have_ to: I can drive the kids to school, document something in reasonably nice HTML, and get a damn window on the screen without having to think (as much) about it.
And a case in point: I reckon that the word 'simply' in the first sentence of the blog article should be 'simple' (ok, so it could make sense with either word, but 'simple' would be more readable).

Now, should the author correct the mistake? Or would that not respect the 'minimalism' with which it was written? We wouldn't want to have to produce a feature-bloated version 2 of the article, would we?
Sarcasm? I can't tell.
Not that LOC necessarily says anything on code complexity or design, but here's sloccount on gcc42:

ansic: 869244 (70.89%)
ada: 150280 (12.26%)
cpp: 114629 (9.35%)
f90: 34164 (2.79%)
sh: 18588 (1.52%)
objc: 13047 (1.06%)
exp: 8821 (0.72%)
fortran: 7139 (0.58%)
asm: 4422 (0.36%)
ml: 2485 (0.20%)
perl: 1080 (0.09%)
awk: 842 (0.07%)
lex: 589 (0.05%)
yacc: 587 (0.05%)
pascal: 105 (0.01%)
haskell: 98 (0.01%)
lisp: 59 (0.00%)
A couple of questions occurred to me while reading this. I hope I can make my case diplomatically.

Who's to say what a PhD program really entails? I understand that there are professional accreditation organizations. My question is simple: if I am the president of Newbonia, why can't I set up my universities to require 20 years of study before awarding a PhD? Or one year and a up-front payment of $30K? The implication here is that less studying and more bribery is always bad, but is that always the case? If you shaved 20% off the work of a "normal" PhD have you really defrauded anyone? How about 60%? If so, how about if you make your course more rigorous? If you made your programs require more work doesn't that now imply that other countries are defrauding their students?

If this is truly a multi-million-dollar business, and thousands of folks are getting these "fake" certifications, are there any stories of people who have been harmed by folks with fake diplomas? There was one case mentioned in the story -- a fake therapist. But I find that unconvincing. Where's the societal fallout from all this fakery? Is this a story about real people getting hurt by fake-accredited folks? Or is it a story about academics up in arms over people who got the same kind of degree without all the suffering they had to go through? It seems to me to be the latter. But I honestly don't know.

I'm a huge believer in education, although perhaps not formal certification programs, which I find too stilted and archaic. And I'm definitely no fan of people lying to each other. But I wonder if we haven't reached a point in many cases where the degree is just a bullshit piece of paper needed for job advancement. A social worker with a Master's degree is most likely not that far advanced over one with a 4-year degree. In fact, the one with the lesser degree might be much more effective in their job. It's just employers need something to differentiate the worker bees and degrees seem like a natural fit. It's stupid, the people who are asking for it know it's stupid, and the people who are getting it understand it's stupid too. On top of this, prices are going through the roof for these things. So people are just starting to treat it like the silliness that it is and buying their degrees off the internet.

Please don't think I am making a blanket case -- obviously a brain surgeon is not something you can fake. But for the 80% of cases? Where some external organization is requiring a piece of paper so you can move from line manager to section manager or something like that? If the cost continues to rise and the knowledge received isn't actually being put to use then diploma mills seem like a very natural and normal market response to me.
Should your fake tan be taxed?
Mono does lag behind the main .NET stack, but the gap is getting smaller because MS is opening things up. For example, MS released the ASP.NET MVC source under a license that allowed the Mono folks to basically just drop it in with few modifications so it worked with Mono on the day it was released to the public.

Beyond that, it's kind of a pain in the ass to do a quick edit of a file to fix something when you're on the road if you don't have all of your tools available.

If this is a priority for you, you can use ASP.NET Web site projects and edit live versions without recompiling/redeploying (for the most part). Web site projects are Webforms-only though, no MVC. However, I think not having the ability to make ad-hoc changes to production code is a feature ;)
It should open you up to: http://www.co2stats.com/certpro.php?s=1138&ref=http://ne...

It's a carbon offset program for websites.

For what it's worth, my company is carbon-neutral, and primarily uses "green" power sources (wind, and nuclear). I do it for two reasons:

1) Promotion. For my business, it's very cheap marketing, and a generator of publicity. For next to nothing, I get a few links, and can differentiate myself from competitors on a dimension that is cared about by some.

2) Because until it's proven that CO2 emissions aren't an issue, I prefer to work on the assumption that they are a problem. After all, if I'm wrong, all I've done is inadvertently invest in energy independence which also strikes me as a good thing :-)
Local "Hacker News" for NY hackers -- just launched by the NY Tech Meetup
I assume you agree that there's some level of necessary taxation? You then need to make an argument that people who receive money from an inheritance don't deserve to have that income taxed, whereas an entrepreneur who builds a company and sells it to Google does.
You are correct, I should have typed simple, it is fixed now, thanks for the correction.
Is there something similar that will support .doc and / or .ppt files that doesn't rely on com or the open office Uno bridge?
> Either you have misunderstood my point about peer review

You're "forgetting" that the AGW folks fixed the peer review system. I know that that's an "inconvient truth", but ....

> AGW is not as settled as evolution, but it's still pretty damn settled.

Then you're not paying attention. The tree data "trick" means that the "before thermometers" estimates by the AGW folks are wrong, which guts the trend argument. The "no warming since 2000" means that the models are wrong. The accounting for how temperature stations were moved is broken. The AGW folks mis-represented the Russian data. It goes on and on.

> I would only say that someone is paid to do X if they understand that their job depends on their doing X.

Since one can get the desired effect without doing that, that's an absurd standard. You pick people based on whether you think that they've bought in and are not going to rock the boat. You never have to say anything.

That's part of why I mentioned "true believers".

> I haven't seen this alleged torrent of quips that (it seems like you're saying) is somehow responsible for climate scientists' belief in AGW.

I didn't say that it was "responsible", I said that it constituted much of the supposed consensus. The amount of research that actually concerns AGW is fairly small. However, there's lots of research where it can seem relevant. Since AGW is "hot", there's a huge temptation to just throw in a "consistent with AGW" comment that isn't actually supported by the research being reported.

This happens all the time in every field. Making a tenuous connection to a hot topic is a common way to jazz up a paper.
I think not having the ability to make ad-hoc changes to production code is a feature

True, but in my defense we are a continuous integration / almost continuous deployment shop ;). As soon as commits are made our tests get run, the product gets built and configured and automatically staged. Usually what happens is I get a phone call that there's a problem, fix it and then let someone test it and push the big red "RELEASE" button.
I've got this car. It's absurdly easy to run over people. All you have to do is drive on the sidewalk. With a boat, this would be somewhere between completely re-engineering it and impossible.
Maybe a good idea, but ... who is going to click on the ads? I cannot imagine any of the member here trying to get any information via clickable ads, although it maybe possible that a few clicks can be generated for special offers applicable to HN only. Personally I vote no ads!
This isn't the first article to suggest that engineers and scientists have some specific, roughly opposite traits -- scientists are exploring, querying, doing research, and engineers (note that they mostly mention mechanical engineers here, so ignore your computer science background for a moment) are usually applying established results rather than exploring the problem space.

I can see how an application-focused, problem-solving discipline would be attractive to more rigid people with an interest in applying their principles to the world to "fix" it, and how such people might also be more likely to be terrorists.

Computer engineers seem to be somewhat less represented by this article (again, all they actually mention are mechanical and architectural engineers), and I'll bet that holds up even in the west -- being a computer "engineer" isn't like being a mechanical engineer, in that we just don't know enough about our discipline to do much rote applying of well-known principles.

That may change when and if Moore's Law stops doing its thing and we can start getting a good feel for the relative balance of computer resources and human resources in terms of cost. As long as that changes by a factor of two every eighteen months I don't see us settling into any well-established principles of work balance between people and computers, ever.
The majority of Loopt's back-end runs in Windows Server 2003/2008, .Net 3.5 and SQL Server 2008. We have some Ubuntu, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Ruby, etc. as well.

I really enjoy the tooling, the documentation, and the libraries. There is exactly one time we've run into an issue with the built in libraries: The documentation didn't match what really happened, but Microsoft confirmed this for free and fixed the docs.

Visual Studio is rather polarizing. I'd say the developers at Loopt fall into three camps: Like it, miss Eclipse, and still use Emacs. You don't have to use it. I can't type more than 20 WPM; Intellisense is so good I haven't felt the need to learn to type properly.

Cost wise it's really not a problem. There's BizSpark which is great for three years, but after that you can get into their SPLA licensing program. It lets you pay per month for only what you use. See http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/licensing/default....

Loopt started before BizSpark, so we know what it costs. Here's a hint: we paid more per month for Office and Exchange than we did for the software running our service. All in it was less than hiring an intern.

If you're super strapped for cash, just get an MSDN subscription, and use it for everything. It's not legal, but Microsoft knows there's more money to be made by letting you become successful (at which point you pay real money for licensing) than there is in going after your initial few counts of infringement.

If you like getting into the guts of things you might not like .Net, even though they've released many of the symbols and source code. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b8ttk8zy(lightweight... That said, you can't edit it. I'm ok with this though because in my experience it just works. I'd rather focus on developing my product than fixing the tools and runtime I'm using.

The open source .Net scene is a little touch and go. There are some great projects out there, many by Microsoft itself, but it's simply not as robust and vibrant as the Linux open source community. This seems to be changing (slowly), but as I said earlier we've found compelling reasons to have a mixed environment.

I'm not saying it's all good. ASP.Net is a valiant attempt to solve the wrong problem. Drag and Drop doesn't work for the web. .Net MVC is much better. Despite that, our website is written in Rails, and communicates with our back-end using Thrift. It works great.

If you want to know more let me know. Maybe I'll write a blog post.

Edit: Grammar
I think that is will be easier to support .rtf files.
You can do all those things with QT, the point is that you don't have to.
> From the article itself: "Currently, the tax applies to about 5,500 taxpayers a year." (Emphasis mine.)

> We're not talking about upper-middle-class family business owners. We're talking about people who are seriously rich.

Actually, we're not.

The super rich aren't subject to the estate tax because they've arranged their estates so it doesn't apply.

For example, neither Buffet's nor Gate's estates will pay a dime.

You remember Buffet. He's the guy who pushes the estate tax while selling insurance to help people pay it.
This confuses a minimalist result with a minimalist process.

Minimalism doesn't necessarily mean it takes a minimum amount of time to arrive at a good solution. It is an aesthetic ideal for the end product where what can be eliminated is eliminated. It might take quite of bit of trial and error to get there though.
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/intercourse-and-intelligenc...

Depending on the specific age and gender, an adolescent with an IQ of 100 was 1.5 to 5 times more likely to have had intercourse than a teen with a score of 120 or 130. Each additional point of IQ increased the odds of virginity by 2.7% for males and 1.7% for females.
Twitter to browser streaming with node.js and HTML5 WebSockets.
I've played around with it, and it looks good. .NET does struts. If/when I lead another greenfield commercial team that's probably what I'd use. I really like what they've done.

But I decided to go html/jsonp/F#/SQL-server this time. It lets me completely separate my layout from my business layer, and with a few bits of auto-code-gen my data access layer is always up-to-date. So it really just leaves me a few hundred lines of F# code to write a full-fledged application. I'm also looking to move to mono and perhaps MySQL, and this architecture is probably the most amenable to that move further down the road. Plus by writing functional code in F# with immutable data structures my code is automatically parallelizable and ready for moving up to super performance using things like MPI if I want :)