skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Article conflates distribution with production. Production would be a bigger cow.

Deep learning benefits from scale: both in computation power and in a larger corpus.

From the example: is the final product the cow, the milk, or the nutrition it provides? Is a software product the lines of code, the app to download, or the service it provides?
To be fair, this did happen with GCC. But everyone hated everyone else for years as a result. Forking fractures a community -- for something as trivial as this it isn't worth it. But it is worth DoSing the maintainer until they realise that making an encryption program called "Felony" is a brain-dead idea.
As a developer in my 40's, I see things like this and worry that the software industry will come to rely only on the young because they don't ... I don't want to say care ... but put as much emphasis maybe? ... on work-life balance.

Developement-wise, I can hang with the 20 something crowd, no problems. I just can't compete with the single/no kids thing.
Thank you. I was just going through the maps on Wikipedia and I'm not from NYC so I had to give a cursory description.
DynStruct: Reverse engineering, structure recovering and memory usage analysis
There's a lot more that can be said about how things change as the scale of a software system grows.

Every order of magnitude increase requires a new level of discipline. At 10^3 lines, you can do whatever you want -- all your function and variable names can be one or two letters, you don't need comments (or indeed any documentation), your functions don't need well-defined contracts because they only need to work in a few cases, etc. etc. At 10^4 lines, if you're smart you can still get away with making a mess, but it starts to become helpful to name things carefully, to add a few comments, to clear away dead code, to fuss a little over style and readability. At 10^5 lines, those things are not just helpful but necessary, and new things start to matter. It helps to think about your module boundaries and contracts more carefully. You need to minimize the preconditions of your contracts as much as practical -- meaning, make your functions handle all the corner cases you can -- because you can no longer mentally track all the restrictions and special cases. By 10^6 lines, architecture has become more important than coding. Clean interfaces are essential. Minimizing coupling is a major concern. It's easier to work on 10 10^5-line programs than one 10^6-line program, so the goal is to make the system behave, as much as possible, like a weakly interacting collection of subsystems.

There's probably a book that explains all this much better than I can here, but perhaps this conveys the general idea.
GOMX-3 Satellite, cubesat doing ADS-B surveys
Changing the government contracting process is going to be the slowest part of this -- yep nothing drastic is different now that a few years ago. But the winds of change are in the air. The fine folks at USDS are working hard to fix this from the root. There was a recent California child welfare software project that was broken up into smaller pieces and served as a prototype of a contract that was made to appeal to modern firms, and reward sound development practices. Expect more of this to shift the playing field and lay the groundwork for competition to do the rest.
Like me, you're in several places on this thread. In this particular instance, the comment of yours we're discussing is a top-level comment, not a detached one. In that comment, you introduced unbidden an irrelevant ideological tangent about whether AAVE harms the job prospects of its speakers.

It's that tangent I reacted to here.

Elsewhere on the thread I simply disagree with your description of AAVE.
fMRI software bugs could upend years of research
It's not all video games, just the ones that have become competitive, like CS:GO. Any time something becomes "like a sport" people start using these tried and true ways of tricking people into giving them money.
I absolutely agree that you need quick programming skills, but the architecture is the magnifier and multiplier of clear programming skills.

Quite often, simpler and less code makes it easier for others to participate.

Joining an existing project requires a demonstrated ability to build the trust to refactor and re-architect anything over time. Otherwise patchwork works.
Says the guy with "Commie" in his nick ;p
The GOMX-3 (https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missio...) is a pretty cost effective satellite. I bet you could put a dozen up as 'ridealongs' with one of the ISS resupply missions.
Volume of works is certainly an interesting criteria. TIL Navajo is a trivial language.
> we all fear mortality

Not everyone. You don't have to be afraid of death. And before someone suggests it, this is not the same thing as wanting to die or even not caring if you die.
Apps are a fad. Mobile devices are heavy and people will get sick of their novelty, as people do with all new toys after awhile. Many of us probably understand this as we were using mobile devices long before the iphone existed.

In contrast, "the web" or something like it, will exist forever.
How do you deal with the students who outsmart teachers? A lack of rule sets would seem an open field for students to manipulate the adults in the room.

One of my friend's daughters is vicious at this. At 14, for a "career and personal planning" project, she stated career her goal as "porn star" and somehow wrangled a skype interview with a 19yo "mentor" in the biz. She has no intention on following this path, but loves how it drives teachers up the wall. "If billy can want to be a soldier and kill people, then I should be allowed to pursue my dream too." She's a perfectly normal girl, but once she identifies an authority figure as weak she turns them into toys. Put her in a free environment and I'd expect resignation letters within the week.
It's a delicate, and necessary balance to pit future requirements or road mapping enough to get a sense of where the architecture could stay, or head in the next 6-18 months.

Quite often in super early projects, the domain is not understood, so the architecture reflects the learning (or misguided assumptions).
I don't really have a problem with this on its own. Many games have similar mechanisms that are usually seen as a way for gamers to give back to the developers for making a great game. The problem occurs when it's possible to trade these items with other users for real money.
>Anyone who has played sports for a length of time would likely say

I played sports, one particularly to a highly competitive level, and I'm not sure I agree with feeling a conscious sense of more control of my body. Sure, some days feel better than other. But there are just far too many variables, so you can always point to something as the "cause" of your sudden string of what I'd consider good luck, but might also look like ability.

In fact, I'd say this is the major fallacy of sports analysis: post-hoc reasoning of results. Caveat: I haven't read the "hot hand" research.
Can that be made into a greasymonkey user.js? That would be sweet.
"SaveIE6.com was put together as an April Fool’s joke"
Incredible! Sounds very similar to what schools like Acton Academy and Talent Unbound are doing in the US. I have no doubt that the future of education will come from private schools made by entrepreneurs re-imagining schools from the bottom-up.

I opened the second campus for Talent Unbound in Houston about a year ago, and am now working on building software to help power more of these schools. It's very exciting to be a part of what seems like a world-wide learning revolution!
Thanks for this detail; it's vivid and upsetting. One assumes that VAR pricing was at play here as well: not only did the government get sold a pointless super-computer, but the contractor made points on that sale.
Fact: everybody wants a 10x programmer but nobody wants to be a 10x manager.

Also, dealing with a skilled programmer is not just a matter of top-down policy: a 10x programmer may have a different opinion about tools and processes and will not be happy on simply conforming - as opposed to the programmer who doesn't know better.
node/MySQL/nginx for both app2 and SLS. both are on AWS -- the first federal govt systems to use them. Even with the urgency, needed to wait almost a year for them to be approved, mostly around security concerns.
Calling a "user friendly" encryption program "felony" feels like an attack on encryption. Yes it will evoke a reaction, because if the author didn't do it deliberately to sabotage the PR of the crypto community then they need to be made aware of their mistake.

Of course, there are other concerns (why PGP and not Axolotl or OTR, how on earth does "your key is your username" work without causing other CAP-like issues, etc). But I'm not going to spend any time trying to improve a project that is working against encryption for everyone.
Missing production target is OK. Shipping crappy cars is not OK.
In 2011 I showed a simple server monitoring tool called Amon (https://www.amon.cx). The project got a really good reception (front page) on HN and it even helped me land a job at a Y Combinator company (S12 Batch).

5 years later the projects is still going strong, profitable and I still really enjoy working on it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3612200
While not scientific, my best friend had a boy when he was in his 20's. He was in constant conflict with her and the son was caught in the middle. He's had a tough life and struggled academically until he finally graduated high school.

Fast forward a decade or so and he finally settles down and him and his wife have a daughter. Both of them hold masters degrees and since she's an only child, reading, writing and math were constants during her early development. She loves to learn and is in a language immersion school and has done very well in school.

Yes, there are a ton of factors involved that could explain the difference - a relatively perfect situation (two parent home, parents put time into teaching) with a terrible one (one parent home, bad relationships, no focus on education) but it is interesting to note the differences in the kids attitudes towards learning in each situation.
This satellite is an excellent example of what the rapid decrease in cost and mass on computing and sensors has done to the satellite industry.
My recommendation was a zip code to congressperson lookup tool. I linked to one such tool hosted on house.gov. Did you find it unsatisfactory?

As to your weak attempt to make this about class, I'll point out West Virginia's congressional district Google Maps overlay: http://www.sos.wv.gov/elections/Vote/Districts/Pages/Distric...

Or is West Virginia too rich for you? I can find more, I just google searched that and found it in 30 seconds. It seems you don't have the time to do your own research but you do have the time to make inflammatory comments.
Derp. I thought I remembered it also coming up with Lamar Smith back when I lived in 78704.

Thank you
The argument that software development has diseconomies of scale is well know e.g. it has been incorporated a long time ago into the COCOMO estimation model. It would be interesting to reverse the question - where does software development really have some economies of scale? What situations does scaling the team or the chunk of software under consideration up make sense?

- system testing?

- roll-out?

- bulk purchasing of licenses for development?

- architecture in the sense leveraging consistent frameworks, naming etc. across a team?

- infrastructure?

- development time too long? (according to COCOMO there is an optimal time and beyond effort increases although slowly)

- management of "hit by bus" risk
I find I can be highly productive with a highly inconsistent sleep schedule as long as I get significant amounts of sleep every few days. I don't think a consistent schedule is a requirement.
> cognitive biases

Those cognitive biases are called "understanding GA/RP" and "not understanding AAVE". As I have said elsewhere, this is no different from a German attempting to parse Dutch, except a Dutch speaker can actually point to a country that has Dutch as official language.

This is not a fault of AAVE. This doesn't make Dutch "realer" than AAVE. This is just how humans work. It's apparently relatively universal and not new, so it's naive to imagine we can "fix humans" to eliminate that bias.

The real problem is that Americans have negative associations with black people. That is fixable because it is largely an artefact of the US's incredibly unfortunate history. Once that is fixed the bias against AAVE is no less worth delving on than the bias against Southern American English in general.

The phenomenon you're trying to call out is called a "sociolect". These days almost every "non-standard" dialect acts as a kind of sociolect because the "standard" dialect is expected to be followed in all kinds of formal or even informal settings from political speeches to the workplace.

I'm not arguing anything is superior. I don't understand why you keep responding to every single one of my comments by arguing I'm making some kind of claim about superiority.

You can't simplify Standard English and arrive at AAVE, yes. That's what I am saying. But you can simplify Standard English, put it alongside actual AAVE and a non-AAVE speaker will likely find the two indistinguishable and think they're both "just simplified English". I'm talking about appearances in the context of another language here.

Of course no language is "superior". I'm making a pragmatic argument about why people act the way they do, not about some nonsensical cultural shouting match.
Just a quick note for folks interesting in joining 18F: it may be a much more fun place to work as engineer in the government, but it's still the government.

You start off with 2 weeks of paid leave accrued per year, and it'll be at least 15 years (last time I checked) of employment before you're up to 4 weeks per year. This pales in comparison to contracting shops in the DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia) area, where the smallest I've seen is 4 weeks for brand-new employees. Over the years I've seen more and more switch to unlimited PTO.

More likely than not, you will inevitably have to deal with a "govvie" who prides one's self on doing nothing all day and getting paid more than you for it, simply because of seniority. This might sound like hyperbole, but after 6 years as a DoD contractor and getting fed up with all the bureacracy, I left for the fully private sector and I haven't looked back since in 2 years. YMMV.
This is interesting, but I don't have Windows Insider Edition set up. Do you use insider edition regularly?
Minor nitpick: "evangelical" is a bad translation of the German "evangelisch" (at least in the sense that many Americans think of "evangelical"). In the German context, this is better glossed as simply "Protestant".

(And the German protestant church, at least here in Berlin, is a vastly more liberal and progressive organization than one would imagine if you grew up in the American south like I did.)
What Is a Social Justice Warrior (SJW)?
9bn people - and all of them will be entrepreneurs. there is a world outside of HN and there a lot of folks can barely finish high school.
The #1 reason that mobile apps are better than web apps for specific tasks like you describe is that mobile browsers are mostly junk and the phones are not powerful enough to run them. Cellular connections also provide an unreliable and inconsistent experience on the mobile browser.

As the technology improves this will change. The exact same relationship existed on desktop computers at one time.
That's the 90's calling back with the 4th gen language that were supposed to drive the developer out of work. Before that it was COBOL, a simple enough language that does not require programmer.

Automation happens a lot in the Software Development world, but instead of depriving the developer of work, they just pile on the shoulder of the developer. For example, today, with AWS/Docker/TDD/DDD/... I basically do the work that would have taken a team of 5 people only 15 years ago.

The thing is there is always going to be somebody that sits at the limit between the fuzzy world of requirements and the rigorous technical world of implementation and those people are going to be developer (of course they will not be programming in java, rather in something else, but rigorous enough that the activity is still called programming)

Unless AI takes over, but it probably means that work as we know it has changed completely.
I see the point here.

No matter what it's called, you're talking about people that don't use best practices, for better or worse. Best practices will get you where you're going in a predictable way, but there is a ton of inefficiency, as they don't take your specific problem into account.

When I was new to moving away from best practices, I wrote a lot of difficult to understand code that was very performant. I spent my evenings reading documentation, reading the code of the people I admired (mostly decompiled framework code), and was very excited to put what I learned into practice and learn by experience. It made me proud to write code that out-performed my coworker's code by orders of magnitude. I worked for one of the top 100 most trafficked sites in the US, and on a platform that was not designed for that level of traffic (none are).

A month later, the lead architect and I had a discussion that did not go my way. I was asked to write a very public and humbling apology to the team, and that apology still exists hosted on the internal network at that company (in a place that is easy to find). I had a lot of talent, but not a lot of wisdom. From that day on, I was to work on the most difficult projects exclusively, and under direct supervision of that architect. We worked on maintaining the performance edge, but doing so in a way that is easy for other developers to understand and extend. He taught me to interface directly with the other departments and senior management to make changes to the development process before work got to development; to enable us to do our best. It was a difficult road, and I was yelled at a lot; but eventually the architect cleared me to work without supervision. What followed is the most productive two years the company I worked for had ever had. I was promoted multiple times, was awarded patents, and was able to do a lot of lasting good. I had a hand in every project, feature, and department. I designed and internally evangelized a few myself, and had become the go-to guy to get difficult things done. You know this company, if I told you their name you'd recognize them and their product immediately (you've likely used my work).

I left about 4 years ago to build my own company. I do consulting during the day, and take jobs that require a hero to survive (to stay sharp). Since I left, there have been no significant new features or achievements out of the company I left.

Moral of the story: If you're talented, your idea of a good night is reading documentation and decompiling/memorizing products you like, and want to be a 10x developer; get someone you admire to yell at you, rip your work apart every day, and tell you that you're garbage for a year. It will do you (and your company) a lot of good.
Give yourself a goal to accomplish within a specific amount of time. It's easy to procrastinate when you have all the time in the world. It's hard when there's a due date.
Critical security flaw found in Lenovo PCs again
I think that's the case right now with many jobs in mgmt consulting / investment banking. You can end up with a negative situation where people devote every waking hour then feel all subsequent success is owed to them - not great.
New payday technology options for making ends meet
We have home education and government schools in England. Neither rules out the other. We also have non-religious families who home educate. There are probably secular families in Germany who would like to try too. There simply is no one-size-fits-all model of education, whether we try to impose one or not.
The EU is a supra-national political union with the aim of turning nation states into regions and centralising power and wealth in an unelected/indirectly elected elite.

You might make free software more reliable and secure. The EU won't.
Which came first: the butterfly or the flower?
> We don't presume that because the one language is a "toy" and the other is a "serious engineering tool," that there is something wrong with the person using the toy when they could have and should have used the serious tool.

Have you not seen the derisive comments that are always posted here whenever a PHP project is under discussion? Someone will almost always say, "I stopped reading when I saw PHP." Others will weigh in with critques about inconsistent parameter order and type coersion anomalies. Quite often the sanity or intelligence of the author is questioned at least indirectly. It's very predictible.
My experience is similar; it's sad, really, because though I enjoy what I do and am often among the most productive, my unwillingness to forgo time with my family in order to work unreasonable hours, often a result of poor leadership decisions, has become somewhat of a liability. After a career of small companies and the occasional startup, I am eyeing the cubicle-and-collars world of B2B software development with more interest.
Writing good automated tests doesn't necessarily rely on a great developer, it all depends on how you approach testing. For example, let's say you want to use Selenium to write web UI tests. One common approach is to have developers create a page object model, which testers can then use to write readable and robust tests. Creating a page object model is a simple task, and working with that page object model is a simple task, as the model guidelines define an easy to implement and easy to follow control structure (essentially all page object methods must return another page object, which means you can chain them together).

Oh and MS Paint would be easy to create a good test suite for. For what it's worth I'm a software tester by trade, so perhaps it's straightforward for someone who creates tests for a living to know how to approach it, I guess someone who was inexperienced wouldn't necessarily know how to approach it.
> There's no doubt AAVE sounds, to users of SWE, like a "dumbed down" version of the language.

So we are in agreement.

> But as the essay points out repeatedly, the irony is that it's the SWE-users who are demonstrating ignorance.

Because they don't speak AAVE and thus parse it as GA/RP/whatever. Yes.

> AAVE is just close enough to SWE to trigger the cognitive biases that trick people into making judgements they aren't qualified to make.

In other words: non-AAVE speakers look at AAVE and see broken GA/RP/whatever. So we are in agreement.

EDIT: I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, but: I'm not saying AAVE is dumbed down GA/RP; I'm not saying AAVE is unsophisticated; I'm just saying that how non-AAVE GA/RP speakers perceive AAVE is a result of their inability to speak AAVE (mixed in with the racial problems in the US because AAVE usage signals race) and that the gut reaction "semi-intelligible = stupid" is not unique to English or a race thing.

EDIT2: Also, for the umpteenth time: I'm not disagreeing with the article. I didn't comment on the article. I commented on someone (flagged) who disagreed with the article and actually argued that treating AAVE as a "real language" would result in bad consequences. Apparently my comment was deemed interesting enough to be detached, which is why you think I'm responding to the article itself.