skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure what you mean by "a new mental paradigm", the web is a complex system you cannot expect it to be completely reducible to a few simple constructs. You generalize the word backend programming as if it's just one thing. There are hundreds of ways to program a backend system, you can choose from .NET to C/C++ and rarely they are hack-free as you suggest that's not even to mention the platforms they run on like for example BSD, Unix is a series of hacks on top of others, there are often 1000s of different ways to do the same thing.

I simply don't buy your point that "backend" environments are somehow more elegant to work in and easier to reason about than the web.

You still have to decide which backend platform you choose and each has its own series of convoluted hacks associated with it.
T1 isn't insulin resistance, T1 is no insulin production.
The second line of the article states:
"President Muhammad Khatami condemned it, as did Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei"
Right, that too. For example, the amount of work that every serious web app puts into implementing some kind of hierarchical system for storing, naming and accessing objects and then allowing users to share them with each other is astonishing. If only there was a way to have the operating system provide some kind of similar abstraction to the users!
OSX had little market share.

I mean, it still has a relatively small market.

If you can save a week's work and make your site work on 97% of computers, or spend another week to get it to 99%, what would you do?

And in truth, Mozilla/Opera/other HTML browsers had around 10 percent of marketshare even during the heydays of IE6's reign, and yet plenty of websites only worked on IE6.

Would programmers care about those five percent of Mac users?
Good on you for making it, but I have to side with the comments here that it's not only not lightweight, I personally also can't see what's so modern about it - I'm not hating on PHP but even as a language that's an old beast.
I agree that this can work in one liners or very simple programs but it fails to deliver in real world scenarios when nothing is trivial. I just don't get it.
An Ultimate Checklist on Productivity and Getting Organized
> "I always thought that making physics more complicated made physics potentially more wrong."

There's no correlation between complexity and correctness. An explanation can be too simple as well as too complex. Nature is what it is, our understanding of it evolves over time.
What "non-OO" methods for representing cyclical data structures are you referring to? The only one I can think of is lots of indirection (e.g. how petgraph does it), which can be too slow (especially for systems programming). As far as I can tell, Rust's model for verified code is pretty hostile to cyclical structures, especially if you want inhomogeneous references (i.e. not everything is an edge on a graph). I don't think you can just sweep this under the rug as "lack of understanding" of Rust's better ways of doing things.
No, the security came much later, by then the ship was already abandoned. Also, in many ways, the security of Java Applets was actually better than ActionScript. For example, it could actually contain security contexts within one Applet. In ActionScript, every line of code had access to everything, which is a huge engineering flaw. Exception to this are web workers, but their usability is very low.
> Making a neural net?

That's not as constrained as you might think[1] but yes, I get your main point and, as a back-end web developer, I agree.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_deep_learning_so...
That's too easy. We all know that in the ideal world, platform-independent code would travel through the pipes instead of HTML/JS. That code "plug" into an existing architecture in the client side to provide some service or functionality transparently to the user.

Why don't we have that? mostly because of security concerns. That's why we can't have nice things.
Looking for New and Junior Developers for an Academic Publishing Startup
Hi! My company, Veridikal Publishing, is a pre-seed and pre-revenue startup in the academic publishing sphere. We are currently part of the Founder Institute (fi.co) in Bangkok. Essentially, we are an open access journal publisher that helps authors publish papers in our and other journals as well as educating them on academic publishing.

Currently, we are looking for a developer interested in equity until we get seed funding and/or revenue.

So, we offer a maximum amount of flexibility in terms of technology stack, working arrangements, and schedule. We are currently based in Bangkok, but are a registered company in the USA.

If you are interested send an email with your resume, portfolio, etc... to info@veridikal.tk . New and junior developers are encouraged to apply.
Yes. Exactly what you said. It bothers me when people think solving broken Javascript problems is a valuable way to spend our civilizations scarce skilled manpower.
Guessing he's referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32
I believe it's related in some way, but I cannot for the life of me find the direct connection. I can tell you that kimchi developer contacts all use @ovirt.org emails and mailing lists.

https://github.com/kimchi-project/kimchi/wiki/Communications
You can use something like RefControl to remove the HTTP Referer header that JWZ uses to implement the redirect.
Is 10% a reasonable value for that chance? Is 1% a reasonable value for the ownership stake? What about dilution and payout rights?

A reasonable expected value of a lottery ticket is directly computable: jackpot times probability of a winning set. I'm not so sure the same is true for the value of startup employment.
I totally agree you except I do think that the web can mess up the server-side stuff as well.

At the core things can be really simple, but then you need to set up SSL, some kind of database and potentially integrate a bunch of different services for things like sending emails, analytics, etc... At that point it is pretty easy to and up with a giant mess. These types of dependencies are not totally necessary but they are definitely part of the culture of web-development.
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head: contemporary ethics are pretty down on things like stripping constitutional rights like the freedom of movement from a group of people based on race.

A lot of people spent their lives bringing about this shift in ethics; some of them died violently for their efforts. Not having fundamental rights abrogated because you share some phenotypes with some bad people is a substantial philosophy with deep roots in the reactions to the breadth and depth of injustice that went down in the 19th and 20th centuries - much more than just "PC goggles".

My take is that if you removed all of the crimes committed by black and hispanic people, the US would still have a murder rate that is multiples of that in many other developed countries. Clearly there is some other factor - one which is objectively larger than race - that should be the top focus.
> Is web programming really that bad? Is it really just that I need a new mental paradigm?

In the sense that there's 1000 web frameworks that all put their own shitty spin on everything, yes definitely. OTOH it shouldn't be hard for you to improve on those things and release web framework #1001.
Here's the fundamental problem: Not just humans read & write code. Our code also reads & writes our code. If you optimize for the nebulous "human" case, you end up walling off the possibility of having your software join your programming team.

Yet, humans can easily learn both styles. Whatever non-Lisp language you pick is as equally ununderstandable gobbledegook to non-programmers as Lisp. Even COBOL or SQL are way too explicit and finnicky for untrained, non-technical users to write complex applications. There's no difference in technical human understanding barriers between heavily magic-syntax'd code or explicit regular AST-like code. All it is is how used you are to one thing and not the other. (Rich Hickey's notion of the subjective "easy", as opposed to "simple")

Because most languages have traded off for the human-only case, having code writing code isn't even on the radar for most people. Write a few tightly-entwined code generators, and you'll start to see the barriers you hit. Full integration of these concepts opens up completely new productivity and clarity for both you the programmer, and your programming-assisting code, without any difficulties besides the programmer's arbitrary syntactic preference.
IMO the browser's strength is really 'zero-install distribution of applications', I don't think HTML/CSS/JS have anything to do with it.

Having said that, I think your argument its a straw-man, back-end web development is just a part (sometimes even unnecessary) of browser programming.
Time Machine – Motu Patlu in Hindi
Yes, it sucks. So how do we fix it?
(In perfect world, how would you reinvent the web as an application platform...)
Setting Up a Rails Development Environment Using Docker
It's inconsistent, but it's getting better. The tooling has been drastically improving over the last few years.

There's no "one true way" of doing stuff and the barrier to entry is low, which causes lots of different ecosystems to evolve. The browser vendors are trying to focus more on lower-level features, which the community is expected to use in order to build better abstractions.

I don't think it's worse than other platforms.

It really depends on what you're building. If you're making something that's largely document-focused, it's extremely easy. But as you start building more sophisticated applications, the complexity increases.
UBI should be paid irrespective of other income. So that person earns 1200 and finishes the month with 2200.
Sounds interesting. My email is in my profile.
there are rules for job postings on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Nah, you are not missing anything. You are not alone, but you are also resisting change because you are not use to this fast pace of change. The reality is that you need really great memory and ability to organize and discover information fast to make sense of todays applications. It's layers upon layers of abstraction. It's terrible in a way when you have to work with others you have to deal with it. When you work by yourself, just keep it simple, choose a few well proven and solid stacks and just stick with them.
String.prototype.endsWith is native [0], it was added as part of ES2015. If you're supporting older platforms, you need to polyfill it.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
> If you have ever done a software engineering interview, you would know that this is completely absurd. There is no way to negotiate or charm someone into passing a software engineering interview.

I'm sure the author is sufficiently qualified to pass such an interview (or 8), but I find this statement pretty bizarre. "Charm" might not be the right word, but under-qualified candidates pass software engineering interviews all the time.
These owners, with perspective and wisdom, are few and far between.
I highly recommend reading Never Split the Difference, by Chris Voss. The book offers a different take to negotiation, written by a former FBI negotiator.

In his words, he could never split the difference in a hostage negotiation. When you enter the process understanding this, you do things differently.
Also you can't navigate huge comment streams in Facebook. I always see some viral image with "xyz friend commented on this", click it and you just see the latest comments in the last 2 seconds.
Languages don't scale. Systems scale. Without said, Javascript has never really been the language for programming in the large. But make no mistake about it, it's slowly getting there as is evident by huge applications, not just web but even desktop that are being built with it. It's not impossible to refactor. The issue from what I've seen is that people think it as if it's a class based language instead of the prototypical language that is.
Sure, they should be awarded damages and maybe fees. Is a Yelp review worth $550k in damages? Ever? Is the court system so broken to think that $550k is a reasonable amount of attorneys fees? For a case won by default?

This isn't an assault on liberty, rather, it's a silent knife in the kidney. This is the kind of ruling that allows liberty to die with a whimper, drowned in a sea of procedure and 'sure, but maybe if's, with no regard for long-term consequence (or any of the theory of, well, law.)
GWT + GXT, vaadin, or smart client are examples of this.
Lottery tickets' jackpot is usually determined in part by sales of tickets for that drawing, and a winning combination wins a divided pot in the case of multiple winners (the probability of which depends again on sales of tickets for that drawing.)

So, no, you can't, at the time of buying a ticket, actually calculate more than a guess of they parameters you cite for determining its expected value.
Web page didn't work for me on my Safari. YouTube works fine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZNm7L96pfY
Whilst some may be happy to survive on their low basic income, most will be motivated to work to achieve a higher standard of living.
Doesn't look like it, the listed dependencies are just qemu, libvirt and some python libs.

https://github.com/kimchi-project/kimchi/blob/master/docs/ub...
I have compiled an exhaustive list of ideas to get more productive. It runs into 10,500 words.

Kindly give me a feedback on anything you feel that's missed in this, something you don't agree with or something that requires elaboration.
We use TypeScript and at first it seems like a burden, but pays off after a while. We used to have a problem with CSS - every time we had to implement some new UI, we just ended writing stronger selectors to override the parts that felt would break if we refactored them. CSS modules solves that problem for us. It's nice that we are allowed to use flexbox.
The biggest problems for us are that <video> events are not being dispatched properly or scaling problems when keyboard appears.
I agree—I loathe frontend development, but React made it tolerable to do for limited periods—but it's still a hack on a teetering Jenga tower of hacks.
Give it up. The JS kiddies had to rediscover vendoring. Something that's been a best practice since the 1970s.
> "test".indexOf("st") == "test".length - "st".length

I don't think this is a correct implementation of "endsWith".

"testtest".indexOf("st") =/= "testtest".length - "st".length
I echo -- this is good advice. Pick the minimal set of tools you need to use react and css modules (this probably means banging your head against something like webpack for more time than you can possibly enjoy) - but with those pieces alone as starting point, you don't really need a lot of additional library support to build applications that run in browsers ... and your code should start to seem understandable/predictable -- in a manner reminiscent of using better native frameworks of the past.

Unlike many other web programming approaches -- this stack should help avoid the need to invent new hacks for every new feature or slightly different situation ...
Your not paid a little less, your paid a lot less, especially as the years go by. For example:

Enter a startup as a sr.eng employee, and you get the same salary that you got working at google. Instead of google equity & bonuses you get startup stock options.

Google gives you $150k/year salary & $100k/year in equity & bonuses for a total of $250k/year.

By entering the startup you have a good chance of losing that $100k/year you gave up because it fails. Over 4 years you have given up +$400k in equity compensation which is about $240k of after tax income. That is almost a quarter million dollars!

If that startup is successful later on, the IPO will likely be about 7+ years out. If the startup is sold in a few years, liquidity is 1-3 years out. That means the investment returns you would of gotten from those savings is also lost.

You should compare your equity grant to possible outcomes with something like this calculator:

https://friendlyoptions.org/#%7B%22numOptions%22%3A250000%2C...
You probably do not have the complexity level of these companies either.

To me js and css are kind of manageable, a bit the same way as python: use strongly enforced linters forbidding anything ambiguous, do not jump every other day in a new sexy bandwagon, and do not let one line of code commited in without an automated test running it on a ci machine.

What I found harder to manage is the young FE devs themselves: for them it seems every new project, or every new view in the same project, is the opportunity to use a completely different, new toolset. Oh, and some new syntaxic sugar candies supposed to "save" a couple of keystrokes (which is the worst reason you can find to use a new syntax requiring its own tools). I find this very dangerous, especially when the github repos holding these tools are 3 months old.
lol would it make you feel better to learn that 1/3rd of that salary is RSUs?

Or will it make you feel worse to feel that he was denied the position at AirBnB but made some phone calls?

Its cool, learn how to play your cards, and this guy already had a track record of successfully doing that
Yep, I have quite a common name, and my twitter handle is my full name. I grabbed this in 2007, so not too early but early enough.

Quite often I get mismentioned, and sometimes if someone big mentions me, Tweetdeck breaks :(.
This is a good resource in terms of 'getting your head into the space'.

https://12factor.net/

Not aimed at beginners but it made me think a lot more about how complex this can actually be then a set of related technologies.
Do web developers find ways to create work for themselves?

You allude to it below when you say "zillions of hours".

There is a significant amount of money moving through the "web development industry".

People are getting paid to write things that suck.

The internet actually has made leaps and bounds in terms of what can be delivered over it to the masses.

But the "web" has become a cesspool of redirects, overstuffed headers and pages crammed with beacons, ad server links and ad-related Javascript, accessible through ad-sales-company-sponsored software ("web browsers") to run the ad-related Javascript.

If and when users grow tired of web advertising, the entire system is a risk of a serious correction.

Again, significant and increasingly larger sums of money are moving through the web ad and user data collection cesspool so no one really cares how poor the quality of the "content" becomes.

And you want to learn to orient your mind to this "new way of thinking"?

Maybe you are not resisting change. Maybe you are resisting stupidity. Your time may be better spent focusing on backend development. Today's "backend" may be tomorrow's frontend.

All that "content" can easily be delivered without a single line of Javascript and without using search-engine-ad-sales-company-sponsored software.
The web lets you reach a large audience in a way nothing else can. You have to get over yourself about the tools not being elegant, and make sure the thing you're using the flawed tools for is worth the aggravation.
I create a project. There are two things they could do:

1. Make an ant/maven/gradle repo, and have the build command run gradle build or something.

2. Create a commandline (open source) tool called "intellibuild" or something, which reads the project files and does whatever the "build" button does.

Unfortunately, they don't do either, so if I don't have a license (or I want to give my code to others who don't use IntelliJ), my J2EE is not buildable.
Ruby’s Swiss Army Knife: The Enumerable Module
How well supported is ES6 across browsers? Chrome for sure. Not sure about FF or IE.
Migrate Data from Other Database to Neo4j
> The issue from what I've seen is that people think it as if it's a class based language instead of the prototypical language that is.

This always gets trotted out as the issue. "It's not JavaScript that's bad for building large applications, it's just everyone is using it wrong."

Prototype inheritance is even more brittle and hard to follow than class-based inheritance which is why developers, for their own sanity, try and shoe-horn it in.
The problem is the math:
808+492+275+340 =1.9T/318M = 5915/yr=$497/mo

so your supposed to replace: housing assistance, social security, medcaid, medicare, tuition assistance,food assistance, among others with $497/mo. Also, a strong incentive to have children without a job.

Now you could not give it to children but they seem like the neediest group of people to give it to.

Now you could leave out medicare and social security but now your left with 615B / 272M = $188/mo but, why bother?
"
In Richard Feynman’s popular book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” he tells how during his college years he “often liked to play tricks on people”. Most of these tricks were designed to show how dumb people are. For example, in a mechanical drawing class at MIT where the students were taught to use a drawing instrument called a French curve (a curly piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves), Feynman informed the other students that “the French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal”. He reports that the other students in the class were excited by this discovery, and began holding up their French curves and turning them in various ways, trying to verify that the curve was always horizontal at the lowest point. Feynman found this funny, because they had already taken calculus and supposedly learned that the derivative of the minimum of any curve is zero. (Of course, it’s also intuitively obvious: If a curve at a given point is not flat, the point is obviously not the minimum.) Feynman says “I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way – by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”
www.mathpages.com/home/kmath687/kmath687.htm

"Easy to begin, hard to master" languages/frameworks let you go very far in spite of your knowledge fragility. Some interesting topics to reduce this fragility are data structures, design patterns, software and hardware architecture and, distributed computing.

If I had a penny for every JR. Dev that thinks they can get around the CAP theorem...
1 point by veridikal 10 minutes ago | hide | past | web | 1 comment | edit | favorite
Hi! My company, Veridikal Publishing, is a pre-seed and pre-revenue startup in the academic publishing sphere. We are currently part of the Founder Institute (fi.co) in Bangkok. Essentially, we are an open access journal publisher that helps authors publish papers in our and other journals as well as educating them on academic publishing.
Currently, we are looking for a developer interested in equity until we get seed funding and/or revenue.

So, we offer a maximum amount of flexibility in terms of technology stack, working arrangements, and schedule. We are currently based in Bangkok, but are a registered company in the USA.

If you are interested send an email with your resume, portfolio, etc... to info@veridikal.tk . New and junior developers are encouraged to apply.
In the part of the world OP was probably referring to, development companies are like staffing 7-11
Interesting that the article mentions Stack Overflow, as back in April we changed our Terms Of Service to explicitly disallow these kinds of scrapers: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/277369

Of course that doesn't stop it from happening, but at least now we can send notice and take action when we find scrapers.
Maybe I'm the reverse case, but I really, really like Twitter's UI. Especially their newly redone mobile UI.

While Facebook is now completely unusable on my phone, and Reddit is very close (an example of too-much-JS-gone-wrong), going on Twitter is a blast of minty fresh air at my fingertips.