skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Whatever became of the solo programmer?
I'm a child of the microcomputer era, and grew up with the mindset that good software was very often the work of a single developer, and that even "big" software projects were principally the product of one mind, with a few other people helping around the edges.

Fast forward to today: nearly every software development job advert talks about teams, or specific team-oriented practises ("SCRUM", "Agile", etc.). Searching for "solo developer" or similar brings up a long list of articles about why working on your own is problematic, a few talking about historical solo projects (while pointing out that "we don't do stuff like this any more") and basically nothing in defence of the solo programmer. About the closest I can find to such a defence comes -- a little surprisingly -- from the XP people [1]. This is counter-intuitive to me: tooling has generally improved since the 80s (with a few reservations) and the range of libraries available has increased massively. So a solo programmer has extra leverage and ought to be able to achieve more today, not less.

I suspect there's a degree of ascertainment bias here due to plenty of successful solo programmers churning out useful code but not feeling too much urge to write about it. But really, it does seem like there has been a change over the past decade or so, and very few people are willing to speak out for the solo coder.

Can anyone think of any exception?

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20160709203742/http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TeamOfOne
It could be used as a joke, but don't use that word seriously, it could offend. It's either businesswoman (with Russian pronunciation "бизнес-вумэн") or something like "предпренимательница" (enterpreneur-woman).
Damn, look at this European protectionism /s.

(I'm a functional programmer, so yay for them!)
Trump's mass deportations are a form of ethnic cleansing.
Forever Free by Joe Haldeman does something similar, an attempt to leave the galaxy causes the simulation to be terminated
Not all projects require "proper backend code" whatever that means. It's not my team, but our enterprise/analytics dashboard is written in Node; we've been fine with 2 developers on that team for 3 years. It doesn't receive a tonne of traffic since it's largely just interactive reports for our users and the actually complicated parts are handled by a separate team that makes sure the relevant data lives in a Druid database that the dashboard team can query.

The whole product started as a NodeJS+MongoDB app, which was a disaster at scaling to the billions of requests a day we handle and we've replaced it everywhere except the dashboard, but there is absolutely no incentive for replacing it there and when something truly tricky comes up there is support in the rest of the org for them; of course nothing stops them from writing a hair ball besides themselves, but that's always the case.

You don't necessarily need to find someone who is only good at frontend code and throw them into a backend project, but if you find someone comfortable with Node, they're probably in that position because they also know how to do frontend, and once you have at least one senior Node developer, you can teach your frontend-only developers.

Maybe I just don't have a good sense for the web developer market and there are a lot of backend+frontend people who are not Node developers, but my intuition tells me that's not the case.
How Python influences JavaScript
> The second one in particular. Why bother with owning a house or a car if not with the end goal in mind of supporting kids?

Sweet tax bennies, at least in the U.S.
Their ability to remain friends despite political differences speaks very well of both.
Right, I get the last part. Just saying I wish I could have it now with little to no configuration :-) Not blaming Elm, it's still quite young and evolving.
Borders are in place to hamper agents. That is their whole purpose.

Crossing borders without permission is provoking conflict and war.

Crossing borders traditionally requires negotiation. This is the way in any governance framework.

A world without any respected borders is a world in which there is no escalation, protection and where government is melting down. An agency that is tasked with protecting the borders of the law should understand that. If anyone struggles just think how it feels (for the sake of the argument here it is irrelevant whether true or not) to be at the receiving end of Russian cyber bullying interfering with the election.
Peter Thiel will donate $1.25M to the Trump campaign, despite controversies
Those who forget history are doomed to be dogmatic software developers.

A lot of stuff we take for granted are either accidents of history, or powerful counter-reactions to the accidents of history.

There is a practice, and it turns out to be bad. Mild discussion of the virtues and vices would, in a world composed of Asimovian robots, be sufficient to update the practice to something better.

But that's not how humans work! Typically an existing practice is only overturned by the loudest, most persuasive, most energetic voices. And they have to be. Humans don't come to the middle by being shown the middle. They come to the middle after being shown the other fringe.

So a generation changes its mind and moves closer to the new practice. Eventually, that is all the following generation has ever heard of. The original writing transforms its role from mind-shifting advocacy to the undecided to being Holy Writ. The historical context, and with it the chance to understand the middle way that had to be obscured to find the middle way, is lost.

My previous role was as an engineer teaching other engineers an XP-flavoured style of engineering. I often referred to our practices as "dogma", because we are dogmatic. But if we aren't, less learning takes place. Dogma is most instructional when someone later finds its limits.

When I was learning to coach weightlifters, I was told something that has always stuck with me: "As a coach, you will tell trainees a series of increasingly accurate lies". You can't start with nuance. In the beginning, it won't work.
In most cases, it's probably still easier to use C#, but JScript has always been an option in ASP.Net (and classic ASP). I found that the ability to use the same code on the back-end and front-end was nice when you needed it, but those occasions were quite rare.

The code also usually required some (often significant) refactoring of the code in question to make it portable between the front-end and back-end environments. In classic ASP, this usually meant ensuring front-end code moving to the back-end was isolated from any DOM interaction and didn't use any ES5(+) features, while back-end code moving to the front-end had to be isolated from the ASP objects (Application, Server, Session, etc.). It's all stuff that seems like common sense, but wasn't rigorously applied to JScript code which only had to work on IE5 (later 6, finally 7 before the project was put out to pasture), especially since use of JavaScript on the client wasn't significant until the project's last couple of years.
I think it's funny that he's supporting the party that is making an issue out of the "who can use which bathroom" deal. Transgender people just want to use the bathroom they align with, it's the GOP that's making up stories about how children are at risk or some shit.

Theil is an idiot.
From what I can tell, basically all of the reasons you state for using Elm are also present in Scala.js.
“a USB” is common
Canadian availability?
Clearly you haven't read those emails: they show nothing of the sort, which is why you couldn't provide any evidence to back that claim.

You can find signs that people in the establishment personally favored the establishment candidate – the least surprising revelation in political history – but there's no evidence that lead to any concrete action. That's why the only claims of rigging have been intentional misrepresentation based on the knowledge that some people like you would repeat those claims without checking the sources.
I came to Canada as a German when I was 8.
It took about 3 months to learn English fluently at that age.
No tricks, just watching TV and going to school.
He comes off as an expert but he hasn't done anything impressive to my mind.
well, when you align yourself with a women-hating, racist candidate, what do you expect your friends to think?
If you are the receiver, it is ok. Simply connect to the network and offer you identity to the sender, then wait for message. As you do nothing else besides connecting to the network, there is no difference between you and other users.

What is questionable is the security of the sender.
Born in a country ruled by british in the past century.
You're assuming Thiel is acting rationally. But more likely, he's blinded by political ideology.
JavaScript framework to auto generate code for portfolio site from a JSON resume
I don't think it is more copy/paste that it is necessarily advocating. Rather, make sure you get real value out of anything that you abstract away.

I think the specific scenario was alluded to when someone comes to read your Foo action, you want to avoid: "Found the entry point to Foo, looks like it first sets up something using Utils A. Now I need to get a rough idea of Utils A. Finally, back to Foo. Only, now it makes use of two library functions from B and C. Now, off to get a rough understanding of B and C. ..."

It is possible, of course, to quickly get through all dependencies. Or, to just ignore the understanding of A, B, and C to get whatever you needed into Foo. Doing this, though, typically muddies whatever purpose A, B, and C originally had so that maintaining them will be near impossible.
> Hasn't Thiel talked about how it's bad that women have the right to vote?

I was curious about this, so I looked it up. From Thiel's writings on Cato Unbound:

> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

Later:

> It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.

I'm not quite sure what he's trying to say. It sounds more like nonsense than any sort of actionable malice to me. (But then again, I don't really care about Thiel in the first place, so maybe I'm a little biased.)
What would a person who had a family that needed feeding do in the absence of government entirely? My guess is that they would perform some kind of activity in an attempt to feed them. You can take money and even capitalism out of the equation entirely and people would still work. That Russian family that cut themselves off from the outside for 40 years in the wilderness still worked to survive. The food didn't grow itself and then climb into their mouths to be eaten.
Yes, but have they made it easier on our SSD's?
My informations from Germany are 6 years, but it probably still applies:

- electricity is produced by wind farms in north, and transfered to industrial south. German grid does not have enough capacity and has to transfer through Czech grid. That is often pushing it to edge of safety limit. Safety breakers are not possible for political reasons (Poland installed something like that).

- Building new high-voltage power line is almost impossible

- Atomic plants are being decommissioned. There might be a problem to satisfy existing demand.

- Germany is planning to use Russian gas to make power in future (baltic pipe...). But Russia stated they might not have enough gas in 30 years to supply their own internal demand, and will stop exporting.

- More recently there is a huge political instability associated with Russian gas.

- Poland (or Estonia?) buys liquid gas from Katar and transports it on tankers. But that is very expensive

- Building new power plants in Germany is very problematic.
>To me, the reason to consider requiring a car charging station is not really related to cars but to the history of after the fact electrical installations which to be safe must be done right and doing it right takes time (to hire qualified installers) and money (to hire said installers and purchase electrical gear) and that human nature is to avoid those things and install systems that trade those costs for safety (fire and shock).

>I look at it as parallel to requiring circuit breakers rather than fuses in new residential construction and renovation. Fuses are really safe, safer than circuit breakers in theory. In practice people substitute non-fusable objects for fuses for convenience and cost savings. The work until they don't.

I agree here. That said, in the US most homeowner electrical installations are done 90% to code and the stuff people skip is stuff like supporting wires individually and circuit planning often sucks.

In applications where you really care about not starting electrical fires there's usually a combination breaker and fuse where the breaker setting is conservative and the fuse is sized to burn up just before the wire does.
It's a past participle anyhow, stating it is “a verb, not an adjective” is strange given these are often both.
If you have a chance, compare Pennsylvania Dutch to Modern High German. With a few exceptions it's mostly a preserved older German dialect. The same is true for the German spoken by German-Russians who returned to Germany during and after WW2.

It's not just language. I assume that it's because while the native population marches on naturally, the emigrants are trying to preserve the culture and language they brought with them, with no influence from their original home country. Being surrounded by a foreign language/culture probably also leads to emphasising the distinctions (e.g. to avoid loan words out of fear of watering down your identity).
you seem to live in a delusional fantasy where angry white uneducated men are the only voters in the country
Neither, at this point, is Trump. So it's a bad investment either way.
I think working on a large project in c89 made me better at writing in other languages.

When you strip all your useful tools and concepts away, you're forced to rethink how you can organize with just data types and functions. Surprisingly, you can do pretty well with just these.

It's the sort of thing that helps with recognizing when you're looking at FizzBuzz and when you actually need to use a generic factory.
I like the term "tracer-bullet." You should get that written up as a blog, if it isn't already.

Reminds me of an anecdote about getting people onto the moon. When that was their goal, the very first thing Nasa did was make sure they could hit the moon with a rocket. Then iterated from there.
Yet she can't keep a man. Must be men's fault.
One, Thiel is an investor (which I don't have high regard for). Seems like a lot of investment is gambling these days anyways.

Two, he's Christian. Which I don't have a problem with but if he's gay as well those are two conflicting ideologies. Wonder how he reconciles that.

Oh and the party he supports doesn't support equal rights for him. Wonder how he reconciles that...

He's all against 'social liberalism' even though liberal communities are the only reason he has a right to marry.

Believes climate change is pseudoscience... like he's a scientist himself or something.

Thiel is an idiot.
just goes to show how myopic and stupid thiel is. a single issue voter who ignores that trump is a women hating, racist, tax dodging psychopath
Who is this society you refer to? When did it vote anything regarding impact factors?

To a very good first approximation, academics are assessed by other academics.
See, you're falling into the trap of trusting what other people say about a person, rather than actually listening to that person's viewpoint. If you were familiar with Molyneux and his full line of reasoning, you'd understand quotes like that in context rather than how someone in the media wants to characterize him.
I took classes, then studied in another countries, watched tv in that language and spoke and wrote to people in that language.
you're letting big finance cloud your judgement. you don't think trump is influenced by 'big finance'? how about the real estate? Russia? republican 1%ers?
I like to think of this as a dependency cost. Adding a library may "relieve" implementation cost, but adds a dependency cost (ie. finding+evaluating dependencies, integrating and maintaining the dependency, testing the dependency and so on).

This cost varies a lot, for example a library to left pad a string may be easily replaced, but if you choose a library to implement some on-disk format, then that can cement things in. If the library becomes unsupported one very well may end up maintaining it alone, for example.

In the more general case more issues are attached: choosing a deployment stack, a documentation or translation tool etc. can result in decisions that are essentially set in stone. These also tend to be composed from multiple tools, leaving more wiggle room. Deployment for example might be done with AWS and Ansible on the higher levels, but use in-house tooling for figuring out the details.

Similar arguments apply to code de-duplication and DRY: de-duplicating code isn't free, and not always the right thing to do.

See also: http://blog.liw.fi/posts/dependency-cost/
Are you willing make conceiving, delivering and raising children your new career?

Is this anything more than a conservative's fantasy? From everything I've read, women in general never dedicated their lives to raising children. Either they were poor and had too much work to do, or they had servants to take care of them. This concept of widespread full-time motherhood doesn't seem rooted in any historical reality.
If Americans are truly NOT saving (as opposed to just not using savings accounts):

Yes, being judgmental without knowing the whole story isn't a good thing, but that misses the point: people are choosing to spend instead of save-and many times it's on luxuries. He's not just talking about the poor.

It is a fact that an iPhone is a luxury. There are plenty of much cheaper phones that function exactly the same as an iPhone. But through excessive marketing and a digitized world, people are convinced they NEED an iPhone. They're convinced they NEED a $1500 Macbook Pro for school in liberal arts.

It's not good to make judgments on the poor, but this is 69% of Americans, not just the poor (impoverished are closer to 15%), and that's the scary part. Most but the top 30% are spending above their means, and getting credit to do it, in an economy that's probably not going to grow like it did in the 20th century.
Depends where you are. Places like New York or London are still brutally expensive for single-income households - prices are set at the margin, and at the margin you're going to be bidding against double-income households for all sorts of desirability criteria, not just sprog-related ones.
At the very least, Elm code should be compatible with Google's Closure compiler (just like Clojurescript). There is no reason the Elm folks should try to re-invent the wheel on this, just harness the power of the Closure utilities by making your emitted JS standardized and compliant. Then you get all sorts of things for free, like dead code elimination, just for starters. The Clojure team realized this from the start and it has done a lot for the cljs ecosystem.
Have you actually listened to a significant portion of what Molyneux has said, or do you routinely judge people 100% based on tweets out of context? Please, do yourself a favor and start listening to alternative viewpoints.

It's this kind of "let's judge a person by a tweet" mindset that is extremely dangerous to the pursuit of truth and improving society. The media thrives on one-liners (such as those found on Twitter), but I'd like to think we can do better.
Look at the Freenet Message System. It even offers the captcha.

I doubt proof-of-work can really help against determined attacker. Spammers will happily calculate proof-of-work to send spam. Spamming chans is really easy and all chans will be flooded with spam once it is worth the effort.
Also pretending not to speak English helps.
Caricatured, perhaps, but the characterisation of a typical front-end developer vs. a typical back-end developer is disturbingly close to the mark. Obviously there are exceptions in both cases.
Saying it's pronounced 'boo-roo' is sort of misleading. Japanese r's are almost like Spanish r's where it's almost an l sound or even a d sound. If you say it fast, it's not too far off of 'blue'.
I am currently a PhD student. In my experience, I've had to navigate my way in unusual directions in order to work on things I'm interested in, rather than just go with the flow to collect publications.

I talk with several of my peers who are unhappy with the choices academia offers, and would be open to the thought of pursuing research without being a career academic in the conventional sense. The biggest hurdle that comes up is the feeling of being alone -- not knowing other people who are trying to hack the system and do things differently.

Since there seems to be some traction along the lines of independent research pursuits here, I'd like to pass out a quick survey I just created, for people currently trying to pursue academic research on their own path (or interested in doing so): https://goo.gl/forms/wLvkGPstpCCBJY513

It's very preliminary, but I thought it might be a good start to get some discusion going. I invite responses/comments, either here, or on the survey form.
ActionScript was a viable answer to introducing optional Types on JavaScript. NIH syndrome got this one.
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Actually, yes, I did read the article. When I read 'Javascript malware', I understand this to be ECMAScript which is executing on the clients machine but delivered by the origin site. The ECMAscript has access to the keyboard while the window has focus, so could do a MITM. Like I said, there are various ways to prevent this from happening:

1. Instruct users never to enter card details directly into a website, but rely on a redirect to the card provider. This would change the origin. When properly setup, this should catch 99% of the problems.

2. Provide stricter browser controls, so third-party ECMAscript is not loaded into the browser by CORS. Again, instruct the user or have us make better browsers.

3. Lobby for better payment services. Here in the Netherlands, payment is done using iDEAL, on a separate origin (using redirects) and the payment is validated using a separate device.

The secondary problem is with the websites, the primary problem is with the supporting technology.
This may be a regional thing. I have not heard the phrase pen drive in ages.

Everyone I know says flash drive or USB stick or thumb drive, roughly in that order of popularity.
Grunt is already considered an obscure codebase? It is barely four years old!?

Or, are you just saying that if you have a complicated problem you will probably need to know specifics of how these tools work? I can buy that. I do question how many people are truly doing something complicated where these tools wouldn't be sufficient.
Oh I love these. My favourite french one is "footing." No, "je vais faire du footing" doesn't mean, "I'm footing the bill," it means, "I'm going for a jog."

There's a ton of examples in France for some reason. Brushing as in the article, but also "pressing" for the dry cleaner.

In Chile they say all the time, "catchai'?", meaning "did you catch what I said?" Equivalent of "y'know?" It took me a while to realize that they conjugate it too.. To say, "I didn't understand," they'll say, "No catcho." Beautiful ;)
What benefits are you talking about?