skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's like saying good, on-budget software projects are simply related to number of lines of source code per day. Obviously, you won't get anywhere on zero lines per day for months on end with a 12-month project. Not as obviously, you and I know there are far more other factors to consider than this layman's level metric.

We're at that layman's understanding stage with our grasp of human metabolism. Counter-intuitively, Jason Fung among others have discovered that steady caloric restriction has worse body fat loss long-term outcomes than zero-calorie straight fasting over a span of time of >24-48+ hours, even if the net calorie loss between the two methods is exactly the same.

We don't really know at the molecular biology level why that happens. We have some good hypotheses and experimental evidence about which hormones are involved in this counter-intuitive result. Even weirder: when you break the fast, if you break it by going onto a low-carb, high-fat diet, your odds of consistently keeping the weight loss off go up. Again, we don't really know why at the nuts and bolts molecular biology level.

There are even claims by people on low-carb high-fat diets that they eat more than their computed TDEE as tracked by something like MyFitnessPal's nutritional database, and yet they're still losing weight. I've noticed this tends to be reported more by people who are quite obese; I've yet to see someone who claims this who is in the normal BMI range. I haven't seen any double-blind studies attempting to verify this yet; would be nice if MFP could crunch numbers to share.

At a very, very gross global population level, you are absolutely right that it is CICO (calories in, calories out). Digging deeper though, there is a lot we simply don't know enough about. For very obese people, other hypotheses and mechanisms seem to be helping at least a good number of them to the point where the /r/keto board is quite popular, and just repeating CICO in the face of this empirical evidence doesn't advance human knowledge. We should be saying instead, "hm, that's not what I expected, why is that?"
Most products have continual work done on them.

Usually that's new features and bug fixes. It's very rare to find a client who'll happily pay for refactoring. If you're in a job where you get time for that you should consider yourself very lucky indeed.

EDIT: For what it's worth, I agree with your point about code quality. What's 'beautiful' now is only 'perfect' in the frame of the current feature set. It might be horrible if the next feature that comes along changes things dramatically. I'm very much of the opinion that "good is better than perfect", just with the addendum that the code at least has to be good. Bad code is just bad.
"Trust us."
"Hmmm.. I'm pretty sure AltaVista ran on DEC Alpha hardware, not Sun."

Yes, they did. Remember - the original URL for altavista was: altavista.digital.com.
" A good carpenter wants to build a solid house even if no one will ever see its frame. Ditto to an auto engineer at BMW, or a hardware engineer at Apple, or a mechanical engineer at Boeing.
Why do software engineers break this mold? "

They don't, but a good carpenter is not going to try to figure out how to make every single wall perfectly 90 degrees, etc.
He's going to take a level, see if the thing is in a center for a given stud, make that work, and then move on.

They never perfect the end result.
None of the walls in your house are likely perfectly square and plumb
They also use imperfect building materials, and so they know that a year from now, even if it was square, it wouldn't be anymore.

Carpenters, more than anyone, are true believers in "good enough".
I'd argue most of your other examples are the same.

That said, the problem she complains about is real. She is, in essence, a programmer from 30-40 years ago.

When you had to share time on computers, and your software broke, you didn't just poke it repeatedly until it worked, because you couldn't.
Instead, you sat on a mountain and meditated upon your code, until you understood it well enough to fix the problem and try again.

In that sense, the thing that has really changed is not the cost, it's the speed at which you can throw shit at the wall.

Development is so fast nowadays that programmers don't stop to think about the real underlying problem, they just want to make the compiler shut up or the program keep going.

They just want to solve whatever their immediate problem is.

The cost incentive was always there. People always wanted good software as fast as it could be built. It was the speed of being able to build it that made people concerned with quality.

Now that they can essentially build it at light speed, nobody cares, because it's only how it seems to work that matters.

IE doing things the wrong way to achieve the result people want is fine, even if it causes longer term problems.

You can see this in pretty much any long-running (IE 15+ year) open source project.
That's nice but it doesn't explain our Right Wing's infatuation with Putin.
Most of the things mentioned annoy me too and I've been doing this for going on 20 years now. Perhaps move into a different industry that uses tech but is not tech. Some companies appreciate 10+ year code. (Code you write that you expect to last 10+ years).

Churn and burn code fits SV right now. VC's invest in hundreds of companies expecting only a few to make good money. It makes sense to only build enough product that proves the business model / concept. If the business model is bad, it's better to have paid less to build it than spend more for solid code. Solid code costs time and money.

Traditional companies that use tech want a product build well that has low maintenance costs and will last them 10+ years. They are more willing to build a tight application rather than a loose one because their business model is already proven.
Plague and Rabies : better together.
Reminds me of Ira Glass's Quote.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to-...

And for a different perspective. This was posted 5 days ago.

https://neilonsoftware.com/books/personality-patterns-of-pro...
Tl;dr: researcher discovers they're a researcher not an engineer.
I heard the same thing about async code...
Considering that some people read zero books a year, the simple act of reading a book would be a huge improvement in ongoing literacy and attention span for some people.
It could come from income taxes though.
This was my thought as well. And don't work at a small company or startup; go work in a mission critical industry such as aerospace where perfection is the rule of law.
I wonder what will happen if someone enters their land, falls into the hole, gets hurt, and sues for damages. US liability law is a funny thing. Is a big-ass hole shown in video on the internet an attractive nuisance?
They're all rounghly the same. Some more expensive than others. I'm carribian based, I can't afford to be Switzerland based.
Abusing Protocols to Load Local Files, Bypass the HTML5 Sandbox, Open Popups
Minecraft 101: Don't dig straight down.
Having used one for a few days I have found that while disk I/O is an impressive gain on the already amazing speeds in the previous model the CPU gains are minimal and disappointing. And the GPU is already dated. It has a lovely screen and better speakers but I had hoped for a greater increase in CPU and GPU performance.

Also the keyboard just isn't as good.
The Weeknd Stargirl Interlude Ft Lana Del Rey
The foreign earned income tax exclusion is much more than $60k, it is almost $100k now. I don't take it because the tax credit is much easier to work with once you make more than that. But that applies to high tax countries where the tax credit will negate USA taxes completely.
"Is there anything else?"

For C++? No.
Too hard of a language to waste phd students maintaining :)

Over the years there have been a few more (openC++ is a good example, ROOT used to be one too), but they are all dead now AFAIK.
One reason is that research in compilers is pretty much not in the frontends anymore. For any research still being done that uses C++ as a base, gcc/clang/llvm pretty much work fine. LLVM in particular has an IR that works for most researchers, is not hard to understand, etc.
For people who want to try to build larger solutions, they usually start with C (see, for example, libfirm and friends).

Commercial folks use EDG or, actually, a lot are also starting to use clang now as a frontend.

(IBM was the other major company that had their own C++ parser for a longer time)
On the modern web, ISPs are one of your threats (2015)
Thank you for sharing your thoughts here, this is so well put and I completely second this.

I find the beauty of code is not in adhering to someones concept of elegantly written code, that only the coders see, but in the fact that it's living, and that over time your solution can evolve to become better than its intended purpose. Something observed to be perfect usually has a past that is often overlooked.
Perfectionists rarely finish, but when they do, it's usually everything they wanted and more than you expected.

I can't be a perfectionist in anything.

More than perfectionists, though, I like those who focus on building that one product, writing that one book, solving that one math problem over years. That is people who are dedicated to a problem and have removed Time from the equation.
Indeed. It could, and it still can.
You judge depth not from a single image but from the difference between two images. Similarly, GPS works not by measuring signal arrival times, but by measuring the differences between arrival times.
To be honest, I seldom used lint, either, when I was starting out (although I suppose I cheated by using the Borland IDE in the early 90s). However, when using gcc in the mid to late 90s, it was just too easy to tack on -Wall (enable all warnings) to the options. No real excuse not to always check things, at that point.
I think it's mainly because software engineering is still more an art than a science.

Although we may have formal engineering education, most of us end up making business logic where there are few rules on how to do it. You can't compare it with building a bridge, which has a strict mathematical workflow.
It also probably introduces suppression effects from multicollinearity when entering the same multiple regression, like Nate Silver did.
So, while neat, pretty much all of this would be solved by C++ modules and precompiled modules.

(and in fact, is, based on what i've seen. But i still hope these guys get to market and make some money before that takes over the world, because i know how hard it is to do what they are doing :P)
Right but they don't have to hire from only that pool.
Perl might have a lot of operators but Haskell's ability to define your own operators leads to a ton of operators in the standard library and third party packages.
Not sure how your comment relates to my post. Are you saying you'd work with a libertarian (or a communist) but not one that believes in something you think is a conspiracy theory?
No, that crown would almost certainly go to one of the variants of APL, which have more operators than ASCII has symbols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)
Seriously I think thats the best music video I have ever seen. The loop that the girls did in that vid was incredible...

That was amazing - thanks.
A rich celebrity who paid zero taxes only getting 2 years seems to be confirming that white collar crime is largely unpunished, not a counterexample.
I'm not entirely sure that she's right in tarring the whole industry with the same brush.

Taking a bug out to tea is fantastic, because it really is about understanding the problem. But she conflates maintenance coding and program writing. There is a lot of half-baked software out there, but to say that this isn't like any other industry - like journalism - is really patently absurd. Despite best intentions, journalism is absolutely like programming. A sub-editor is really just like your QA department in many ways. And just like she made a mistake in a script on NPR unintentionally, so too do programmers.

This piece is really a mass of contradictions. Take the following:

But here’s the thing. No one will ever remember that number. No one remembers it now, and I’m sure no one noticed it when it happened. But I knew it happened, that it was an easily preventable mistake, and, in journalism, being wrong in that way is absolutely unacceptable.

So... what is it? Was it unacceptable that the figure got into the story to the extent that she got fired? No, of course not - I'm assuming NPR ran a correction, and forgave her for her mistake.

I really doubt most programmers are going out of their way to slap together code that has deliberate bugs. Yeah, they exist but to say any software development house that writes email clients, job seeking sites or any other software are intentionally encouraging this sort of behaviour seems to be an insult to the vast majority of founders and software developers who work hard to hone their craft and take care to produce quality software.

This essay seems overly emotionally wrought and with a perspective that is out of kilter with reality. For me, despite her protestations that she is no better than all the others who work at software development, there's an implicit undertone of superiority masked by claims of victimisation and isolation. It's not particularly fair, and it seems rather manipulative to me.
Nice! I am sure this helpful without having to look at mole to kg ratios or ml/kg etc.

What are you doing to prevent hackers from altering your ratios which could cause harm?
Which credible threat is allowing Google et al to assert pricing pressure?
Funnily enough prior to the election I had a dream exactly to this effect, and Trump calling Clinton a hypocrite.
There's a huge difference in economics. A house will be used, so looser tolerances in carpentry are not obviously good and are seen by many as a bad trend. Sure, you may not die from those lower tolerances, but you'll likely regret it. See for example http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-10...

The median house will be used for decades, the median software is used for months (maybe days, or even minutes). This is really what my point is.
Japan quietly prepares for worst from North Korea
> Apple iPhones and other hand-held devices have long had an airplane mode that shuts off wireless communications to prevent interference with the vast electronics systems that control modern aircraft.

This is such hogwash -- if there was the remotest possibility of phones etc interfering with onboard instruments of an aircraft, you can bet they'd strip all your electronics off your person at security and stash them in a lead-lined bin in the cargo hold for the journey.

It's amazing people just believe what they're told..
Instead, you sat on a mountain and meditated upon your code, until you understood it well enough to fix the problem and try again.

:)
We were stopped by a TSA agent, who took great care to inspect our Cards Against Humanity deck, and ask lots of questions. Where'd you buy them? What is this? She revealed in the course of the conversation that she'd been banned from shopping on Amazon.

I posit that someone who's banned from shopping at AMZN is more dangerous than someone who plays card games with a dark sense of humor. How does that even happen?
This comment is uncivil, unsubstantive ("if false then X"), and introduces a classic flamewar topic with nothing at all to say about it, new or otherwise. Please do not do this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Writing is art too my friend. Why feel so insulted?
I'm pretty sure the style of writing was to convey emotion and help people understand her perspective at a deeper level, it wasn't just long for no reason. In this case, the article is specifically about what motivates us to keep on programming and keep on building things, so the human side of things is really important. It's not just that she wants everything to be perfect, she believes that the relationship between a website developer and one of its users should be one of trust, and it feels wrong to betray that even if it's more efficient from an engineering standpoint. Accurately conveying "this feels wrong" is complicated, hence the long article.
Rising Seas Turn Coastal Houses into a Gamble
The Most Secure Smartphones – Holiday Edition
But according to Wikipedia, Lake Superior has an average depth of 483 ft.

So take the area of the lake and multiply it by 483, and now it is not surprising that you can cover North+South America with it.
Is there any proof they're going to find an aquifer? Do we know the location they're at actually has wildlife to be disturbed by that noise?

I mean, if the only loss is some flowers and a mound of dirt I don't really see how it's a "nature massacre".

Massacre is a pretty strong word...
Did you know that if you try to overthrow the government of the United States you'll be arrested? Crazy stuff.
As a designer, one can live exclusively in "photoshop", ignoring the complexity of the process and the reality of usage. It's not like you can "test" a drawing with a real user.

As a programmer, you gotta get all the little details right or the application is not possible to use. There is no way around it, whatever is forgotten will just hit you right in your face.

And last but not least. Drawing is dead easy. A programmer could design a UI in a drag&drop devtool maybe as fast as a designer. The challenge when creating an application is not the drawing of the UI but the handling of the user interactions and the data.
About {lambda talk}
The Entire Python Language in a Single Image
Race wasn't the focus of the story, but it was an element of the prelude to it. My understanding of the purpose of that paragraph was to underscore that it wouldn't come up again. And frankly, if you break out in hives at the briefest mention of race especially when you're specifically asked not to pay attention to it I don't think that's a failing on the part of the author.
This level of attention to detail, perfection, and craftsmanship is found largely at bigger companies with more to lose with their products. Automakers, manufacturing, aerospace. When I worked at GM, this sort of thinking was necessary at every step. Perfection and correctness was written into every process.

Also, about 40% of the engineers in my group were female (active safety/autonomous vehicles. We solved awesome problems, but moved slowly to do it right. Maybe the author should look at companies whose markets demand less iteration and more safety.

"You get there first, making waves while I sit in last place and watch." There are companies out there that do not subscribe to this thinking!
I said this earlier (mostly because I see the questions before they are asked):

> Global warming, which he doesn't plan to do much about, will be a great threat to coastal real estate (also controlled by the global wealthy).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13036485
Is there a way around the paywall? I clicked "web" and then entered through google, but it's still paywalled.
The {lambda way} project is built on two engines, 1) {lambda talk}, a purely functional language unifying writing, styling and scripting in a single and coherent notation, 2) {lambda tank}, a tiny wiki easy to install as a thin overlay on top of any web browser.

« But there are hundred of wiki engines and hundred of languages! Why yet another wiki and another language nobody will ever want to use? } »

Let's talk about it! http://epsilonwiki.free.fr/lambdaway/?view=krakow
Who should? I mean, the place was literally unoccupied at the point the distant ancestors of the Falklands population first turned up, sitting off a thinly populated part of Patagonia whose indigenous population was - decades later - subject to repeated invasion and eventual colonisation by the European-descended leadership of an expansionist Argentine Republic situated thousands of miles to the north.

Nice to see you put the territorial ambitions of a literal fascist like Galtieri on a higher pedestal than the right of the people that have lived there to self governance though...
I used to work in healthcare and banking. Failing fast isn't encouraged in either.

The problem with fields where perfectionism is expected is that everyone knows you arent going to do a perfect job.

So you end up having 50482772 code reviews with 30 people pouring over every single semicolon, that is also very frustrating.

Maybe the author should get out of web/mobile development, but I'll take some dipshitty code that I know I can fix over highly micromanaged perfectionism any day.
But is that the problem?

It sounds to me like the author wants to get it perfect, not just right. And even in those other kinds if software, you stop when it works well.

It might even be worse, as the developer needs to sometimes willingly make the product worse in some areas to make it acceptable in others, and that kind of compromise hurts to a perfectionist.
Chelsea Manning is not in prison for dissent and Edward Snowden is not in prison at all.
On HN, comments about provocative things need to be more substantive, not less. Posting like this amounts to trolling.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13042460 and marked it off-topic.
Echoing the sentiments of others here, it looks like she's been in startup world for the past few years, maybe she should try working with different types of companies for a while.
It's still anecdotal evidence and distracts.
I think if books were more useful, people would have a better attention span for them. Reading a book won't automatically improve your life. Usually it's just another form of time-wasting.
So running JavaScript reduces battery life? Woa.
The real argument for abolishing the corporate tax is not that they avoid it and therefore its worthless (though that is true). It's that taxing corporations doesn't really make sense. Corporations don't want things. Taxing them is just another way of taxing their customers and employees indirectly. And if you want to do that, why not just tax the customers and employees more in the first place?
The pathology you describe is nothing more than 'leadership' - a personality type that is commonly glorified - taken to an extreme degree. People are, to a large extent, reflections of each other.* Castro was in many respects the focused reflection of how the United States has historically behaved towards smaller weaker countries within its orbit.

* A tendency which is underappreciated in politics. Consider for example, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as an instantiation of George W. Bush for the Iranian political market.
I'm surprised people still think of Perl like this. You realize Perl is being used by major sites such as imdb, booking.com, and duckduckgo? Maybe try watching the video before making a critical comment.
Wouldn't they be trespassing if it's without permission?
"Banned from shopping on Amazon" or some variant is a good candidate for writing on a custom card.
Would the screwed companies that had been promised these chips immediately go to the public?

And with Thanksgiving, I'm not sure there's been enough time for it to further leak out.

On the other hand, it's a claim that Intel will do something that's both extraordinary and extraordinarily stupid for the long term, so we indeed need some more proof.
Is google3 converted yet? ;)
Awesome resource. I've spent a lot of time looking for CSS image effects and found the info out there to be really lacking. Thanks for putting this together.
> Neither are they unique - if you engage with meaningful content, of any kind, you can learn and improve yourself.

Youtube has been godsend for me last couple of years. It exposed my own ignorance about how little I knew about the world.

Now I usually type in 'BBC documentary' into youtube every night and watch it in bed. Also helps me get rid of some of the self-centered pre-bed anxiety.