skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Could savvy business analysts replace programmers?
I feel like programming has a lot of cruft that gets in the way of the logic. Is it required? Absolutely. How else are you going to compile + deploy your code? But... hear me out. I've worked for a few corporations that pretty much have the same flow:

1. some sales team promises the client software with new features/replacing existing features they already have

1. the client agrees to pay for the use this software

1. a team of business analysts works with the client to write technical requirements on what the software should do

1. programmers turn the requirements into code (with help from architects/directors/resource managers/project managers), then deploy it to QA

1. QA tests the code, hoping programmers didn't introduce any bugs or miss any details when translating the requirements into code

1. the code is promoted to an environment where the client can have their own QA team sign off/accept it

1. the code is promoted to production where it is used + maintained + supported

I noticed that some of the business analysts I worked with were very bad. However, some were very good. Some were very technical, but maybe not up to date on the latest and greatest nuances of writing in one of the top 10 programming languages these days. I started wondering if they were given a template that compiled to deployable code, how far could they get in the process of replacing a programmer?
Your points might be valid a polygamist society, but otherwise, it will always be pretty simple for males to get reproductive access.
An imperial ton would be the British one, also known as a long ton. It's 2,240 lbs, which is slightly heavier than a metric tonne.
During my time at these corporations, I saw 3 hierarchies of work:

1. backend service - APIs/talking to databases, message queues, or caches/talking to other APIs/doing light data transformation

1. UI - giving the user tables of data/links to other tables of data/giving the user basic CRUD operations around data through backend services

1. batch jobs - hourly/nightly/weekly jobs that perform basic logic over some form of input and generate some type of output/response (lines from a file, database rows, messages from a queue)

I'm obviously playing devil's advocate when I pose this question (along with oversimplifying the entire nature of technical programming work).

If a "savvy Excel" worker or your average technical documentation writer was given a specific plain English format (kind of like a programming language) to follow that compiled to a deployed service (REST endpoint), batch job, or UI page, how far would this get at replacing the bottom 30-50% of programmers? On top of that, what would be stopping this English-to-deployed-code from replacing say, the top 85% of programmers?

I think I'm focusing too heavily on the web development industry (this obviously wouldn't work for something that needs to be performance optimized like a game engine), but I also don't know if that's a bad thing. The web development industry is probably large enough to be solely focused on for the point of this hypothesis.

I'm sure this has been tried before but I don't know what terms to search for to research.

I do also think that once a "business analyst" understands how systems work (pass certain types of request parameters into a function that does filter/map/reduce/calls other functions/loads other data, returns a specific response format), they are pretty much a programmer at that point, right? Maybe the overlap of "people who write technical requirements for corporate software deals" and "people who understand code flow" is very small and I'm proposing something very dumb.

Curious to hear the thoughts of those smarter than me!
What you seem to be missing is that the EU is an organization that legally owes its existence to a series of treaties between 28 sovereign nations and the United States is one, single, sovereign nation under International law. This system of nations is really a post-Napoleon phenomenon and wasn’t solidified until after World War 2. If it had gone a different direction, maybe every American, German, Brazilian and Australian State and every Swiss canton and every Russian oblast would be organized in a manner much like the EU and issue their own passports.

It isn’t a mere organizing principle, there is a legal distinction that is easily drawn with differing legal trappings.

The EU deciding on collective Visa measures is fine, I actually have not taken any issue with that in this entire thread, the only thing I took issue with was a bad analogy which left alone, only confuses and misleads otherwise constructive discussion.

Long and the short of it is: Hawaii and Croatia aren’t analogous to each other vis a vis visa agreements, and that’s because they come from differing International legal positions, a position in which Hawaii is actually irrelevant from beginning to end and Croatia isn’t but has the legal standing and recognition to temporarily be irrelevant in its own visa policies if it chooses to. The nuances are not unimportant.
This looks very nice

As an aside,

wget -r -k -np

works surprisingly well for my offline needs.

For permanent access I defer to archive.is
The author above is referring to reference counting. And no, there is nothing to capture circular refernce.
I had a very similar experience happen to me in High School in which I was expelled for hacking and changing 28 peoples transcripts. We used rainbow tables to target weak NTLM hashes on library computers and exploited the fact that the local admin and domain admin password was the same giving us unlimited access to the entire districts files.

We were caught because one of the people I was working with left a flash drive with his homework as well as decrypted teacher passwords in a classroom workstation. When the teacher examined the drive to ascertain its owner, they discovered their own decrypted password.

Interestingly, there was absolutley zero evidence tying me to the case since I never needed to change my own grades. That didn’t matter. One students testimony was all they needed to expell me. They used the fact that on back to back calculus tests during the time in suspicion, I went from a 79% to a 95%. They didn’t consider that the tests covered 2 different chapters. It was a good life experience in hindsight however.
WTF? This has no instructions at all for assembling a PC!
And maybe that's not such a bad thing. There's a ton of space between "things companies" should do and "things government should do".

In the US, the policy agenda is (still) broadly defined by tribalism along polarizing issues (e.g. abortion). In other countries, it's slightly less bad but the phenomenon is similar. If less social goods were coupled to politics the world might be a better place, but it also might take a paradigm shift where we don't dualize social activity into two bins: stuff you do because you make money doing and stuff you get done by taking from your neighbors because they "owe it to everyone".
One possible cause: because (apart from leaking some memory) they’re stable.

The long-running programs I’ve used in other languages are architected so they respawn new processes regularly. Or they crash often enough on their own that they don’t get the opportunity to leak a ton of memory.

Of the 4 long-running C-family programs I use the most, 3 have crashed in the past 2 days.
Shhhh stop giving away my trade secrets for hiring better than everyone else!
> If your answer to them is "I can't tell you, we just do stuff on the kanban board and don't think about deadlines," they're (1) going to be less than thrilled with you, decreasing trust, and (2) unable to make their decision effectively.

I think the point is that if you do make those commitments you are just making things up, in reality those commitments are worth pretty much exactly as much as not making the commitments.

Where with reality I mean the actual physical reality. I realise that social reality can be different, and even a commitment that you make despite everyone knowing that you don't actually have any basis for making that commitment (no track record, no reasoning, no nothing...) can be valuable.
This sounds like a very good idea, but I'm having trouble making it work. For example, let's say I want to save a great website which will probably disappear soon (https://launchaco.com). I run `echo https://launchaco.com | ./archive` and then...? The generated index.html doesn't load css and js files. Or is this more for static content?

Is there some tool that would allow one to make a copy of a modern SPA? Is that even possible?

EDIT: I'm sad to see launchaco.com go, it would be a perfect tool for a project I'm working on. I don't mind paying, but I gather this is not possible anymore, and anyway, it might take some time for me to have everything ready...
"You basically get full memory management without garbage collection"

No, you don't. Reference counting is not equivalent to garbage collection.

Edit: Garbage collection has no problem collecting circular references if they are out of scope. Not so much for reference counted pointers. You will start leaking memory accidentally if you are not carefull - i.e. reference counting is not "automatic full memory management" - it will delete stuff once it's reference count goes to zero but it you will have to be careful not to come up with circular references that will leak.
http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=207

He's basically described "complete gatcha" which was so addictive/exploitative that it was banned from Japanese F2P games by the government.
In some cases (can't speak about this specific case) it's a matter of being recognizable. Many platforms (YouTube, twitch, ..) have limited capabilities for the creator to be recognisable. With such a branding at the second video you know "it's the anime guy"
Read the presentation. If anything, BBC's characterization is restrained.

This idiot should have been fired sooner.
The thing that irks me a bit is that most of all that separation to "recycling, compost, trash" is mostly for virtue signalling anyway, from both the store and customers. "Early era" recycling made a lot of sense, where the effort to separate high value, easy-to-decontaminate items (like aluminum cans and glass bottles) made sense. The economics and ecological aspects never made much sense once we went to large scale single stream recycling, but China's willingness to be the world's garbage can postponed that for a bit.

I think it would make a lot more sense if the bins were just "glass bottles", "aluminum cans" and "everything else", but then people would feel less good about all the stuff they throw away.
Selected Excerpts (with my comments):

"o An instruction can do multiple things, but only if it fits into the pipeline system. There is no need for microcode."

No microcode? Sign me up!

"o The ForwardCom design is scalable to support small embedded systems as well as large supercomputers and vector processors without losing binary compatibility."

Unbelievably forward-thinking!

"o The instruction set is fully orthogonal."

Aesthetically and mathematically pleasing!

"o Array loops are implemented in a new flexible way that automatically uses the maximum vector length supported by the microprocessor in all but the last iteration of a loop. The last iteration automatically uses a vector length that fits the remaining number of elements. No extra code is needed to deal with remaining data and special cases. There is no need to compile the code separately for different microprocessors with different vector lengths."

Utterly brilliant! Genius level intelligence!

Well, what do you expect? Agner Fog is a LEGEND in the assembly language community...
Does it really matter whether or not we call it "hacking"? Let's call it "unauthorized access" instead.

Whoever actually broke into this account was behaving maliciously, regardless of how easy it was (or wasn't) to do.
The primary reasons they don't do this are likely economic, but the hypergolic fuel used by SuperDracos also isn't particularly healthy [0].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/29qwj9/how_toxic_wi...
What you are saying is right specially for HFT and also because no platform have been able to achieve that till now.
We decided to build this only after talking to 100s of traders personally. We definitely can’t help people develop profitable strategies but if someone has a strategy, she wouldn’t be stuck because of resources/capital limitation. Having said that we are going to keep building the state of the art infrastructure to support more efficient trading as well.
Thanks for taking so much time to provide feedback.
That's literally untrue, but ok.
I live in a capital of an EU country. City mandates recycle bins and garbage segregation due to EU laws, same City collects trash from all bins using same trucks and proceeds to dump it all in one big hole in the ground ~100km away while paying hefty fines. Its been like this ever since we got recycle bins.
I live in New Mexico near the Arizona border. We have DST; they don't. Arizonans tend to be smug about that; New Mexicans don't. The natural background smugness intensity (smugtensity) between the two states is about the same. So by gross state smug delta I'd say a single year-round timezone is popular here.

I just wish for a little more conformity so that I miss fewer November appointments in Arizona, and to wipe away those smug smiles when I tell them why. Although it's possible that expression is just due to me being an idiot who can't tell time.
Because it is just naive cargo cult of the kind fresh programmers (and/or ever-fresh programmers) repeat.

It doesn't take into account the purpose of the language, the ecosystem, the quality of the compiler, gc, et al, the evolution of the syntax and semantics, the available libraries, and so on.

It's just a knee jerk reaction (following old wives tales) of the "Java is verbose", "Java is slow", "Java is this", "Java is that", only staying at the surface level, and based on 2005-era enterprise Java coding practices.
The GitHub terms of service allow forking any repository, regardless of what the license says.
Just a data point: the authors of ParticlesForJustice are 18 people from the field all with research affiliations, and the cosigners include 491 scientists with university and research lab affiliations --- this doesn't count the (vast) number of "additional signatures", many of which also have university high energy physics affiliations. There are 2x as many signatures on "ParticlesForJustice", and they appear to be of significantly higher quality.
She's got a point with respect to durable items. In the last century it was uncommon to throw something out just because it had a crack or tear... minor repairs were the norm. Now we throw out perfectly good phones when the battery gets worn out and it isn't fashionable to replace them. We've gotten (a bit) better at reducing wasteful packaging but much worse regarding the longevity of what's inside the package. Also, world population growth isn't helping the problem.
Car is priced at less than US $ 1M
This runs on proot, which basically ptraces all processes under it and intercepts any syscalls that need privileges or deal with paths, and emulates them.

It works pretty well until you start to run many processes, and then proot starts to be a bottleneck. It's not multithreaded, so every syscall ends up going through a single loop. Any multithreaded code that makes a lot of syscalls will be reduced to being effectively singlethreaded.
There are all sorts of ways that immutability helps at scale, so it's not surprising that as time goes by it seems more and more useful.
> macOS maintains a separate, hidden resource fork on every file downloaded via the browser. There’s a corresponding SQLite database of such “quarantined” files, providing some redundancy. I’d be curious about whether the discovered RATs had quarantine entries. I’d also be curious about what the system logs say.

Um, separate from this case, that's a bit worrying from a privacy perspective.
>While photo metadata can be modified, Williams said the signs he expected to see for metadata modification weren’t there. “There is no evidence that these were modified,” he said.

Assuming the person changed all data/time fields including those in the file system, what other signs of modification would there be? I poked around online and didn't find anything.
So what happens if you try to execute "%PDF-1.<number-between-0-and-7>\n%<4-bytes-above-128>\n" as x86 real-mode machine code anyway? Can't this be modified to simply undo whatever the PDF magic header would do if it was present?
There's no good reason, its politics. If one party says they want to increase the limit, the other party will say: well, just give us this instead and we will increase the limit. And if neither party cares very much or has other priorities, this issue just keeps remaining where it is.
Majority of Big Pharma expanses are not R&D but sales and marketing.
Visual appeal. The anime waifu is more eye catching than a plain background.
I still don't perfectly grasp what this tool does.

How can you deploy multiple staging environments?

I guess I kind of get it now that I think through it.

Say you need 10 services for staging to work. They all talk to the staging database...

Does this DockUp thing also allow you to configure to deploy a database so developers aren't fighting over data/migrations in staging?

It sounds like a containerized development environment, but it's really only as good as the configuration job that is done for it.

How do I test new load balancer rules? Gotta have all of the load balancer images + configuration files in.
I'd invite you to try out the platform then. We aren't offering get-rich-quick schemes. We are just providing the tools to create your own. :)
This was posted to the cpp sub-reddit. The wacky non-standard license and the denouncing of modern C++ are large red flags, as well as vague terms like 'Object Request Broker' and custom implementations of standards.

To be fair though, the custom implementations of standards could be very useful if they can be made free of dependencies.
How to prepare yourself for a good end of life
yeah sure, i have some stuff i did for coursera data science courses up there. and a neat graph algorithm project i did for a take-home interview. i think they’re ok, but i was really asking if google et al want an impressive github resume. based on the comment i replied to, they might.
I have checked out Kryll. It's a great project.

We are focused on providing the access of automated trading/investing to everyone.
I'll try (and yes, some of this is allegory, or metaphor, or whatever.)

Normal human consciousness is very different from what we have now. Normally we're very hip and mellow and happy. (Cf. G. I. Gurdjieff)

The dimly remembered golden age was just normal life, then there was this accident (maybe it was the still-hypothetical Younger Dryas Comet Impact, maybe not.) There was a global disaster (flood, the oldest human societies have actual oral traditions handed down from the survivors.) In the aftermath of that we fell into a kind of Lord of the Flies scenario and developed agriculture and cities (both pathological aspect of our sundering from Nature/Reality.)

All of what we think of as human history is the story of accident victims recovering from a terrible disaster, rising up out of a kind of nightmare or coma, and returning to normal healthy existence, which feels so good (in comparison to the trauma-filled previous existence) that e.g. Christians call it the Kingdom of Heaven.

As we heal our individual and collective trauma we have rediscovered e.g. the basic structure of the Universe (astronomy, cosmology, the Standard Model) and begun to live in harmony with Nature (e.g. Permaculture and other forms of applied ecology). As a side effect of living in harmony with Nature we can communicate with other intelligent beings around us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Plants (esp. Findhorn)

https://ase.tufts.edu/biology/labs/levin/
> If you have a class of people (let's call them W) playing life in easy mode, and another class (let's call them B) playing life in hard more, then the fact that some people in class B still finish the game is irrelevant

This isn't an effective analogy to describe the situation. Remember, on average meritocracy has been evening the playing field. Currently, some groups have less average success than others. But this isn't static. A variety of previously poor and underprivileged minorities have achieved success under the system of allocating opportunities based on capability or performance. Irish, Jewish Americans, Asians, Germans, Latin Americans, and others came to the US largely poor and underprivileged and have achieved success through the meritocratic system. Black that did not migrate willingly (as in, former slaves, indentured servants, etc) [1] and Native Americans have not. But a strong argument can be made that meritocracy works to even out social imbalances more often than it doesn't.

And if we do away with meritocracy what are we going to substitute it with? Most proponents of genuinely disposing of meritocracy propose to substitute it with a system of essentially allocating opportunities on ethnic grounds. This is a terrible idea. If this happens then the route to success lies not in hard work but by politicking and trying to increase the opportunity budgeted to their race. Not to mention such a system would probably hurt poorer minorities who have less clout in politics. White Americans, which make up 60-80% of the population depending on the definition used, have enough votes to form a supermajority and direct all the resources to themselves.

1. There's some interesting nuance about Blacks in America. American Africans - as in, blacks who migrated to the US willingly - have seen large success. For example they graduate from college at twice the rate of native born white Americans: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigration_to_the_U...
This isn’t a visa, and the 90 days visa-free travel allowance still applies.
I think the answer is obvious, someone helped her.
Reusable containers died as soon as plastic containers were developed. Plastic containers are so much lighter that significant money is saved in transport, and obviously the handling and transport for the returns, the inspecting, washing, sterilizing costs are all gone. Huge win for the producers, not sure whether it's a net win or loss overall environmentally.
I'm hoping innovation happens.
The problem is not in the filesystem, it's in the shell. Stop writing shell scripts for tasks that need to be robust! None of these problems hit you when using a better programming language like Python. (Yes, Python 3 has a bit of an impedance mismatch between its native Unicode string type and the filesystem, but that just makes for slightly uglier code, not actual bugs)
Why isn't this just a Quantopian algorithm hooked up to the actual Robinhood API when it comes time to buy/sell/deposit more funds?
I immediately recognized that key :)
Just a playful way to mess with people. At work, I see a guy that wears a D-Va shirt every other day. He is a big guy, and the whole D-Va thing is printed full-screen on his shirt. It makes quite a funny sight.

4chan people are notorious for pulling that kind of shit. I wouldn't be surprised if the person that makes that video is from /g/.

If you don't find it funny, then you don't find it funny, like how you don't get some movies or memes that people like. I do.
> It ends exactly where you decide it does.

> Otherwise, you are simply doing an entrepreneur's job for an employee's salary...

Thank you... I'm beginning to realize this but it's still sort of a professional identity crisis for me. Of course employers want employees who think, and I'm happy to think in terms of revenue and profit, but at the end of the day it's not my responsibility.