skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"most software is written to solve a particular problem and doesn't need to be reused"

Sure. But most software needs to be maintained, and usually over a way longer period than the original authors imagined (we're sometimes even talking decades here).

And not only that: that "particular problem" your code solved? Well guess what: the problem changed. Because that's what happens in the real world, nothing is ever static. Shit happens, things change, that's the only constant.

Most software development in the real world is not writing fresh new code in greenfield projects. It's trying to keep the old crap running, old crap written by coders who thought they only needed to solve that one particular problem once.

So no, it's not fine that most code is an unmaintainable mess. It's the primary reason why most software work outside the small world of internet startups mainly consists of digging through steaming piles of crap instead of the joy of writing code.

YAGNI does not stand for "I'm not gonna need it, so fuck everybody else".
IF Twilio comes even anywhere near really threatening AT&T I'm sure AT&T would 'just' buy them. They are the same AT&T that offered > 35Billion for another telco.
This is a loan, not an investment - the difference should be obvious, but to spell it out: they'll want their money back whether you make it or not.

I'm going to make an assumption that they are looking for equity too, but I could be wrong.

Putting it together: they loan you money which you have to pay back with interest, and you give them a %age of whatever you build just as a topping.

You could go to the bank and get about the same and not have to give away anything. Is this really what you want?
"At that time, Kessler also said his company sees cable-cutting as no more than a temporary austerity measure that will cease as soon as the economy takes a turn for the better."

To steal a page from John Gruber, this sounds like one to keep for claim chowder.
That's the equivalent of USA blowing up an USA base with nuclear bombs to defend against the invaders. Please take it to them, blow up the invaders in their own bases.

Instead, promote Internet Freedom to replace and outlaw SOPA, DMCA, PROTECT-IP, COICA, CEST, OPENA, ACTA and more.

The pacifist nature of the SOPA movement sucks because it targets one bill, when there's a tsunami of anti-Internet bills.
In July 2010, some yutz who used to work there said that Conde Nast likes to "allocate resources proportionate to revenue."

http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html
Nitpick: for some reason everyone's chin is cut off. This is in Opera and Chrome. Otherwise looks really cool!
> there will never be higher concentration of fucking brilliant and well-connected individuals as there are a major universities.

The concentration is far greater on the internet. You have virtually everyone on the planet within arms reach. It is interesting how we've failed to really utilize the medium.

You and I have now made a connection. I could be the most important connection you ever make. You pobably don't care. (That goes both ways, of course)
Its not that complex. CouchDB is the core technology that Couchbase and BigCouch, et. al are using to power their more "vertical" offerings, in various degrees. CouchDB is not going anywhere, and its a great standalone product.
Based on a hilarious night at the bar, I quickly learned some PHP and JS and launched LinePunch.

It grabs from two simple arrays of jokes and punchlines that I update manually. I made sure you NEVER get the correct combination, but you can edit the URL to do so. Then just a really simple reload of jokes and joke submission.

Any and all feedback is welcome. I hope people find some of the combinations as hilarious as I do. Sorry if you are offended. Actually, no I'm not, it's a joke.
The article would make more sense if it were titled: "Why AT&T should acquire Twilio."
Genius: one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration : Thomas Edison
I came here to look for the obligatory 3 shells comment. :)
Praia de Non Nuoc em Danang - Vietname
Customers don't care about "free stuff" or even prices. They care about service. This is my point. GroupOn may help bring in the customers with the coupons but customers don't go back because of prices (not so much). If the experience sucks, it sucks and that's it.
If your are implying that an rise/spike in enrollment in architecture programs was because the students were counting on having a job (because of a building boom of some kind) after the end of the program, I beg to differ. (MArch here.)

Architecture is one of those passion fields that you enter knowing full well that the barrier to entry to becoming established is very high. It is also not a meritocratic field (like software). Everyone in my school (Columbia/GSAP) knew that at the end of the program, we were looking at n years of slavery for some big name architect (if lucky) and it was all together hugely competitive. After all, we had the example of our instructors (some of them highly regarded talents) who were mostly "paper architects" and pamphleteers.

Many of us elected not to go that route and branched out to computer graphics, modeling, and some like me ended up being software engineers, instead of spending the next few years drawing bathroom details for some commodity architectural firm, hoping for future glory. (Yes, ego is a big driver for architects, and possibly a job requirement.)

So regarding the current unemployed numbers, I would be curious to know what percentage are electing to remain unemployed due to perfectly reasonable reluctance to do banal work after having spent anywhere from 4 to 7 years pursuing their passion for excellence in design.
It's funny to me that, with all the attention to detail, they used the wrong font for the "One more thing" backdrop. It should be Myriad Pro https://www.linotype.com/partner/charmap/16785273 but I think it's Arial.
Another good feature would be a summary of how SOPA currently stands, or a link to a website that has that information and keeps it current.

I love HN, but it is NOT the place to get up to date political info. I believe at one point there were articles saying "SOPA postponed until January" and "SOPA will be voted on before Christmas" up at the same time.

Also, a lot of those representatives have facebook pages. Is it worth SOPA opponents time to go on there and give them a hard time in the comments, or should we stick to phone calls? It might be worth including a link to their FB pages anyway, though I'm not sure on this one.
If you are interested in this it's worth watching and/or reading "Cool It":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_It_(film)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_It:_The_Skeptical_Environm...

Which is not so much about whether or not climate change is happening but more about the reaction of governments on how to deal with it, i.e. the economics of it all.
What does it mean to be "culturally literate" here exactly? Able to speak Chinese?
The cost of cable is something I've heard everyone I know, every relative, every acquaintance complain about at some point. A typical high-end cable TV and internet bundle costs more than most people spend on electricity, heating, water, sewer, cell or landline phone. Only 61% of American households have wired cable television service at all.

If that cost doesn't affect you at all (and you think comparing to a daily latte from Starbucks, something else most people can't afford, is a useful analogy), yeah, it's something to keep in mind when evaluating this article and the comments. Your perspective may be a little different than the respondents.
If you're on Android then Famigo Sandbox sort-of solves this.

It only lists a subset of apps (automatically adding child-friendly ones it finds, but then editable) and prevents access to the phone functionality, redirects ad links etc.
One of, if not the main feature that I associate with Netflix is its large library of content. I pay the monthly fee as I can assume to a certain degree that the majority of the things I want to watch will be available. I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

Fragmenting the content like this over numerous streaming solutions each with their own charges and workings is, in my eyes, a huge step backwards for online content. I can't see users being happy to pay more parties for the same content on numerous services. This to me reeks of networks killing the golden goose.
With stories like this, I always wonder: do the executives have kids? What are those kids watching? Do they own Rokus? What about their friends, classmates, roommates, etc.?

Do the executives really just keep the blinders on all the time?
I may be mistaken, but I believe a lot of engineers who work on physical projects like bridges must have an engineering degree and pass other tests to work legally. That would put the degree in higher demand.
Six months is just about enough time off that you really start to miss working.

I'd actually recommend setting off with the goal of staying on the road for an entire year. Just travel. Nothing else. Not even a laptop along.

The cool thing about doing it this way is that you won't make it. You'll have the time of your life for 6 months or so, but then a little voice in the back of your head will start asking for more. 8 months in, your brain will just be crying out for stimulation that it can't get from figuring out which local bus to take from here to there. You'll need to work. You'll go out of your way to find a new project, to the point where you'll book a flight home so that you can get moving now.

That's what you need to recenter yourself. If you just take a month-long break, you'll never truly get off your starting point, so you won't end up where you need to be.
Whenever a company like HBO cuts off direct DVD sales to rentals, the message is simply "we don't want to make life easier for you", which makes sense since NetFlix is a direct HBO Go competitor.
Facebook: building timeline scaling up
Once everything becomes encrypted you're going to need specialized tools (Wireshark) for debugging anyway, so does it matter whether the inside is text or binary?

Also, efficient formats/protocols need to use byte counting, and byte-counted "text" protocols (BEEP and bencode come to mind) are effectively human-unreadable anyway.
If I didn't have to pay for cable and the regular HBO rate, yes, it would be good.
For me? Two.

Django is good for getting a site/system up and running fast, so long as I'm not too concerned with specific implementation details (the users 'just work', etc.)

Pyramid is good for a longer-term/more custom system where being easily able to modify (or choose) particular implementation details is important to me. It's not as fast to get a full-featured site off the ground, but the pieces glue together in a way that I really like.

I think that there was a well known post many years ago about "glue" and "full stack" frameworks, comparing pylons (now pyramid) as the former, and django as the latter.

#EDIT: Oh, and I used to do a bit of work with Zope/Plone, but that's pretty much what you'd consider to be the 'enterprisey' setup for python, and I wouldn't recommend it for most uses.
I second this -- strongly.

I've spent the past four months leading a team of programmers assembled for the sole purpose of dealing with a productiontype system (written by one of the early employees in a weekend because one customer wanted to evaluate something), trying to turn it from a hack into a functional piece of software while half the business is standing on it.
Rather create scarcity
There is few good reddits with good/decent moderation (deleting silly memes and off topic comments, /r/AskScience , /r/fitness and /r/DepthHub/ comes to mind).
I agree with your point about fragmenting content, but not about Netflix. The only reason I still pay $8/month for Netflix is their amazing mass of children's programming.

I could do without the decade old movies.
This is kinda-sorta like literate programming. I like the idea of using familiar text formating and labeling conventions to express relationships.

What I'd not like is having to use specific editors in order to work with such code, and an implementation that allows for easy movement between a purely text version and a GUI version seems tricky to get right.

I'd not want to write HTML or HAML but I wonder if there's be a decent way to use Textile or Markdown table syntax. Basically pass a big string to some method that Does The Right Thing.

OTOH the overhead of editing or reading that might be worse that what the article was railing against.
Reddit has sponsored links paid by CPM so all eyeballs account for some revenue. I don't have any info on profit but between the ads, reddit gold and schwag i'd guess they're in the black.
(And the irony behind "WebGL is a derivative of OpenGL" is that on Windows (at least for Chrome and Firefox), WebGL is actually all based on Direct3D, via ANGLE:

http://code.google.com/p/angleproject/)

I would love to see shaders on CSS, but GLSL is such an ugly layer to add on top of a fairly nice design. Notice how the SVG filters are so much simpler to specify than the GLSL-on-CSS proposal.

I would much rather that Adobe designed a more restricted, declarative little language which would easily compile to GLSL, than bolt an almost-turing-complete C variant on top of CSS which is hard to reason about, hard to guarantee safety (most of the webgl-crashes-video-drivers issues have still not been solved, aside from the hamfisted "we will block webgl if we see this set of drivers" solution), and hard to interoperate.
That's why the cable companies like Comcast want to take over. "Free" streaming with your existing subscription. It's already out there in their Xfinity app.
I don't get it. I zoned out after the

'I am going to drop 99% of all candidates because they fail the following'

and

'You sent me a looooong resume'

In my world you're sending the resume before the interview. If that's such a big issue (is it?), then - don't invite those guys. Your 99% rate just dropped significantly and you're not wasting time on both sides.
Funny because I care not for the children's programming but for the ability to watch the classics as well as more recent releases. A large library can cater to many different tastes.
Price discrimination is hard. I've heard of Americans picking up crappily bound but reasonable priced big name texts, like Norvig's AI book, or CLRS's algo book produced for India.

276 RS < $6 US
http://www.dealsandcoupons.in/resources/3986-discount-book-I...

The publishers don't want to risk shaking up big profits to sell near cost to the low end. If you sell cheaply to the poor schools, what prevents the poor schools from reselling the books to the rich schools 20 miles away?
The reddit admins have made a policy out of basically never intervening on the site - how ever egregious the transgressions are - so the inmates have slowly taken over the asylum.

There's also something to be learnt about this on HN. :)

I think reddit as more of a platform than a community at this point aside from the hivemind and reddit memes going on there. I'm sure it's still an interesting place to create your own subreddit, if you have the time to moderate it (although you can't IP nor e-mail ban people from it).
Group to Launch Mobile Developer Alliance
Interesting. It's easy to pattern match this against the old "media company wants control and doesn't get the modern world" chestnut.

On the other hand, try pattern matching this against the "band decides to put work directly on internet rather than going through a label" or "writer decides to self-publish rather than go through a publisher" story. Why wouldn't a direct-sales model work for them?

Admittedly, they aren't quite doing the direct-sales model, since they only grant access to HBO GO through some sort of premium TV subscription. But if they offered direct subscriptions to HBO GO...
Ditto. I don't live in the US too. I've been eyeing to crowdfund a personal project in indiegogo instead. But haven't really looked into how the process goes.
This is true--and I have many meaningful relationships online as well (networking is pretty much the key to success in any area--you have to know people). My connections in college seem to be a bit more meaningful though--there are the people that helped me grow and develop into the businessperson and designer I am today.

Also, I do care about the connections I make here and elsewhere on the web--I'll start:

I'm Jeff Siarto--I live and work in East Lansing, MI and run a small research company with my wife and college friend. I'm also the author of Head First Web Design and I enjoy building RC airplanes and amateur UAVs.

I'm also a leap-year baby.
Here's my naive Ruby version for what it's worth. It took me way too long, perhaps because I have a nasty cold. I've been programming since 1983. If I showed up for a code interview today, I'd probably fail miserably.

def print_pascal(rows)
row=[1, 0]
(1..rows).each do |r|
next_row = Array.new(r + 1)
next_row[0] = 1
(1..row.length-1).each do |i|
next_row[i] = row[i] + row[i-1]
end
print row[0..-2], "\n"
row = next_row << 0
end
end

print_pascal(100)
Open a physical space, like coworking place or hacker community center.

It puts you at the center of community, gives you tons of new contacts and entertains you a lot.
Is there a consensus about what caused the decline of Digg? I thought it had a lot to do with the redesign that couldn't be reverted, but I don't like to peddle hearsay and assumptions like it's the truth, especially since I never used Digg.
I haven't paid for cable in my life and I don't plan on starting. The on-demand functionality that streaming services offer and their multiple-device support is way too useful to give up in place of cable services.
It wouldn't be surprising, the reddit community is growing quickly and I expect linkedin has a lower pages/visit than reddit.
Some employers might be better prepared to ask engaging questions, but the reality is that most interviewers are like the guy in that article. You can fight it all you want, but people who are serious about finding good jobs are better off if they can sell themselves rather than waiting for some HR guy to ask the right questions.
"Does it not strike you that quite a few HN'ers openly admit that they would not pass the filter?"

I have yet to see someone who says that they would not pass the filter. Every single example I've seen in this thread is someone making up a different filter and saying that they would not pass that. I see people saying that they took a long time to debug subtle bugs in it, that they don't know the definition of the problem, or that in general they need documentation to code, all of which is completely irrelevant to the filter as given. Subtle bugs are allowed, the definition is given to you, the solution doesn't need any documentation (and if it does, you can just make up whatever API call you expect would be present in a sane standard library)

I'd be shocked to find any good programmer who, given the definition of Pascal's triangle, couldn't produce some decent, possibly buggy, incomplete, and syntactically incorrect, code on a whiteboard to print out a row from it.

I've yet to see anyone give an argument for how a good programmer could fail this test that doesn't rest on some feature of the test that doesn't actually exist.
This. My Aunt was a career counselor for the past several decades. She won't let me use a resume longer than one page.

You don't need to list ever job you've had since your first part-time job flipping burgers during high school. Just try to figure out what they care about and list that prominently. If they want to know more, they'll ask about it. That said, make sure you summarize things in a way that doesn't make it appear that there are large gaps in your resume, though you may still have problems if your most relevant experience was ten jobs ago.

For a tech job, you want to focus on things like what tools you've used, what problems you've solved and any awards or achievements that you can brag about. If you really feel that you can't leave anything out, put a note on there with a link to an online copy of your CV which, unlike a resume, is supposed to list everything. Then watch how many hits it gets to see how little people care.
I have the 4GB 11" Air, and it's quickly becoming my favorite dev machine, even when I'm next to a monster dual quad core Xeon box. The Intel card is fairly slow at pushing pixels around (so if you develop graphics you'll notice slow texture access, etc.), but is mostly capable.

The simple deciding factor is a SSD in the laptop. It's hard to overstate how much of a performance difference these make in compiling, localhost-served webpages, etc.
True, but could just anyone write it as offensively as the below Python one-liner?

(Were one to ever write such code in production, he should be escorted from the building immediately!)

from itertools import tee, izip, chain
pascal = lambda rows: reduce(lambda acc,n: acc+[(lambda it: [sum(x) for x in (lambda it,n=2: izip(*((lambda it,n: ([next(it) for _ in xrange(n)],it)[-1])(it,pos) for pos,it in enumerate(tee(it,n)))))(chain((0,),it,(0,)))])(acc[-1])], xrange(rows), [[1]])

num_rows = 10
print '\n'.join( ' '.join(map(str,row)) for row in pascal(num_rows) )
There is always a demand for something that feels and acts less monolithic.
You can believe that something is both heritable and flexible. Most personality traits are at maximum about 50% heritable; I don't think that's so bad.
Do you have the DB on the dev machines, or just as part of the build server?

We found that running unit tests that hit databases was far too slow to have people running them all the time. Ones which mocked out database calls were over 100 times faster, which meant we can run the whole test suite in under three minutes, where the old test suite we used to have which made DB calls took over an hour and a half, which was infeasible to run on check-in, let alone on dev machines.
We have a service tech here who has been prototyping a pretty slick Android app that will be integrated into engineering. From my brief experience working with him, my estimation is he has a natural talent for this stuff that eclipses even the majority of our senior engineering staff. In his spare time he does robotics competitions.

Had another guy like that I worked with 6-7 years ago. No degree, learned everything on the job, then got a CS degree from night school over a couple years so he could be promoted to an actual engineer. Left after his first review, got a job as a sr. engineer at another startup, then was promoted to a director before he turned 30, leading a team of 12. The best engineer I ever worked with.

Now my experience is quite different from a good deal of folks on HN, but I went to a decent school (UCSD) and worked at 4 startups and 1 bigco here in San Diego, in agreggate about 100 engineers over the years.
The casual assertion that people in the UK barely use lavatory paper is beyond funny. We use epic amounts
The deviations are all in the run-time, mainly no continuations. Also, I'm not sure if I'll guarantee tail recursion, since I'm so dependent on the language I'm compiling to. Ports and vectors might be different too.

Macros, lists, functions, syntax, etc. will be the same though. I'm basically using the R5RS as a rough guide for a language.

Debugging is actually really exciting to me. I really want to learn how to write a debugger. So that is early on the feature list: a debugger written in Outlet itself so that it can run in any environment it compiles to. I'm thinking there could be a web interface to step through Outlet code. I'm not sure, but we'll see how far I get :)
Let me try (I do not often write production C code)

1. You need to malloc 3 words, and you're only allocating one (you want sizeof(Abc))
2. Abc in the struct will not resolve (change to struct _Abc and the struct name to _Abc)
3. You should cast the result of malloc/check for failure
4. This is bad memory management practice, I think.