skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it's nearly that cut-and-dry. The most elegant code in the world is pointless if it doesn't solve a real problem (the end product), and the an unmaintainable and unscalable mess of crap that actually shipped on time is equally pointless if it's so broken that user's can't use the product or developers can't improve upon it.

Great people need to find a balance, and I don't think leaning towards one side or another shows whether someone would be a great employee and/or founder. This "ship early/ship often" and "move fast and break stuff" attitude is ok for immature products, but there's still a minimum level of quality you need to reach, and as your userbase grows and your product matures, it's almost certainly going to be important to raise the bar on quality.

Shipping prototypes is fine, but you have to keep in mind that if it catches on, your plan to rebuild a non-crap version (invariably you had this plan) will fall through because something else came up.

My rule of thumb for prototypes is to get the data models close to right, and untangle the rest later. Pulling apart spaghetti code isn't too bad as long as there's reasonably sane intent behind it. I can fix systems where people are updating state from the views and writing to the db in all sorts of unimaginable, horrible ways; however, if you're not storing the right info, you're pretty screwed and have a hell of a migration process in your future.
that's a pretty good sign we aren't that racist

Yes the level of racism is probably going down. However that doesn't mean it's at zero now.
That (very nifty) technique only works for periodic phenomena, so it seems hard to apply here.
The problem with affirmative action is that it is based on race

The problem with the need for affirmative action is that it was the outcrop of slavery,which was based on race.
http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/hackers.htm

Mark Tarver compares "street programmers" (people like the OP before he started to take some CS courses) and people who focus in Computer Science without practical (industrial) coding.
Gary McGraw: Proactive defense prudent alternative to cyberwarfare
Sorry, can't help but abbreviate Canada to CA
Oh? I did this, and it kicks me out for not being "enrolled" in the beta. Is there a step I'm missing?
Iranian Blogger Dies After Arrest
I'll concede your first point but I don't think your second always holds true.
The Difference Between Server Side and Client Side, Front End and Back End
You know I'm always up for a naked run
Reading this article has significantly raised my blood pressure.
Yishan is the current reddit CEO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yishan_Wong
Found a bug in Gmail, Cloudy fixes it
they should use a much better predictor of disadvantage than skin color

What would you suggest? All methods of trying to measure "disadvantage-ness" will be flawed (including race/ethnicity ones). I mentioned this in this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4758649
Well, if you want a bit of help, you can shoot me an email - in my profile - and I'll see what I can do (which, I am afraid, will not be much).
>This instance of a job ad with a stated preference for native peoples is discriminatory, yes, but that is wholly acceptable given the state the US and its policies have put native peoples in.

You agree that it's discrimination. Finally.

So discrimination is okay in certain circumstances.

.. I find that hard to accept. Again, you're proposing that the answer for discrimination is more discrimination. What does violent crime and equal participation in society that you keep bringing up have to do with allowing one group to do something we don't allow any other group to do?

What does allowing this accomplish that enforcing the existing equality laws does not? (Referring to EEO and EEH acts, if they are applied like they should be?) Legally, how does this not fall afoul of the equal protection laws as defined in the constitution?

On a more practical level, wouldn't it be more beneficial for everyone involved (the employeer, the employee, society at large) for someone hiring for a position to choose the most qualified person for the job rather than selecting explictly for racial background?

>Your message isn't just that all discrimination is wrong. You quite clearly took aim at the behavior of and policies directed towards minorities as wrong or unjust.

That is my message, and whatever other subtext you choose to read into it is entirely between you and your keyboard. Knock it off.

I don't feel particularly discriminated against here, so I hardly have a dog in this hunt. I don't like how I'm not allowed to question a discriminatory law without being presumed racist. Basically pointing and asking "WTF?" is what I'm doing here.
Visualizing timelines of music mashups
Make sure your shirts are able to get as many washes out of them as the AA ones. I've owned a lot of different brands of shirts and one of the ways in which AA has surpassed many other brands is in the number of washes you can get out of a shirt before it looks and feels like it should be replaced. Many cotton shirts end up with a very rough hand after only 5-10 washes. ELS cotton also makes sure that the shirt resists pilling.

These days 95% of the time I can be found wearing the AA "Track Shirt" in multiple colors because it's got great color fastness and maintains a smooth hand. I'd say each of my shirts have 20+ washes and don't look much different than the day I bought them.
I second that recommendation.

Flint and Tinder was the first thing I ever backed on kickstarter, and even though there were some production issues, they managed to pull through with some pretty darn nice underwear.

Experience was a big part of it, too. The package came with a beautiful map illustrating where the fabric was grown, processed, and assembled. It also came with some matches, which I don't have an immediate need for, but are cute nonetheless.
My point is that quality is an objective measure which does not depend on situation, or reality, or getting things done, or time constraints, or personal issues, or whether you do it in a weekend. Better code is still better regardless of all that.

You have to have an objective notion of quality before you go trying to apply it to reality. And if you do, you might have a chance at improving it.
To Wes: Just curious, how much traffic / conversions does an article like this usually generate from a non-tech press outlet like the Atlantic?
When you're in "Easy" mode, the keys (or in your case frets) don't actually do what they should in reality; They're just used to define generally what range the autoplay pattern gets centered upon (the actual notes played are governed by the selected chord). It's kind of disappointing, really; It should let you play real notes in conjunction with the patterns in my opinion.

The real bug, though, is that the "key" setting at the top of the UI that's supposed to update the available set of chords is completely wonky, and rarely does what it's supposed to (what, you wanted B? Let's go with A instead. You chose major? Minor it is!)
Pick the Perp
App Engine Datastore: How to Efficiently Export Your Data
Right to anonymity? Convicted felons lose their right to own a gun. Some might never use one to commit a crime, but they still lose that right.

This is no different. It is not reasonable to call this a slippery slope. These people were convicted of predatory crimes against children, and those of us who do not commit such crimes have nothing to fear as regards our anonymity until and unless we commit similar crimes.

Not all punishments end when you're let out of prison. Nor should they.
I just recently realized that I've had a few AA shirts through multiple years of heavy rotation, and they still look and feel like new. Whatever it is that they're doing, it works.
A lot of people don't believe that Americans of today should be liable for the actions of Americans then

Another way to think about it: Wealth (and power) is often passed down through generations, through families, from parents to children. Most people are fine with this. Hence people now who are advantaged might be likely to have benefited from slavery in the past, when it was passed down. Why is the wealth allowed to be passed down, but not the responsibility?
It doesn't maintain the temperature for very long, so there's surprisingly little total heat energy transferred over that time. If the camera were behind a barrier and took the picture in a mirror (as is often done with explosions), it could be within 2 miles of a large-ish atom bomb without taking much damage. http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0900/frameset_reset.html?http...
Aggregator spam, actual (MUCH more verbose and in-depth) source is http://www.damninteresting.com/rapatronic-nuclear-photograph...

That source is even linked at the here submitted page as source.
You're making the point that being competent at programming is in some way relative to the perspective of the asker, but that's just not the case. Competence is absolute. There are traits of a good programmer that are immediately evident to any experienced programmer.
Also written up at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/08/iran-accused-tor...
From the about page [0]:

"Mashup Breakdown is an attempt to visually describe the musical wizardry that goes into a mashup. For each track, you'll see the timeline of samples used, and with the currently active samples highlighted in real time as the track plays. I (@brahn) created the site when the spectacular mega-mashup artist Girl Talk released his 5th album, All Day, composed from an astounding 372 songs by other artists."

[0] - http://blog.mashupbreakdown.com/pages/about
And then as soon as they are done fixing it the requirements change and the fancy decoupled codebase (while very flexible in serving the needs of the old requirements) is basically non-workable for the new requirements.
I know! I do too! This is my way of helping myself stop, and hopefully helping others stop too. All of that insecurity and worry is very unproductive.
I love how transparent Yishan is. This is the right way to do community management.
>they thought of and tried out all the possibilities

This doesn't guarantee to come up with the best implementation.

Do you always naturally know the date? Personally, I don't.

I will, however, always know how long 4 hours are, even if I travel to another planet someday. It also has the additional benefit of working as an AP/PM check.
I'm positive that more than a few startups have been sunk by poor code, however I don't have any examples.

I worked on a Big oil company IT project that had failed twice due to bad code. As the business guy I figured out that the system would round round down the final non zero digit of any value stored in the system to either zero or five. Usually this would make the report numbers slightly off, but sometimes it could be massive. Say you bought 1,000 $9.00 parts the system would show $5,000 in cost instead of $9,000, but if you paid $9.26 for the parts it would show $9,250 in cost.

The root cause of this error was the IT team had one guy who was crazy smart and had a bucketfull of assumptions about what the problem was that couldn't imagine that the issue was one baked into some of the first code he had written.

In a nutshell, this was a reporting package that sat ontop of SAP that was supposed to be actually useable by field managers and guys who turned wrenches so they could keep track of their budgets and spending. Of course this was needed because SAP had been implemented with very little training and no helpdesk for users.

The project had been rolled out twice to the field and just rejected flat out because the numbers didn't match, million had been spent building it and there was a 3rd try before the entire system was scrapped and a few million spent on an off the shelf piece of software.

It took a while to find the root cause of the totals being off because I'd always get these great complex explinations as to why the data was off an they had project change orders in to fix it. Finally I just pulled data to find out what was going on, and saw this weird pattern of the data being off in specific places but it took a day before I had the insight that the same thing was changing $140.00 into $100.00 as $0.79 into $0.75 i.e. the final nonzero digit of any stored value was being rounded down to the either 0 or 5.
This has nothing to do with being trustworthy. Would you rather that they didn't compromise and as a result have other parties form the government, which leaves them without any influence at all? Both parties made compromises.
There are other ways ( and better ways ) to do the same thing.

Why don't I get to decide this for myself?
IPad Magic Show
Elite running on a Raspberry Pi
yeah, launch steam like this:

steam steam://open/friends
This is way more clever than I expected.
Truth be told, horrible JS tends to be the norm because people more often than not just need to wing something in it.
Just because you focus on the product does not mean you ship bad code. Nor does a focus on the code mean you ignore the product. I see it more of a philosophical thing - what excites you most? Writing a highly efficient, perfectly formed piece of code; or creating a product that others use.
Haha. Super cool. Cloudy just fixing all of gmail attachment problems.

First saw Cloudy a bit ago; it let you attach a file using filepicker.io which means attachments straight from Facebook, Gmail, other cloud sources. Nice job.
If he's a good enough programmer to do so full time, then he's wasting his time worrying about such broad, imprecise labels as "good" and "bad". I'm saying he should blog about something else.
Build it with me: Hacker News Reader App
You can force it to be true by signing up for other commitments, e.g. a Martial Arts class or something.
Feature companies, fraud prevention and the enterprise
Personally I find this interesting from a marketing perspective... its not like cloning a DB is a new concept, but by calling it "forking your data" they make it seem quite a bit sexier.

I'm not sure if technically its the best term to use, but it does sound cool.
How exactly is this a "secret weapon"? Obama did not carry any of the states in this region except perhaps Florida (it's still being counted), which is not even among the states with these swatches of ancient plankton deposits.

Also, if you look at the map it's clear the blue patches are clustered around major highways and rivers, which is where the population centers will obviously be. As we've seen before, the Democratic / Republican divide is very strongly along the lines of urban vs. rural. There doesn't seem to be any mention in the article of how that factors into this. Obviously there is a bit of chicken & egg thing going on with population and highways, but you would think there could at least have been some discussion of this.
VSee Challenge to OpenTok Customers
Most of the discussions of beautiful code that I've read are about how clear and straight forward are perquisites to beauty. Code that's difficult to understand or reason through is almost always described as ugly. Efficiency is normally impossible without using the right data structures.

I'm not clear who you're complaining about here. It's possible you're complaining about yourself.
Groupon Reports Q3 2012 Earnings Below Expectations
Sadly, new Python-based MIT courses are at least mediocre.

By mere rewriting the code from Scheme to (ugly) Python they lost all the elegance and convenience acquired by decades of evolution of the classic courses and two editions of SICP.)

Watching 6.00CS is boring, when you remember how this very code supposed to look in Scheme.

The old Berkeley's CS61A, which is based on the same great book, was also translated into Python.

For teaching in Python, at the very least, its standard idioms must be carefully selected and used, as it is in the original Python tutorial on the web.
In Engineering we learn about a "black box" - a device that accepts an input and return an output. We couldn't careless about the parts/components inside that black box.

Sometimes we have to treat programming like a black box. All we care about is getting the desired output. There will always be time to make the code efficient later.

The end user and manager only care about the output.
The article mentions the competition for FamilyLeaf, but does not give any inkling of a clue as to how they'll overcome the competition and really the bigger competition from Facebook. Simply saying their confident it will fill the niche doesn't give me any reason to choose it over the myriad of other services lifted.

I'm also not really in the target demographic, but if someone asked me why they should choose to use this service instead of Facebook, I'd be hard pressed to give them a reason.
Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B
Replace the word programmer with writer.

What is absolute competence in writing novels? Writing magazine articles. Publishers want good writers that sell lots of books, young writers want good writers that critique their books.

There is a base level of competence, but even that is often local culture
I don't understand: how is this more secure? Maybe I don't understand the meaning of the word 'secure' in this context.

Photos and everything is still stored on a remote uncontrolled server.
Remember BlueSteel? I'm using it right now. Still use the latest Enlightenment DR16 on all my Linux and Solaris boxes. It does everything I need a window manager to do.
A bit off topic, but this got me wondering: is there any field of study dedicated to quantifying multidimensional, fairly subjective measures (like one's quality as a programmer)? Just intuitively it seems like there's some process in general to map out a subject's traits across multiple dimensions, assess those in a variety of multidimensional contexts, and convey the results in a natural-language way, but I've never seen this talked about in articles like the OP's :\
PhotoJacker for iOS: Quickly and easily back up your Facebook photos to dropbox
PhotoJacker is an iPhone app that enables you to easily backup your personal Facebook albums and high-quality tagged photos to Dropbox.
Super cool use of filepicker.io
The time-sampling rate vs photo-sensitivity would seem difficult to get right without some trial and error. Is it pure luck to get an image of this quality? Its fascinating regarless, however.
But if a startup wants to become a successful larger business (rather than just get acqui-hired by Google), then the code quality does matter. Once they've gotten paying customers, they can't afford to drop everything and build a reliable and scalable system from scratch - it would be cheaper and less risky to build on top of their original code.

Also, depending on the business, the MVP may end up being a large and complex code base that can't just be hacked together haphazardly. Not all startups build iPhone apps; some build on-line retail businesses or investment banks.
Reference Graphs as Tools for Refactoring
Images are giving 403 errors for me.
Priceline.com Agrees to Acquire Kayak
Ah what I didn't know there was a WebMIDI draft... do any browsers plan to support this?
Reflections on Selling
Then again, having the kid realize their parents have been subverting reality could lead to trust and control issues between them.

I'll admit it's nice, but at the same time it's delusionment.
You're right, though projecting to US politics, I think you can safely say PvdA is socialist (they call themselves social democrats by the way). SP would be outright communist by US measures ;-)
So basically http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
This isn't about political correctness, and kneejerk dismissals like this aren't constructive.
Indeed, I'd see it the same way - for individuals (and indeed families) it certainly is not really more secure - if anything, less so due to the likelihood and encouragement for families to put more intimate/sensitive and personal details into the environment.

This and things like Pair, the social network for couples, I would suspect are shooting for high 'value' - where value is correlated with selling that information to third parties (advertisers, at best; but other parties are possible customers too).

edit - after reading their privacy policy, they do currently seem to have a good standing; even so I'd generally be cautious
I foresee some confusing conversations with her peers about the series when she is a little older.
I'm not against any of those things - but we were doing just fine with a lower tax rate. Are these tax hikes going to build roads, buy bombs, or maybe just bail out some Wallstreet friends? Like I said, the government is the best place to invest our hard-earned salaries. Make them figure out how to properly budget money, then maybe allow them more. I'm not arguing to demolish our government, just keep it small. Would you rather give your money to someone who was motivated to do well, like a small business owner, or a lethargic beast like the government, who does not care what it's burn rate is?
Part of being a good programmer is writing bad code sometimes.
This Wikipedia article explains the shape of the fireball http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_trick_effect

The source article has more information about the camera and the inventor http://www.damninteresting.com/rapatronic-nuclear-photograph...
Then why is there such variety of style, brevity, documentation, and technique among good, experienced programmers?
From where? I have no idea what this takes and what it would cost, but if someone does it, I will gladly publicize it on the blog, twitter, relevant mailing lists local to the flight, etc.

-PyCon Publicity Coordinator
The examples shown are neat and the screenshots shown are usable on your ipad:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6432940/paper/mixingWell/4/index.htm...

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6432940/paper/mixingWell/22/index.ht...

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6432940/paper/mixingWell/24/index.ht...

Interesting they use Processing.JS and CoffeeScript.

This is an interesting technical post, but why is it being hosted on fastcompany.com. This belongs on their blog.
Which professions have the most psychopaths? The fewest?
There's a lesson in persuasion here: Including a weak argument (scientifically untenable position about abortion) just serves to make your otherwise strong arguments (evolution, global warming, vaccinations) weaker by its inclusion.
As usual, a negative post has floated to the top. This time from one of Hacker News' most prolific and highly rated posters.

It's not about being PC, it's about a cool hack and supporting one's daughters.
This is similar in concept to Everlane? I am not sure if they are manufacturing domestically, but I think the idea is roughly similar (based on their prior posts here on HN).
Saying that the demographics of colleges/corporations don't match those of colleges directly is evidence of racism is a logical leap that is completely false. Right now colleges already practice affirmative action. Yet African Americans are still underrepresented.

Why? African-Americans on average have lower incomes and thus lower high school educational attainment.

You should be treating the root cause (low-income) instead of implementing a plan that benefits the children of well-off African-Americans and the children of African immigrants to a greater degree than it benefits the children of low-income African-Americans (because those kinds of African-Americans are more likely to meet the minimum qualifications and benefit from the extra boost of affirmative action), a system that also detracts from the opportunities of poor whites and Asian-Americans, as affirmative action is inherently a zero-sum game.
I agree that Iowa would be a good place for third party candidates to make a run, but the problem they have is visibility. There's no national visibility, and there's no local coverage. We have strong local media though, and I would actually call them balanced, so I've no idea why the visibility is lacking.
You're using branches in production? Consider not doing that.