skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, it is a craft, as in crafting:

- It is labor-intensive

- It is creativity taxing

- It produces better results the more skilled the craftsman is

- It can only be learned by practicing

That extends to all professions that can't be automated and benefit from highly-skilled labor. They are all crafts.

The author is just confusing craft and art.
"PROGRAMMING IS NOT A CRAFT"

And then the TLDR basically says: "Non-programmers just want programs to work". As if the two are mutually exclusive... as if craftsmanship forbids pragmatism.

No, just no.
predisposed: make someone liable or inclined to a specified attitude, action, or condition.

Just because you're more inclined to do something, doesn't mean you're likely to do something. See the other comment about a 50% increased likelihood moving someone from 1% to 1.5% risk of succumbing to alcoholism.

That said, a lot of people may make the same mistake and succumb to alcoholism erroneously based on the tests.
> This is a contradiction, if hours of instruction don't increase test scores, then the approach of increasing the length of the school day will have nothing to do with providing better test score outcomes.

It's not a contradiction. Increasing the hours of instruction incidentally decreases the amount of time spent outside of school, which does increase test scores.

You suggested having more accessible child care as an alternative, but that would have to be carried out by the HHS, right? The educational establishment is solving the issue using what tools they have available (namely, longer school hours).
Stanford GSB is actually extremely competitive. Acceptance rate is about 6% (lowest in the world for MBA programs, I believe), and almost the entire applicant pool is highly qualified.
SeatGeek Launches iPhone App
Startup Naming Stories
What is the intended purpose of the "see quote in context" button? For me it always opens a message box saying "NOPE" but nothing else.
I find it interesting that the two examples he gives of "proper professions" are highly regulated guild-like professions whose values are artificially inflated, at least to some degree.

I'm only a very new programmer, but I'm reading Martin Fowler's Refactoring and, even from my limited experience I'm finding that one of the differences between software and other products is that software must be maintainable. So the end user isn't the only end user. Software has to be read and worked on by other programmers in future, and most of the craft involved is not in making a program simply work as it's supposed to, but making the code easy to read, easy to maintain, and easy to modify.

So the aesthetic quality of the code and the craftsmanship involved is very important, for pragmatic and eventually end-user-facing reasons.

But hey, what do I know? I haven't gone to programmer's school or gotten a programmer's license or anything.
> Software craftsmen should be egoless, humble, with a focus on the outcome rather than the code or the process.

That sounds good. But developers aren't like that. We are concerned about getting the job done in a way that promotes our career and/or keeps us from getting fired, well- most of the time.

> I also think there should be a way for passionate, skilled programmers to differentiate themselves from the mainstream commodity bodies, and also to recognise one another, and demonstrate their value to potential employers. What could that be, and how could we make it work?

These are called certifications, and their value has diminished. Here's why:

Many of us survive by Google searching, using stackoverflow and better documented frameworks. And, there still aren't enough of us. Many of us feel we are overpaid, but most would never admit it.

By deciding on a way to determine who is proficient and who isn't, you risk a lot of people not being able to find work, and for what goal? Right now programming is an art. If you make it into a trade with the federal, state, or county regulations saying that the developer must be qualified in X, and they have tests for X (that become irrelevant daily), then you are going to (1) eliminate a lot of developers from the workforce and (2) stagnate the art because right now it develops at a faster pace than any of us can keep up with.
This is the reason why single payer healthcare systems based on residency make economic sense, it prevents this exact situation. We already have this problem to an extent, it's called being elderly.
>> Twig (http://twig.sensiolabs.org/).

The syntax is very Django/Jinja alike. They took good inspiration.

Meanwhile, why the Wordpress team didn't switch to a template engine and orm after all those years is a true mystery to me.
Looks interesting.

Some suggestions:

* The font needs to be larger

* The color scheme could use a little more contrast

* Pasting source code needs to be easier
He is analogizing the fact that pipes are usually inaccessible behind walls, much like code is inaccessible from the executable standpoint. People running programs don't know what is going on underneath, generally. The same holds true for the average person turning on the hot water at their sink.
Absolutely agree with the last point. While I wouldn't expect a designer to throw down much Objective-C quickly, the "move this element 5 points to the right" game can be played by a designer.

Add 5 minutes of guidance from a developer and some forethought (subclasses for common button idioms in your app and how to apply them to elements; storyboard overview; a hand from a developer to hook up a table view cell nib, etc) could save the developers a lot of time. Even gawds, understanding the naming conventions around assets.
Necurs Rootkit Spreading Quickly, Microsoft Warns
Build an iOS App in 10 Minutes with Heroku
As a programmer of 29+ years, I'm not sure I agree! :)
Whole slew of startups should look into genetics. DNA sequencing is basically the final frontier of digitalization of the world. Look what happened with text and images, and it's now happening to everything living. Medicine is going to change.
I won't even think of building for Windows phone until I see them in the wild. I did see one at the cable car turn around in San Francisco - so I asked the guy using it... Yup, he worked for MSFT
I think TrueType fonts with groff is fairly painless; the topic comes up on the groff@gnu.org list now and again but I don't pay much attention. The list is low volume and very friendly, with some real old Unix hands on there; feel free to ask, say I sent you if you like. https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff

Gunnar's Heirloom troff has TrueType support. "troff can access PostScript Type 1, OpenType, and TrueType fonts directly, that is, it can read font metrics from AFM, OpenType, or TrueType files, and can instruct its dpost post-processor to include glyph data from PFB, PFA, OpenType, and TrueType files into the output it generates". http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html
Good point, memories and personality are a little more difficult. I suppose a sufficiently advanced 3D printer could print the state of a beings atoms, though getting this state data might involve paying for future life at the cost of the current one: 1) Get data of original, vaporizing them. 2) Make copy right away. 3) In event of death of copy, make new copy. For the sake of discussion I tried to limit the concept to the state of technology as we know it today, but you are absolutely correct, further advances are needed.
You're right, life insurance is less regulated and is handled by the individual states in the US. Both New York and California prevent genetic discrimination in life insurance, though.
Find My iPhone app now provides driving directions to your device on iOS 6
Hystrix Dashboard and Turbine Stream Aggregator
Sex is determined genetically; Gender is determined socially and psychologically.
+ Is your page accessible to those with disability?
+ Is your markup/CSS/JS correct? (especially when selling your idea to a tech crowd)
T-12 hours before "Programming is a craft" post on HN
Artists and Media companies know that music copyright is impossible to enforce, and they do not build their business around selling of music content. In China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, no one buys CDs, but people spend a ton on consumer goods that are schilled by these artists, and also a ton on concerts to watch them perform live. US record labels need to wake up and figure out how to build real businesses around artists not tied to selling music.
WordPress could really change their bad reputation by dropping support for PHP 5.2 in the next release, and requiring 5.3.

This would allow future WordPress developers to namespace their code, and out allow simple closures withint your code.

As of PHP 5.5, there is no support for a straight mySQL connection. There is no real downside in WordPress adopting the PDO standard.
And from a payer perspective, it's problematic if a sizable population secretly learns that they are at meaningfully greater risk of health problems. Those individuals could then adversely select against the payers by buying Cadillac healthcare plans.
Better: impersonate a well-known trial attorney
> The problem is the education of poor urban and rural childern who are parts of ethnic minorities.

Exactly: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

If you break down American students by their ethnicities and compare them to students in the parts of the world their ancestors migrated from, American students always do better or the same. That is, European Americans do better than Europeans, Asian Americans are about as good as Asians, Latino Americans do better than Central/South Americans, and African Americans do better than Africans.

The problem is that there's such a large gap between different countries that despite a performance improvement among Latino and African Americans relative to Central/South Americans and Africans, they drag down the overall American average, bringing America below many countries in Europe and Asia.
So, silicon is virtually everywhere. How would this affect manufacturing costs?
Thank you for posting this link again. It has led me to an interesting paper on a related paper co-authored by Martin Odersky called "Deprecating the Observer Pattern with Scala.React"

http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/176887/files/DeprecatingOb...

Interestingly, the farther I read into this paper, the more I think the Mozilla Rust community should get behind functional reactive programming. After all, an experimental language created with the intention of being used for creating an experimental browser should probably give serious consideration of the abstractions used for event handling.

I also found a talk on FRP, for anyone who's curious:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HMKNexdyOw

...the slides for which are here:

http://www.slideshare.net/edwardamsden/introduction-to-funct...
I was bummed to see they won't ship to Maryland. It seems Maryland thinks adults aren't responsible enough to have access to their own genetic data.
Actually there is a startup called Counsyl that tests for about 1000 of those genetic diseases for about $350. I think you have to get it through a doctor though.
You make a very good point that comparing american total aggregate scores to the best of the individual european states is misleading. We could compare total american average results against total european and show that the US does better, as you have, or even better is to present histograms showing american state by state results and comparing to european state by state results. This makes sense and is a fair way to compare since in both europe and the US, educational policy is mostly determined at the individual state level rather than at the union of states level.
Ask HN: Do you have any one-man websites? How much do you make?
I am curious how many of you manage a single employee premium website and how much you make from doing that? I'm curious if longterm med/high individual income streams can be made by working on self-sustaining small projects instead of lots of nurture required large ones.
I've posted this here a number of times, but it looks like it is still needed. Here are some stats on US performance, broken down by ethnicity:

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-...

tl;dr White Americans do very well when compared to White Europeans. Asian Americans do roughly as well as east asian nations (a bit worse on math, a bit better on reading/writing).

The bulk of the gap between the US and other nations is caused by Blacks and Hispanics (groups which are uncommon in Europe and Asia) dragging the US average down. I.e., the problem doesn't live in the education system.
Don't forget too that while Bluehost does offer unlimited BW, it's not really unlimited. It's just good marketing.

The moment you start to get any real traffic on your site they are going to shut you down without notice and ask you to either upgrade to their expensive non-shared solution OR terminate your contract.

I've seen this happen in 2 different cases.
It's sort of sudo anonymized. I purchased my test in 2010. The account is tied to my email address for login. I ordered the test under just my first name to my office at the time. I also purchased a test for a friend. Other then an email address, that test isn't tied to him in any other way. So while its not impossible to tie back to someone, it's not a perfect 1:1 relationship.
I think one of the most compelling stories as to why 23andme (and other genotyping services) is amazing is Sergey Brin's:

http://too.blogspot.com/2008/09/lrrk2.html

Because of 23andme he found out early that he has a high chance of getting parkinson's disease. He now has the chance to prevent (or at least prepare for) it.
Ask HN: What was Pixar's initial partnership deal with Disney?
I'm very curious if anyone has any insight or even an educated guess on what Pixar's initial partnership with Disney looked like to build Toy Story in the early 90s.

Specifically, I'm curious how much equity Pixar gave up to have Disney on board.
ITunes 11 and Colors
"The bad: * The documentation is badly out of date....."

Completely normal, this is one of the common risks with software projects:

".... This is a fact that companies do their best to have revenue since the first days of their creation. This implies another fact that always a proper documentation is the last thing they provide to the users....." (http://www.drdacademy.com/?id=17)
Elsevier editorial system hacked, reviews faked, 11 retractions follow
Do companies like this ever get involved in lobbying? The complexity of the problem seems to be the core of their value proposition, so I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they subtly or overtly opposed simplifying reforms.
Note that he says 'baby elephant' instead of 'car'.

Edit: a baby elephant weighs 3 tons, whereas an average car weights 2 tons. Hmm.
Previewing on Android: There is this http://code.google.com/p/android-ui-utils/
I'm really curious how they're doing things such as unemployment insurance filing, local taxes, garnishments, etc.

This is a world that is RIPE for the taking if you can do it right, but for $154/month @ 99 employees, they should be aware they're going to blow 3 times that in support costs (for instance, how do integrate this into GL using Quickbooks? How can I set up my Vacation accrual rule for employees that isn't straight forward, etc.)
The european court of justice has already ruled that price discrimination based on gender for insurance premiums is sex discrimination and therefore in violation of fundamental human rights.

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-11-123_en.htm?loca...
I highly recommend arch grants. who couldn't use no strings attached money. it could really get your startup off the ground.
Nice work Nate! Don't listen to the haters and keep on building what you are stoked about.
BTW, I just realized that TechCrunch incorrectly listed our prices initially. They've since updated the post to reflect the actual cost. Our goal is to be competitive on price and significantly less expensive than ADP and Paychex. You can view our full pricing at zenpayroll.com/#pricing
Installing vFabric Administration Server & Provisioning tc Server across 3 Nodes
While I agree with most of your points, I discourage doing everything from within Xcode. Yes, the Organizer will get you up and running and at least get your app onto a device, but anything beyond that it quickly breaks down.
haha! mark loves these, i think he started doing them way back at zurb.

we took them away because they are hooorible for perf – and were exposing a memory leak bug in chrome i believe
I've read _The TexBook_ and other material but just find the TeX mark-up so noisy to parse compared with the troff style of `.cmd' at the start of the line, cmd is often short, with the odd bit of \s+2 embedded within the line, depending on personal preference.

troff and friends were developed on Unix in its early days by the originators of Unix and it shows in what a good fit they are to the environment and in their elegance; they are Unix programs. TeX was born outside of Unix; it runs on Unix.
Announcing vFabric Data Director 2.5, GemFire 7, EM4J 1.2, and More
I've been considering it too, it feels like as of recently the new findings coming out were done with new SNP's not tested previously. I'm just paranoid that i'll have to keep doing it ever 3 years. For now, i'm planning on waiting until there's a result i'm truly interested in.
Maybe Dan reads/answers this:

1. Who hosts Bomb Sight / what kind of solution does the site use?

2. When you say "we managed to squeeze a bit more capacity out of it" what kind of numbers from pre-to-post "squeeze" are we talking about?
Forget coding. Startup founders should focus on Product & Design.
I'd also argue that it's also art, just with a smaller target audience. Open source software is a great example of this. A lot of open source projects are really just experiments in expressing an idea in a new way, or basically saying, "hey guys, check out this cool thing I did." _why was the trademark example of taking this concept and constructing an entire persona around it, but art is about expression, and programming allows for some interesting forms of expression.

Just like it takes a little training to appreciate the intricacies involved in the construction of a piece of literature, classical music, painting, or other work, it takes training to appreciate beautiful software.

Code is just a much newer canvas for ideas, so it's not as mature.
CloudFlare is the new wp-cache.
Ask HN: Advice for drift.io - What would you do with billions of pairs of eyes?
Drift is being developed in order to enhance an individual's visual perception by providing near-real-time access to extra-sensory images from around the world. These images are being shared instantaneously and are available to view anywhere on Earth just moments after the original event. The volume and quality of images being created are increasing as rapidly as the lag-time between initial experience and worldwide availability is shrinking.

For the first time in history, we can access a massive distributed network of "eyes" (i.e. mobile devices with cameras) and see what people all over the world see, create, share and experience. In essence, our brains have suddenly acquired billions of new pairs of eyes – our vision has been liberated from the limitations of our physical presence in a specific location.

Drift facilitates access to recently shared images and presents them in a fluid, focused and easily digestible view. A Drift keyword search yields results that can be filtered by location. Use this view to gain analytic insight into current events and cultural trends like never before. Explore and become inspired by vistas which, only a decade ago, were reserved solely for the beholder.

I am seeking feedback on features and functionality you think would useful to add to Drift.

Please go and check out Drift at http://drift.io
Get a feel for it and let me know where you'd like it to drift to in the future. In addition to the discussion here, I can be reached via the email address or Twitter in my profile.
I agree. Nimbys and current owners prevent the building of higher density and modern housing. You would hope that the Federal government would step in because new construction would create jobs. Also in the Bay area, you could add lots of higher density housing near the Caltrain and gain that way.
FreezeGun: easy mocking of Python datetimes
A Tale of Modernization: Stopping Bank Robbers as a Service
For what it's worth, I use intuit's payroll (formerly paycycle) and while it's functional, it is neither innovative or progressing. It's very much stagnant, with a UI straight from 2000. I've been with them for two years and nothing has been changed.

I can't speak for the others, but there's very much a "it works, lets not mess with it" vibe from Intuit's offering.
"Non-programmers don’t care about the aesthetics of software"

https://www.google.com/search?q=market+cap+apple
From what I remember of my research looking at boats and boat births on the peninsula, the boat space cost was about the same as an apartment, then you needed to pay to buy and maintain the boat. (anything in water needs... a lot of maintenance to remain floating.) - certainly around silicon valley, there aren't free places to park your boat. (the economics may be different elsewhere.) also, I did this research around the first dot-com bubble, it's likely the numbers have changed. But still, there is a reason why they call them 'holes in the water into which you throw money'

RVs are a bit more of an open question; where are you parking it? I mean, you /can/ boondock for free, switching between walmart parking lots and the like, but that requires an RV that can move when the owner of the space wants it to move, (and when the wastewater tanks need to be emptied.) and functional RVs are pretty expensive, and they require maintenance. is that more than what an apartment would cost? certainly if it's a nice RV. Could you buy a cheap RV off craigslist and keep it running for a year for $12K in depreciation and maintenance? maybe? but it'd be a close thing, and it wouldn't be a nice RV, and you'd have to move about often. but maybe. I do see a whole bunch of people boondocking on Stockton Ave near one of my co-lo facilities.
"decreases the amount of time spent outside of school, which does increase test scores"

Do you have evidence of that or is it something you assume should be true?

Internationally, more school hours is weakly correlated with lower achievement, not strongly correlated with higher.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/dec/13/more-school-...

For example, Poland has 595 hours of instruction, far less than most countries, and has very high academic achievement.

Finland, Norway, Australia all have below average hours and yet do better than average.

Mexico mandates 1058 hours and has among the worst scores internationally.

Based on actual empirical evidence I have seen over the years, the claim that more hours in school increases scores is false and unsupported by evidence.
We just completed the process of switching over from Paychex to ZenPayroll. It's now clear to me why companies like Paychex should be very worried. ZenPayroll's online dashboard is orders of magnitude simpler and more intuitive than Paychex'. By automating most of the process (in lieu of a payroll specialist calling you every 2 weeks), their cost structure will enable them to always beat Paychex on price.
Wow! Is that online?
There's nothing similar in older linuxes?
FTC expected to settle Google patent case