skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although it's true that people want programs for their functionality, not their beauty, there is a reason why it's a good idea to focus on the "beauty" of the program that lies beneath the functionality, and that's because unlike bridges, which rarely need to change once they are built, programs often do need to be improved and modified after the 1.0 release.

More importantly, other people will need to be able to revise and extend upon your work, and if it is easy for other programmers to understand your code, and be able to work on your code, this makes your code far more valuable in a way that might not be visible to a customer who is only interested in the functionality.

Now, there may be cases where this doesn't matter. If it's a startup where it's not even clear whether you're going to get the next round of funding, maybe taking the time to invest in making your software more maintainable doesn't matter; letting technical debt build up might be acceptable.

But there is a reason why open source projects care very much about the underlying quality of the code from an aesthetics point of view, and that's because we need to worry about the long-term maintainability of the code after we accept a code contribution. Even if the startup goes belly up, you can reuse open source code. Proprietary code is much less likely to be reused, and besides, once the startup fails and you are fired and the assets get sold off, why would you care about how maintainable the code will be? It's very unlikely you'll ever get the chance to work on it again....

But in the case of open source code, caring about the craft of writing good, maintainable, elegant, easy-to-understand code is important. And in that way, I do respect programmers who respect their work as if it were a craft.
I'm still looking for a discount. I think I'd buy at $50.
This article lacks substance. Describe in detail what their setup was, what tweaks they made. Just saying it got slow and they added Cloudflare just makes it a bad article. Everyone knows a CDN can help. CDNs arent a magic bullet though, and it would be nice to see the technical side of things that were done.
The Web's Dirty Little Secret: Ad Services Can Kill Your Traffic
Move a bit further north. I'm in Denmark, and here's a great culture when it comes to getting things done.
It would be trivial to figure out who you really are once enough relatives sign up.
That's not quite what the poster is asking for.
Do you really know what features are new in Windows 8?
That's very similar to a philosophy I have about feeling pain all the way up to the decision maker.

If the decision maker (project manager in this case) doesn't feel any consequences for their decisions, then they won't have any incentive to make good ones.
Collaboration Tools For Working With Remote Teams
"With a craft, the product has intrinsic beauty in its own right." - Is he talking about art?
“Startup City” Report Questions What NYC Tech Boom Has Done for Working Class
You can always blacklist a package (such as linux) in /etc/pacman.conf to avoid upgrading it during pacman -Syu, for example. I had to do this during a power regression in the kernel. However this isn't a long term arch strategy. Note also that arch has LTS kernels, should you prefer.
Well, that certification that I'm talking about doesn't exist right now, so... we kind of have to guess. No one can get away with saying, "I won't read crap code" and remain employed, but that problem is exactly what I'd like to see some professionalism to fix. I am fucking sick of bad code.

To answer more directly, I'm not good at picking startups (0 for 2) and I doubt I would have foreseen Facebook's success. I didn't, although maybe if I knew the company better I'd have been more of a believer. My general answer is: No, I wouldn't take a startup job where the bulk of my time would be spent reading other peoples' code, unless the code quality were extremely high.
The poster said:

As someone without iTunes, what does iTunes do now?
Errm, that really isn't true. The vast majority of the Paycycle engineering team is still at Intuit and working on Intuit Online Payroll and/or related projects. The amount of people that have left over the past few years feels inline with normal attrition rates (or slightly better than).
Hint: all property is a government monopoly.
Great post, interesting to see what Wordpress adds in each release.
Software is just a medium. A small subset can be thought of as art, just like a small subset of paint jobs, constructions (in the broadest sense possible), and sounds sound can.
I didn't make that comment so I can't answer for it.

What I can say is that the area that the term covers is arbitrary and that you can discuss one facet of it without involving the others.

There is no reason that trademarks need to be discussed when talking about content distribution systems just like there is no need to talk about expiration dates when shipping plastic lawn chairs.
Already illegal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimi...

In fact, HIPAA might have already forbidden that. The law wasn't clear but it's entirely moot now.
Apple is not blocking you from purchasing an ebook via Kindle's app. Amazon has chosen not to include this functionality in their app because they don't want to lose money on sales through their app.
Practical Lessons from Mining Retail E-Commerce Data [pdf]
But since your parents had the test, and they know your parents' results, your probability of having the (genetic) disease is not exactly unknowable by the insurance company.
There are two kind of "technical" people. The "Science" kind, and the "engineering" kind. If you appreciate the "beauty" of an mathematical equation, or the "elegance" of a proof, you are the "Science" kind. If you appreciate the preciseness of a tool, or speed to achieve a task, you are the "Engineering" kind. Science provide the backbone behind engineering, but engineering re-invigorates science.
Unfortunately, programming can fall into either categories. Argument like this is mostly pointless without a specific context. As a programmer, it is a life long effort to find the "zen" of the two.
Hoping to launch a minimal version of my very first Rails project. I've been slowly getting the basics down and now it's time to actually do something with it!
Running WordPress on OpenShift – Part Two
On the other hand, one of the nice things about RHEL is you hardly ever have to upgrade major version... RHEL4 has been around since 2005, and is only now finally being phased out.

In comparison, I think "sarge" was the stable Debian in 2005. "sarge" is no longer oldstable- nor is etch. oldstable is "lenny", released in 2009.

Don't get me wrong, I like Debian, but when you compare "ease of upgrading", don't forget to consider "need to upgrade"!
Oh, never mind. I have seen some libraries that have very low usage rates of books compared to computers and I would not mourn a scaling down of their books on hand as long as they kept a strong catalog.
Cheap Internet: Nationwide Google Fiber for $1000 per Household
Hey, look at that. Instant pluralization. Thank you for proving my point.
Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon
Kenshiro Robot Uses Biomimicry To Copy Human Form
The number of interest though is $/watt-converted. So if 8% organic sells are $x per sq meter, and Si cells are $Y per sq meter, then multiplying that number out you will get the cost per watt extracted out of that sq meter of surface area. If area is not constrained this can result in better economics for organic cells.
Thats because of economics of scale (read: cheap chinese stimulus money), not because of dramatic advancements in the technology.
That code blip sends a shiver up my spine.

My previous code shop maintained a fairly large rails base and we mitigated that risk by doing as many things "the rails way" as possible, even if it took more time than some ruby hack.

When you consider how quickly new hires could pick up the project, it easily outweighed the extra effort designing code in a well-understood format.
One of the ZenPayroll founders here. We definitely take care of all payroll-related tax and compliance deposits and forms for you, including 941, DE-9, and state compliance forms (such as new employee hire report forms).

Your only interface is through our single-page app, so no messing with kludgy government software (like the EFTPS software) or and paper forms.
Slightly off topic, the name ycorpblog sounds fugly. They have one of the biggest, most renowned internet brands - why not just blog.yahoo.com ?
The non-dischargeability of student loans matters because it significantly reduces the lender's risk of taking a loss. Even if the student doesn't have the income to service the loan debt within 5-10 years after graduating, the lender will still recoup their investment, with interest, if the person ever makes enough income to pay it down in their entire lifetime. And the lender is near the front of the line for collections (just behind things like the IRS and child support). So the only case in which the lender takes a loss on their investment is if the borrower dies before they can pay it off. In the aggregate this is a very small risk.

Student loans are not all government loans, maybe 70% are Federal Student Aid loans. Both FSA loans and subsidized private loans are subsidized by the government, which only means that the government pays the portion of the interest that would be due while the student is still in school. But it does not matter whether the lender is the government or a bank--the loans still carry an interest rate and are still non-dischargeable. The government cannot "just tax the rich" to pay off students' loan balances, the government does not work that way.
Samba 4.0 released
nice project. I usually avoid this by making my APIs accept a datetime objects and make the client code create the datetime object.

Pure functions make tests simple.
Rubyists desiring similar functionality should check out either of the following libs. As far as I can tell they differ only in their pun selection.

https://github.com/travisjeffery/timecop

https://github.com/bebanjo/delorean

In the ruby community, disliking someone's choice of science fiction reference is grounds for a rewrite.
Cells Harvested From Human Urine Used to Make Stem Cells
Everyone Knows SEO Status Quo
No, it uses a different TCP options header.

In fact, many of the security considerations are the same.
Option 3/e: it's idiomatic in C-syntax languages to use if/then/else when you do not care about the return value. Use of ?: therefore implies that you do care about the value of the expression. When I see the result of ?: being thrown away, I have to ask myself whether it is supposed to be an if/then/else, or whether a previous programmer meant to do something with the result, but forgot.

Option 4/f: if .show() always returns a truthy value, then yes, this is the same. Even if I know this is true, I must still mentally translate it into the idiomatic form. If I don't know this is true, I must waste time finding out. And if one day .show() doesn't return a truthy value --- perhaps because a different part of the codebase has been changed so that lockBtn is of a different class --- then your code will break.
Social network declares "your data is yours" - users retain all copyrights
No compile STEP means there is a REPL, there is no waiting seconds, minutes, hours while a compiler compiles and links code to native format, code on arch 'A' can be run on arch 'B' without [re|cross]compiling it and a few other less important things.

That there happens to be an PURELY optional for performance only pre-parsed representation for the interpreter is immaterial.
Micro-publishing startup Checkthis launches Social Posters
EHSM - Start-Up, Open Source and DIY Conference
oh, sorry - didn't look at code, assumed java from some comment. but either way, same point - when you talk about solving problems with types, people tend to assume you're thinking of haskell or similar, but just because you're not using some super-cool functional language doesn't mean you shouldn't demand all you can get from your type system.

(ps i was talking about the code on the server side; not chromium)
Forward (a new e-commerce platform) uses a template engine and routing layer that might be something like what you describe. It works with MongoDB, has a REST-like model system, plugin system similar to WordPress, and you can do stuff like this in a template:

{get $blogs from "/channels/blogs/entries"}
...

Alpha version was released just yesterday, you can sign up and download it at http://getfwd.com

/shameless plug
> So here’s my concern with the idea of Software Craftsmanship. It’s at risk of letting programmers’ egos run riot. And when that happens… well, the last time they went really nuts we got Web Services, before that J2EE.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't programming craftsman that created J2EE, but rather the programming tradesmen that this guy seems to be glorifying.
Not exactly what you're looking for, but if you're in NYC check this out: http://monthlymusichackathon.org/
Both places are nice at times.

My ideal engineering state is heads-down-leave-me-alone. I can write some awesome code in that place.

At the same time, when a compromise has to be made, I want to know as much about the problem space as possible.
Feel like answering a couple more questions? :) The kinds of questions I have are not "good" questions for S.O. I'm tempted to try redoing a project of mine from ConTeXt in troff just to see what it's like. Do you recommend any particular macro package? Without any other input I'd probably try the -me macros, just because they've been compared to Pascal (versus the FORTRAN of -ms and the PL/1 of -mm).

Also, do you find yourself writing your own macros much? I haven't the faintest idea what that would require with troff, but I rely on this with TeX quite a bit, mostly to elevate stylistic markup into semantic markup. My impression is that if you want semantic macros you use a macro package, and even then you probably freely intersperse non-semantic macros.

This project I've been working on for a while, uses LuaTeX so that I can connect to a local database, perform some queries and typeset them and their output. I imagine this kind of thing would not be difficult to do directly with a custom pipeline step using troff. Have you done that kind of thing before? If so, how unpleasant was it?

Thanks for talking with me about this.
My guess: when zero board seats go to investors. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Did you manage to get it working? Because me and a fellow android developer couldn't.
The thing is that the premise that you are accepting, which does underly existing law, is there because of the triumph of an extreme position. (A triumph caused in part because of the creation of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.) Therefore accepting that premise is not a neutral position.

As for patents and engineers, I think it is likely that opinions differ. And one of the causes of that difference is that in software it is easy for random non-technical types to create broad patents with little merit by slapping "web" on top of obvious generic ideas. By contrast in hardware, patents are more likely to come from actual devices created by actual engineers, and therefore you tend to have fewer of the truly egregious patent abuses that outrage people on the software side.
Thanks for the email. I'm happy to poke around ZP but for me to switch from what we have "working" to ZP (which would cost more, means that ZP would need to blow my pants off amazing).

Up for the challenge?
The Secretary Puzzle
Along the same line, (heh line) my friend made a linear algebra library last year.

I present to you "Clique: A Javascript Linear Algebra Library with Applications to Spectral Analysis"

https://github.com/Forns/clique
You might be interested in something I plan to open source at some point: a native Markdown lexing / parsing engine meant to be used to stylize markdown for Core Text / NSAttributedString.

Here's the meat of it in a gist: https://gist.github.com/29dabe4b6e762ee221df
Article says direct sales doesn't make economic sense in this market. ADP employs an army of well payed outside sales reps. I interviewed there out of college. Seemed like a good job. What's the difference between the businesses that ZP can't support that long term?

I know tech companies hate that and want to automate everything, but some products need sales reps.
Board seats go out in seed rounds. There is no hard rule for naming the different rounds, in this case it is just their first round of institutional capital.
Watch the damn video! It has feet that pop down - is that so hard?
I'm sure that happens a lot; father is sterile so they use artificial insemination and they never let the kid know; is just that OP is one of the few who later found out.
Yes, holding an CEO-author of a letter accountable is incredibly sexist. I'm very sorry, and it won't happen again.
Property has existed since the very beginning of settled societies, throughout the world. Civil law is a later development that simply codified the concept.

There are very strong arguments for the existence of patents in areas that can be defined easily, for example drugs, materials, in fact I'm undecided there. The argument for patents is that they encourage both innovation, and resulting products. However a patent is still not property and thus there is no natural right to it.
How to Run Custom Chef Cookbook Recipes During Deploy
Ha, no. And my new sister's husband is also happens to be a phd geneticist.
You'd have to prove that you didn't already have the test performed, which sounds tough. For example, maybe you flew to Elbonia to get an illicit test done in some dark alley, then came back to the US and retook the test while buying the insurance.
It also seems that bad documentation is something that keeps people from adopting (read, providing those sought-after revenues) some software packages.
Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans [by Stanislaw Lem]
I am an SAP Consultant, and my .02 is that companies are so in love with their back office processes such as creating purchase orders and sales orders, that they want these things so highly customizable that it requires big package software.

Most SAP horror stories are from customers who don't realize their ability to process their Accounts Payable isn't a business core competency and is not bringing them competitive advantage.

If customers come around on this, THEN the days of SAP will be numbered.
I think in this context it can also mean something like "oversold," like the company is misrepresenting themselves to some degree.
Super System by Doyle Brunson is great for both beginners and intermediate players. Really the best way to learn, like most things, is to get out and play.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#Accuracy_proble...

It is the same as trying to store 1/3 = 0.333... as a finite decimal. Basically, a floating point number only has a finite space to put the component after the decimal point, so it gets truncated and made inaccurate, just like truncating 1/3 to 0.3333 will mean that calculations become wrong: 3*0.3333 = 0.9999 ≠ 1.
jep, I mentioned that in the contact form. I will publish a paper about the results!
still waiting on mine :@
Moving2you.com, the new social network for travelers, is born
True, but don't forget that the longer you wait with upgrading, the more compatibility issues you may run into when you finally have to upgrade. Linux has changed a lot since 2005.
While I agree with your general point, the lifetime prevalence of alcohol dependence is rather high; it is estimated to be 12.5% [1].

1 = http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17606817
>Real world physics only vary because input conditions are never the same.

Not exactly. Classical physics is a deterministic approximation of quantum physics at macro scales. In reality, outcomes vary even if the initial conditions are the same (although you may need special equipment to observe that there is any difference. You can choose to call all of the quantum events "inputs" but that's dodging the point.

That said, most applications would not benefit from simulating at a quantum level, and doing so at large scales is currently intractable. So while real world physics is not deterministic, macro scale physics engines should be.
This.

Programming is one of the few fields left where measures of productivity, utility, and value have not yet been fully usurped by the more arbitrary measures of popularity and seniority. You can judge a programmer by the quality and quantity of the product he/she produces, so you don't need to do it by arbitrary social rank.

In other professions where an individual's marginal product of labor is much more difficult to measure or is averaged together with that of everyone else in the organization, ranking people based on these extraneous social factors becomes necessary, but with programmers it is unnecessary and even harmful because the incentive structure becomes biased toward factors other than programming productivity.
Very nice. I just used it to buy some basketball tickets, and it was a very smooth experience.

I'm not sure how or if to address this, but after ordering I got to a receipt page, and the confirmation took a few minutes to arrive. I found myself wishing I could save the confirmation page, in case I needed to refer back to it.

That said, it was easy for me to find the game I was interested in, easy for me to find tickets, and checking out went better than expected given that I was on a mobile device. Thanks.
For #1 if you have any Ashkenazi Jewish blood or suspect you do, it's really worth it for peace of mind. A lot of people say they don't get interesting results, but as someone who is 25% Ashkenazi I was pretty happy at the lack of "interesting" findings- to find I carry only a minor form of hemophilia among the Ashkenazi-related genetic disorders 23andme tracks.
Yes. It costs 10-20 times more, mind you.
Constraint-based UIs are not something I'm familiar with, but sound interesting. Can you expand on that for me please?
You'd probably like Clojure.

As an aside, though, part of the reason we have different languages for things like backend code, markup and styling is that they're commonly done by different people with different specialties. A general-purpose language will not offer much benefit to a designer, but it will trip them up more often. Having a language tailored to your specialist is a good thing. The only time you'd really want everything done in one language is when the same coders are doing everything. I admit I'm in that situation very often, but it's more maintainable if you just use CSS or similar so that normal front-end guys can work with it.
I never heard of anything below 300, but I was born in '75 ;-) I never saw a BBS that accepted anything below 300.
Definitely up for the challenge :). Our goal is that our software isn't enough to just "work". It has to delight you as well :)
One problem is the advanced solar cells need elements that are rare and/or costly to acquire.

In some cases there just isn't enough of the necessary element on earth to make enough solar cells. That's why despite all the advances you hear, the main solar cell is still silicon, which is incredibly plentiful.
So you guys handle all states and all localities (and the corresponding tax table updates, etc?)

For instance, I have an employee in Florida so I have a UCT-6 for SUI, and also a couple employees in PA (so local taxes galore)

How do you handle a state such as California where the employee has to OPT OUT of receiving a paper paystub?

Don't take this as me bashing what you guys are doing, I'm just genuinely interested as this is a little bit of a hobby of mine (payroll consulting)

EDIT: I just read that they only support California at the moment. Bummer.