skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Programmers are critical thinkers, that's why we are good at what we do. That's why no code anyone writes including our own 4 or 5 years down the line meets even our own standards. You have to be a critical thinker to get coding, to want to do it. The only down side is so much critical thinking wears us down over time. If anything, we should force ourselves to take more vacations.
Xiaomi Mi2 outsold Samsung Galaxy S4 in China. Sold 10Million handsets. Anyone knows where to buy in US?
It's not down at all. Even if it was, why is a post needed?
"Stop fucking up" quickly ends up with "stop taking risks" and "design by committee", which may be a good idea if you write avionics or banking software, but perhaps not in other markets.
Have you never seen a piece of code that sucked so much that you could shrink it by a factor of at least 2?

You lucky swine… Much (possibly most) code I have had to deal with was that ugly.
Tools for collecting and handling data
Exactly, that "Why did he write it this weird way?" helps you understand the programmer who wrote it (his level of expertise) and gives the opportunity to analyse the tradeoffs he made. This helps discern between real shit and unpleasant code that had to be written/structured that way.
Try having kids. I've been sleep deprived for several years and my health has noticeably suffered.

I've also noticed that when I'm tired I tend to get stressed much faster.
As 1stamour suggested the whole function was pointless. Not a big deal by itself but if you have layers upon layers of this stuff, code quickly becomes a buggy, unmaintainable mess. There are some awesome static code analysis tools like PMD and PHPMD for measuring code quality. It's not just "all programmers think everyone else's code is crap".
The problem is that chargebacks and disputes are happening at the level above Paypal (at the banks), and Paypal is just the merchant. And there is no way for merchants to make a sale and say "no chargebacks."
For some of their business products, you do actually have to get pre-approval. For example, I filled out approximately ~10 questions (about a page worth of text, about business model, business history, shipping/refund policies, anticipate monthly revenue, etc) to get Appointment Reminder the payments gateway to charge credit cards offsite. I got asked to call in with some elaboration. It went something like:

"So this business hasn't actually sold any software yet?"

"That's correct, we're anticipating opening to the public next week."

"And you charge people monthly for the software? That's after they actually get the software, right?" [+]

"Yes. The software is already written and we are capable of fulfilling immediately, we just haven't opened to the public yet."

"That's great Mr. McKenzie. You're going to be approved, and will get an email when the account is ready."

(We use Stripe these days for AR and substantially all of our other CC payments. Stripe asked very similar questions prior to provisioning the account, but didn't require a phone call or elaboration.)

[+ If you ever get asked a question phrased this way by someone not in the software industry you should probably not respond by saying "Hmm, technically they don't 'get' anything, well OK technically they GET lots of things, but the software is actually physically only on our servers and provided to them on a software as a service model, which means..." When people not in the software industry talk about downloading Gmail just smile and nod -- you don't understand their job, either.]
You said "Either Jeff types really slowly, or has golden wrists of the gods."

Which made me think you associate slow typing with low comfort and fast typing with high comfort.

I mean that if you switch, you'll be uncomfortable simply because you are not used to it. That will automatically make you slower.

But if you take any keyboard, you can become reasonably comfortable with it, in my opinion, if you get used to it. For example, if you've been using ergonomic dvorak keyboards for many years, then it will take a while for you to get comfortable with a standard qwerty keyboard.

But, that's my case. I'm comfortable with most keyboards that I use for a long time. I guess there are many factors like hand size, finger size, shape, previous injuries/strain etc that could change that.
Updating a social network users stream — timings
TodoFRP
I couldn't agree more. What I feel a lot of people are missing here is that Marissa's making Yahoo a place where good engineers want to work: where empowered smart people can make a difference in a scrappy way.
Wow, the comments here about working on weekends are shocking. Rome wasn't built in a day and companies aren't built with 9-5 jobs.

This is sad and hypocrite. Every start up I know works hard, long and hacker news should know better
I rarely use cash when I buy anything in person mainly because of the buyer protection a credit card offers me.

Online it's the same thing. I'd pick credit card or Paypal over bitcoin just like I pick credit cards IRL over cash. It has nothing to do with obscurity.
AFAIK, the Chevrolet Volt (and Opel clone, etc) is the only one where the engine just charges the batteries, and the drive wheels are run by the electric motor alone.

From a technical standpoint, it's a good design for a hybrid - you can optimize each part of the system separately. But GM didn't quite get the car as a whole correct -- it has some ergonomic problems, priced higher than the value (perceived and actual) the customer got, and so on.
The community is one of the best development communities out there. Node + NPM have created an ecosystem with lots of contemporary tools that fall in line very well with the UNIX Philosophy. The few people that I've shown Node to have been surprised about how easy it is to use NPM and tackle dependency management.

> If you're not competent enough to learn another language then are you competent to write good enough JS?

I used to say that about Java Developers that didn't know C/C++. As I've grown, the thing I've realized is that the end user/customer/client doesn't care what you write your application in (Unless you're on a Government contract). They care if it works.
Great, now all Apple has to do is fix their performance bug with CSS transforms on iOS and I can consider using these.
Content and popularity analysis of Tor hidden services
So far the new users are showing little activity (according to the article), so that seems unlikely.
NASDAQ suffers another glitch
Except most games look worse than Amiga and Atari ST games.
yeah, I totally agree. My only nit was your claim that Paypal bears risk. Its true that their model comes with risk and they've built their business model in a way that they shift it to third parties as extensively and quickly as possible. Its a sore point with me in how Paypa, Visa, etc. operate. The merchant is rarely right.
Show HN: We created a browser plugin that will change the way charity works.
"Why did he write it this weird way?" taught me so much more than "this is shit, let me rewrite it the way I'm familiar with".
---------------------

You're 3 years in. In another 3-5 years (maybe more), this 'positive attitude' will (and should) go away. You'll have a much better understanding of the 'weird' ways, and will be able to tell 'quick hacks' from 'crap code' as the OP was referring to.

You will have learned most of what you need to know by investigating the 'weird way', and you'll see the patterns, and you'll be at this for 15 years, and you'll be seeing the majority of stuff coming out being crap code by younger developers. It's the way of the world.
This seems analogous to "The Market for Lemons"* The proprietor of a small business has a very hard time judging the competence of a designer/developer even for simple jobs.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Neat - I completely forgot about this. If anyone's interested in these different views on top of HN I created http://yahnr.com/ a while ago that just shows the top stories by vote from the past 24 hours, updated every 15 minutes.

I mostly did it as a way to generate a "pseudo-static" site that is entirely hosted on S3 with a job that just dumps JSON files to it every 15 mins.
An impossibly high "opening bid" is not an opening bid at all, it's a threat. It says, "sure we said FRAND, but now that it's in the standard we changed our mind, now empty your pockets". Extortion is evil.
New social media tool to tap into Chinese market
Yeah, when Malcolm said that it put to rest all my fears, since there's no way they'd be able to pull that off.

On a related note, Tom Tilley is an amazing presenter and I think he really showed that with the way he handled Anthony Albanese and Malcolm Turnbull tonight.
This is a sign of progress, actually. If you cannot find faults in the code you wrote ages ago and think it is awesome, time to find and fix some deep problems.
I've been beta testing Longview for a while. It's been kind of nice to have. I most liked the at-a-glance visibility of whether there were any system package updates available.

The pricing structure is disappointing. I would have rather seen per system pricing ($3-5 mo/server is roughly what it would be worth to me). I have 4-5 nodes running. I'll likely never have 10 so $40/mo doesn't seem like a very good value proposition.
In Cryptic Perlisms We Do Not Trust
It's not just presales. When any kind of fraud alert is triggered, PayPal freezes the account. There is no way to get a human being on the phone to understand why the account was frozen, when it will be unfrozen, etc. Even if it's obvious to any reasonable human that no fraud occurred.
Deep learning is just a technique to do learning in (possibly many) layers.

And I disagree that trying to actually understand sentences is merely "slightly less shallow" than existing sentiment analysis systems (which, for the most part, treat sentences a just a bunch of words, count the positive and negative words, and take the average).
Ah, yes... the PC version should come with a giant red warning that says "DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PLAY THIS WITHOUT A CONTROLLER".

There's still a learning curve even with a controller, but once past that the controls have a beautiful simplicity and responsiveness that I've seen in very few other games.
>If you are making clothing, you don't say "everyone is different", you make clothes based on the same pattern in a relatively small range of sizes.

Oh wow, you must have a common body shape/type. That range of sizes is actually kinda large, and there is "specialty" size ranges, for example, plus size, petite, big and tall. Bras especially have a giant range of sizes, and I still know woman who have to get custom made bras, and these are woman with natural breasts.

I personally don't fit into off the shelf clothing, period. I've never seen a pair of pants that fit me, I just make due with what is closest, and I've gotten used to constantly adjusting my pants, it is second nature to me.
Lulz. This is why you don't do graphics programming in Java.
asking people to be very specific is the first thing that should be done in any technical environment. "shit" is going down all over the place, please emphasize.

asking people to be nicer in a technical environment would require similar levels of education and understanding of the tools involved. you seem to be a person that makes other people get stomack aches from bad code, so maybe you should reconsider your abilities.

if you write overall good code it's inherently easier to find a bug in it than if you just stitch shit together. if you solve your problems with stackoverflow and/or huge books like "how to... in 21 days" you should maybe reconsider your career choices.

in code the attention to detail is always more important than the overall intention, so why not leave it at that?
I'm using a bash script [0] too, it is bit complicated because of I've have three different workplaces and some conf files that have account information (such as email passwords) should be hidden.

[0] https://github.com/seletskiy/dotfiles/blob/master/dotfiles.s...
"Most code out there is shit code."

semantic point. if you're saying 'most code' is shit, aren't you saying average code is shit?

Kind of like saying a 6 min mile is shit because it's not a 4 min mile.
>And their only action is to make a move that's hugely profitable to them ?

Not sure why you think PayPal is going to just take the money and screw over the customers. Much more likely they will refund all the payments.
Indeed. In the UK, nuclear waste is transported by train as well.
That seems awfully similar to what keeps happening with their G+ and Hangouts app: every few weeks, the apps think you never logged on the damn thing, and take you back through the whole process including a welcome tour!
The developers should be able to push back on some of that - and at least document in the code that certain logical inconsistencies were raised but glossed over.

Simply understanding that something will be a maintenance nightmare should inform a developer enough so that they, at the very least, leave useful info/docs about what corners were cut and why. Until you've had to deal with mountains of various legacy projects completely undocumented, you won't even know this is something you should be doing.
So what exactly is the point you are trying to make here other than that you are the smartest guy?

The article is not about the existence of shit code, the amout of shit code produced per year or how much shit code the average developer will see in his career.

It is about teamwork, and what kind of culture poisons the atmosphere in a company.

Not about shit code, which by the way everyone here has produced at some point or to be more realistic about it (since usually developers look at their old code and think it is bad) - is still producing on a daily basis.
They're a company that you're probably trusting most of your keys and data to. Trust in them must be absolute anyway.
Lay out the conditions early: Hey, we'll take the money and keep it for a year.

patio11 answered this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6333932

It's there, it's always been there, people just accepted the T&Cs without reading them.
I remember that the early comments were pretty negative on the Parallella.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5557985

http://41j.com/blog/2012/10/my-take-on-the-adapteva-parallel...

How does the product rate now that it's finished? I bought one and I think it should be shipping in the next week or two. My feeling was that good or bad, supporting the Kickstarter campaign might help spur the industry just a tad bit faster. We really seemed to have stalled on multi-core general purpose computers.
Tessel actually transpiles JavaScript into Lua, which is what is actually running on the device.
I disagree. Certain useless structures can be pretty cool, but they get boring quickly. The most interesting cities are those built around a variety of useful structures.

For example, what makes Venice really cool (IMO, of course) is not just the fact that there are canals and boats everywhere, but that these are all fundamental parts of the everyday lives of the citizenry. The canals and boats aren't useless touristic scenery, but are how the city works.
To be honest, Schneier's repeated insistence that the NSA has gone rogue from the rest of the government seems more than a little silly. Special prosecutors are for investigating illegal activity within the government, not just things Bruce Schneier doesn't like. The right way to change things would seem to be legislative. It's a lot less exciting, but more practical.
What's not true? I didn't say you were forced as some kind of hard requirement to use the wiki - just that the use of the wiki forces you out of the game and that it is clearly designed to be used in conjunction with a wiki. It should be taken as read that it can be played without it. I mean, who wrote the wiki? The requirement for guessing and repeating segments is just so high that it detracts from the experience. This isn't about knowing every little detail for "min-maxing" either - it's about basic organization to make discovery of information systematic rather than being a sheer time sink. So tell me: how do you figure out that for the Demon Firesage - located in a fiery area, covered in fire - the weakness is.. fire? Trying a bunch of stuff, in this case totally counter-intuitive. What reason would you have to think Gwyn can be parried, when no other boss in the game can be? By trying a bunch of stuff and stumbling upon it since, again, it is counter-intuitive. In other words: by having complete and utter contempt for the value of your own time.

It completely takes away from the sense of fantasy, as well. The whole point with these open world games is to feel like you have the freedom to make your own choices. But if you know that your best best is to go everywhere and pick up every item you can then it feels like janitorial work, not a grand adventure.
"There doesn't appear to be that much spare capacity, at least on the 7010's FPGA, around 2k cells IIRC? Certainly won't be creating a bitcoin miner in that :-)"

Depends on whether you'd like to use the Epiphany chip or not, as the FPGA logic used to interface with the Epiphany can be used for your own projects too (albeit with the catch that you lose the ability to access the full potential of the Epiphany chip). I'd be interested in using the Parallella board as a cheap Zynq dev board.
No More Hibernate
Just trying it now - brilliant - TV shows downloaded from BBC to my Nexus 10. Works great although download speeds are way slower than those to my Sky box (format differences I suppose)
XBMC adds Stereoscopic 3D support
Who is going to be evaluating these investments?
Minecraft's worlds get a new look
Jpillora/xhook: Easily modify XHR requests and responses
From my personal experience, individuals who say "this code is shit" are often far removed from the process of writing code in the first place.

I wonder where the whole "Worse is Better" paradigm fits into the universe with good code, acceptable code, and "shit code".
Well, everyone always talks about what really motivates the legislative branch (campaign funding), but I've never seen civil libertarian types try to start a non-profit or super-PAC to lobby congress. We know this way of influence is proven to work, and to work quite well. Why is there no special interest organization that is in those fundraising dinners, talking to the legislators, and trying to get the various committees to influence laws we care about?

Letters and phone calls work, but hundreds/thousands of people willing to donate money to candidates that support particular causes works even better. That's how lobbying works. It's not even completely unethical, really. A spokesperson just buys their way in to fundraisers and says, "Hey, our group really cares about X. Here is why. Oh BTW, we might have a bunch of voters in your district who are passionate about X and would want to contribute to a person's campaign if they also cared about X. Do you care about X?"
Buy a boutique fashion e-commerce startup
Have the trip details (like route) been released yet? Is he only stopping at Supercharger location? I'd like to meet him and follow along a while. I'm not a stalker. Really. :)
Google is waging war on apps that attack, infiltrate and steal from your phone
Programming Mess Detector
Equador or Russia are nice places I hear...
Looking back at Stephen Elop's "burning-platform" memo
What's the point of playing a PC game with a controller? If I wanted to play a game with inferior controls, I would just use a console.
The fact that you have to look closely is a problem. The details only barely show up on their website on my 13inch macbook and I at least am left semi-straining to actually resolve the logo completely. It looks to me like someone designed a logo with little regard to how it would be primely seen by non employees --- I'm sure it looks better on a giant sign out front.
Pressgram Launches in App Store - WordPress + Instagram
Pressgram was released this morning. It's a photo sharing app where you own all your photos and can post to a WordPress blog.
Yes - very impressive and cool BUT part of me wonders if this is just a waste of money - from a practical sense

All of the raw power is impressive, but what do
they plan to do with it? Mostly, to visualize
models run on the Pleiades. Displaying global
tide patterns on the Hyperwall 2...

I'd rather my money went to other programs
You are glossing over one important point: PayPal has a financial stake in keeping money within their network for as long as possible.

For every month they keep $X within their network instead of releasing to the rightful owners, they have effectively seized whatever could have been earned by investing $X for that month. For smaller amounts (individuals, small campaigns like ours), this is negligible, but in aggregate, when you consider how much money PayPal is sitting on, this is a decidedly nontrivial sum. They have a strong incentive to routinely and as a matter of course withhold funds from legitimate businesses just because they can. This is what we are up against.

Their talk about risk could very well be a smokescreen to justify the above behavior. This is not at all implausible, if they were only concerned about risk they could withhold fractional amounts for reasonable periods of time, on a rolling schedule. This is how less predatory payment processors I have dealt with handle this problem.

We understand and accept that they may want to hold onto our funds for a reasonable amount of time to mitigate their risk. We don't expect them to release all the funds immediately.

However we consider their threats to hold ALL THE MONEY for a FULL YEAR to be entirely unreasonable and not in good faith. In the face of such unreasonable demands we balked and sought help from both the community (public outrage) and our legal counsel, the Software Freedom Law Foundation in New York.
It looks to me like the trend on the iOS app store is also downwards to the cheap/free end - i.e. a race to the bottom. My paid niche app ($5) used to get a couple of downloads a week. I made it free for one week, during which I got about 500 downloads. There is interest, but no willingness to pay for it. I think the overall statistic of $5B paid to devs with about 500,000 apps on the app store gives an average of $10k per app. So one app can get you, what, one month's salary? Even that's rosy I think, 'cos the distribution is not uniform but a long tail exponential, which means the me-the-solo-dev is more likely to fall on the tail than near the elite end of the exponential.

Bottom line is that I'm beginning to think that a mobile-only company strategy is likely to be doomed. Anyone thinks otherwise?
> What really annoys me about Dark Souls is the shitty PC port.

With DSFix, it's actually better than the PS3 version, which I never go back to any more.
Haha, "speed limit".

Edit: I feel like I should explain that I'm referring to driving on the rural roads with no cars around, in the middle of nowhere.
o.O so many points! It doesn't look like a bot, but it has certainly a browser extension that posts to HN with a click.
What is classic exactly, how does it differ? At a first glance it seems to prioritize age over points more than the current version.
In the case of Dark Souls, kb/m is by far the inferior control scheme.