skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think the metric 'any code that decreases agility as the project matures' is quite the same thing. I think most code lowers agility, as it is increasing complexity and the number of interactions and entanglements across your codebase. Adding features decreases agility. These are not 'technical debt'.

I always enjoy Ward Cunningham's discussion of this: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WardExplainsDebtMetaphor
(Ward first used the metaphor)

Specifically, he is NOT talking about 'dirty code' or just badly written code, that's taking shortcuts and I believe it is never a good idea in software. We're talking about building good code but doing so before we fully understand the problem, often with the aim of learning more about the problem, especially from user feedback.

What I take Ward's discussion to mean is that "technical debt" is accrued when writing code for a problem you do not YET completely understand (e.g. almost all 'first pass' code). The debt occurs when your code's existing understanding is static (because it is in source control), and your teams understanding grows. The difference is your debt. You can continue building on the code's not-quite-right understanding for the moment which is carrying the debt forward and paying the costs of fighting a not-quite-right model, but at some point it becomes worth while to re-factor based on what your team has learned about your problem, and thus pay off the debt.
Facebook thinking about competing with Google search, again
FTC Rules in Favor of Tesla, Direct-To-Consumer Sales Legal
>Some farming ant species gather and store the aphid eggs in their nests over the winter. In the spring, the ants carry the newly hatched aphids back to the plants.

I'd say that counts. The others don't seem to be on the "same level" as to what I'm thinking - though the distinction is possibly even arbitrary.

Thanks for the info!
Venom zero-day vulnerability affects datacenter and Millions of end users
> There are also places where vibrant short-term rental markets may exacerbate tight housing markets.

Is one form of demand morally/ethically superior to another?

EDIT: Downvotes? I thought we were all being nice?
> Yes, the nature of living in a society with humans is that you sometimes have to take situations on a case-by-case basis, and cannot have a single set of rules that will guide you to correct action in all circumstances.

That's a very old and ongoing argument, between having a concrete set of potentially inflexible laws (which are particularly dangerous when they restrict the human capacity for understanding and forgiveness), and having the arbitrary and changing moral sensibilities of humans ("I'll know it when I see it"). Both have their own set of bugs. I don't think it's reasonable to universally say you cannot have a single set of rules that works everywhere, nor is it reasonable to always defer to collective moral sensibility (which often gets the wrong answer as well).

I do, however, think it's reasonable with either approach to limit outrage and sensibilities to what actually affects people, rather than proxies for that, or worse yet things that neighbors have no business controlling.

> "Quiet enjoyment" is the technical term.

I never said it wasn't, and I didn't intend it as a rhetorical device; sorry if it came across as such. I meant it as a genuine question; it seems like an odd term, compared to for instance "noise ordinance" or similar.
A) If you think reaching perfection is a viable goal, ever, you're thinking about this all wrong.

B) You can spend an hour and a half instead of an hour and include one test and make some incremental improvements as you go.
There was an interesting paper a few years ago about this inevitability;

http://iang.org/papers/BitcoinBreachesGreshamsLaw.pdf

Then it was in the context of botnets and chinese miners -- but the theory is that dishonest mining (stolen electricity) will necessarily drive our honest mining which will spell doom for Bitcoin.
I can only see the top 3 boxes in the results. Opened the iframe in a new window (http://www.bbc.com/earth/bespoke/your-life/), which suggests there's more, but still not loading.
From years of experience, I detect in the tone of this piece a certain notion that product managers / non-technical people tend to form when working with developers - namely, that developers don't care about speed-to-market and would rather agonize and winge over perfect architecture and coding standards... What I think you'll find, more often than not, on the business end of this attitude is a developer(s) patiently trying to explain that speed-to-market is, in fact, directly related to the technical debt accrued on the project for all but the most static and inconsequential things. We must think and communicate about technical debt precisely the way we do to keep errant PMs from drifting off into the Ice Cream Sea of Candyland where all of the half-thought-through ideas they demand be implemented immediately by cutting all corners have no impact on the next set of half-thought-through ideas they want implemented.
The thing is, the skill level required to properly manage remote employees, especially in a mixed remote / non-remote office is higher. When you are large corporation and have to start looking at employees in a statistical manner, you might choose 'no remote' because it's cheaper / more possible to find managers that can do 'no remote' vs. 'mixed remote'. There is almost no large company that is remote only right now.

It's the same reason why almost every company programs in blub vs. lisp, haskell, erlang, etc. The skill level of employee can be hard to find who can do those things. Companies already feel supply constrained with engineers, now imagine you add the haskell requirement and you need to hire 1000 of them.

Startups can leverage this disadvantage sometimes by not having a statistical management requirement and start with a foundational advantage. There is also the case of using haskell killing your startup although because of tool problems, and big companies being able to make small special R&D type teams that can use Haskell, so it's definitely a balance.
Yeah, completely different, and much older.
"and to acknowledgement and gratitude for a job well done. The old employer habit of assuming that positive feedback “goes without saying” and that negative feedback should be emphasized so that workers can learn from their mistakes is no longer helpful (if it ever was)."

This was predicted to happen years ago when schools started giving achievement awards for just showing up.

"Also, “millennials have high expectations and optimism about the workplace that isn’t realistic for most employers, so there’s a mismatch in terms of expectations."

Yes, expecting $100,000/year right out of college with 0 years of experience is un-realistic.

"Different attitudes don’t necessarily indicate laziness, non-commitment or indifference"

I would really like to see the "attitudes" they are talking about.

"that has boundaries on the one hand but also instills a feeling of ‘freedom to be yourself’ on the other hand. Employees don’t like to feel they are being watched at every turn and judged for every mistake they make."

Sometimes, employees need to be judged and watched until the employers know they can handle it. Simple mistakes can cost money, time, and lives.

"for improving each worker’s individual strengths."

I's strange that an employer now has the task of improving a person's 'individual strengths'. This should mostly be the job of the employee.

"Millennials are our future, and that goes for the workforce too"

This is very true. We should also be putting a stop to some of the un-realistic expectations and disrespectful behavior that is being showcased as millennial culture.
Portuguese researchers use EEG to control a UAV
A simpler way to look at technical debt is to ignore all kinds of dubious notions of "quality" and "correctness" and focus on lines of code.

The more lines of code you have, the more stuff you have to maintain and understand.

Of course this is pretty stupid, but it's stupid in a way that sometimes leads to insight.

If your application consists of 1000 lines of code, you can rewrite it in an afternoon.

Also, cleverness can create its own kind of debt. Even as you believe you're working on reducing debt by creating some clever and sophisticated abstraction, you are actually just making it worse. I think this happens all the time.

That's why my basic, fundamental approach to software development is "throw it away and replace it with a simple shell script."
Why We Need a New iPhone Every Year, Not So Much with iPad
technical debt is actually worst than financial debt. imagine an interest rate of x%. now imagine that one day the bank comes in and says: now your interest rate is going to be 20x. you don't get a say in it and you cannot refinance.

also another mistake I've seen made over and over again is to say stupidity==technical debt. If you're doing stupid things just to 'get things done' you're doomed in the long run. If you've thought about it and made the decision to cut a corner you should know why you've done it.
21 Inc sought to build that facility, there's absolutely no indication they actually did.
Either this was poorly written or the author just doesn't get it. Developers shouldn't do TDD or 100% code coverage because they want to build a perfect system; developers should do TDD because they understand that they can never build a perfect system and the T in TDD protects them from complete failure. This means you never attempt to build a perfect system; you only attempt to do just enough. What is just enough? It is the amount of functionality to make the tests in TDD pass... never the amount of functionality to make others 'fall down on their knees and claim “we’re not worthy!”'
Thought I'd also add that technical debt is unavoidable, but we realize it is not OK to have technical debt (the article concludes that technical debt is OK) and that is why we back it up with tests. These tests are like collateral for a loan (technical debt).
>Certainly this does concern ISPs. Running an open wireless network will often violate your terms of service. But despite the occasional cease-and-desist letter and providers getting pissy at people who exceed some secret bandwidth limit, this isn't a big risk either. The worst that will happen to you is that you'll have to find a new ISP.

^ FTA. Not "ignorant", but more flippant. Not everyone has options when it comes to ISPs.
This has always bothered me about most implementations of the Sieve of Eratosthenes. Namely, what they produce isn't it.

If you have division operations, or "mod" operations, it's not the Sieve of Eratosthenes, it's just a filter.

Not the same thing at all.
... and attorneys that do win seem to find it hard to get their money, http://brendagrantland.com/truthjustice/tag/english-rule/.

Personally I think the American Rule is terrible in general, now I understand more why USA has [an appearance of having] so much litigation.
Very much so that I'm trying them both right now.
I hate to put it this snarkily and I fully expect karmic blowback, but I'll just go out on a limb and say that what we need more of is not hastily shipped crapware that barely functions and if successful keeps a legion of smart engineers busy, cursing, hacking, grinding teeth and tittering.

No, what _you_ need is more hastily shipped crapware to capture markets from your competitors so you can make more money and disappear. Hastily shipped crapware has enabled lots of new and interesting things. It also keeps 10x as many engineers busy serving it as would moderately better thought out, slightly later shipped software. Babysitting crapware isn't bad money for an engineer, but it's cosmically questionable as to whether it really advances us more than its opportunity cost. And hastily shipped crapware at scale is a real giant energy problem. Take a look at the size of a Facebook datacenter and tell me again how a metric fuckton of PHP is a good thing for the environment.
How Facebook Silently Supports Russian Agression in Ukraine
One of the biggest reasons for BYOD is so you don't need to deal with the crappy supplied hardware of your employer and you can bring your own. I'm pretty sure that Google employees get their pick of hardware so this would remove at least one big reason for BYOD.
It's hard to argue about this without some idea about what the original author considers "real"/"not a myth".

If he considers genes to be "real" in comparison (which I cannot totally infer from this piece of writing; but he does seem to put a lot of stock in the identification of a physical mechanism for projecting the idea of genetics onto, in DNA), there's a pretty straightforward map-vs-territory argument to reduce that (and pretty much everything else) to equivalence.

All of thought and semantics are imperfect metaphors. The question "are memes real" is exactly equivalent to "are genes real" is exactly equivalent to "is math real" is exactly equivalent to "are trees real" is exactly equivalent to "is anything in our understanding of reality real".

Short of a physical "theory of everything", the only description of physical reality that is "real" is the total enumeration of all of physical reality.
I haven't read the article. But I've done something just as important---sought to understand the interests of those who wrote it. Here goes:

The authors:
"Peter C Gøtzsche, professor, Nordic Cochrane Centre, Rigshospitalet, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark, Allan H Young, professor of mood disorders, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neurosciences, King’s College London, UK, John Crace, psychiatric patient and parliamentary sketch writer, Guardian, London, UK"

Declaration of competing interests:
"Competing interests: All authors have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and declare the following interest: AHY has done paid lectures or been on advisory boards for all major companies producing drugs used in affective and related disorders. He was the lead investigator for Embolden Study (AstraZeneca), BCI neuroplasticity study, and Aripiprazole Mania Study, and received funds for investigator initiated studies from AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Lundbeck, Wyeth. He has received research grants from NIMH (USA); CIHR (Canada); NARSAD (USA); Stanley Medical Research Institute (USA); MRC (UK); Wellcome Trust (UK); Royal College of Physicians (Edinburgh); BMA; UBC-VGH Foundation (Canada); WEDC (Canada); CCS Depression Research Fund (Canada); MSFHR (Canada); and NIHR (UK)."

So Allan H Young has been bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry. Just keep that in mind.

John Crace would also seem to have an interest in justifying the status quo because he participates in it as a "psychiatric patient".

Gøtzsche would of course benefit from acceptance of his argument, because it would likely mean more book sales.
Mother Uses Pizza Hut Online Order to Inform Police About Hostage Situation
I agree with the author more or less at least with respect to compromises between software quality and speed of execution. Code does not have to be perfect, especially when it doesn't affect the end user.

On the other hand this is what I miss most about school, or perhaps just doing things out of my own interest.

There was a time when I could appreciate the beauty of code and all I could worry about whether my software was elegant. Then I joined industry and everything changed.
Rome was not conquered in a day!
Whether you can afford to leave--and free yourself from the obligation of paying taxes here--does not change your basic obligation to paying a share of the government of the land you inhabit.
Great, and then either the raised costs of owning multiple properties gets passed down to the renter or people decide not to rent out houses and property in the first place, making renting itself almost impossible. Then we'll end up of neighborhoods that could have grown filled with urban blight that no one wants to invest in due to the fear of their property value continuing to tank or neighborhoods.

It is not even remotely an easy fix.
Everyone I talk to on Telegram understands I might read their message at one moment and respond later (or not at all). It's not an issue for me.
I was planning to, I had a site setup for buying blackmarket isk and an untraceable distribution plan. I was still growing by 10% a day so even conservatively that could have been a six figure income, assuming sufficient market demand.
Sure, and this is a good example. I think most people would agree that we should ethically prefer to have more housing than more vacation rentals, but these are demands on the same good.
Google Comms and Policy Head Whetstone Takes Over That Job at Uber
That's what Google returns when searching for the thread's article. Usually the first result is the right one.
> I think that quality is something you can't 'bolt on' later. It has to be built in, top to bottom, throughout your organization, code base, and personal skills.

I agree with all of your points and just wanted to add one more thing that doesn't seem to be addressed much. The author mentioned technical debt didn't have an "interest rate", but it absolutely does. As soon as you start to add debt to a particular part of the code base, it must be paid back immediately the next time you or someone else has to work on that same section. This may genuinely not matter for a one-off script, but if it's code that will ever be worked on again it can start a snowball effect that causes the interest to compound and usually manifests itself as code that's buggy, unstable, and hard to work on.
Igniting a debate on legal, therapeutic and educational robotics
Minor updates to your Google sign-in experience
I'm unconvinced that accepting large amounts of technical debt allows startups to react faster.

I've definitely seen startups that have almost found a good idea, but can't tweak it, scale it, or make it stable, because they're overwhelmed by technical debt and even simple changes have become engineering death marches.

Letting your back-end code turn into a complicated, disgusting mess means that adding critical features may become a multi-week nightmare. Which is then followed by a series of additional multi-week nightmares for each successive feature.

Now, this isn't to say that obsessive code-polishing is a good idea, either. But startups require rapid iteration, and you can't iterate especially rapidly when your code is complicated, badly organized, and poorly tested.
Show HN: Get the inside scoop on jobs (video app)
http://hello.lanternapp.co

I care a lot about people finding fulfilling work.

71% of people are disengaged at work. So much more good could be done in the world if the right people are in jobs they are excited about it. It's possibly the most leveraged problem out there.

Obviously, there are many reasons why people are disengaged. I am particularly interested in the difficulties that exist with 1) knowing what jobs are out there, 2) being to understand what they are ACTUALLY like.

If you think about it, it's very hard to answer these questions. Everyone here probably remembers going to useless careers' fairs and suchlike.

The best way to learn about jobs is to talk to the people that do them. This is hard today - first of, we don't even know the breadth of jobs that exist, and secondly we most likely don't know anyone in each role. Lantern (my app) aims to fix both of these.

It's a video app for authentic discussions about work.

http://hello.lanternapp.co

I'd love any thoughts and feedback. For those you who are hiring, this is a great way to get an authentic voice out about your company. You can direct potential candidates to lanternapp.co/search?q=YOUR_COMPANY to hear directly from your current employees.
>For instance, if you’re using a relational database, and your models are improperly structured, this will cause you significant pain later on. If you build a system using NoSQL that later needs to become highly relational, you will incur massive frustration in the future.

I don't think this is what Linus was talking about...
Nope. Although I'd rather not say exactly who.
Some people are renting out a spare room, or maybe the whole house for a couple of weeks while they're away.
Some people are buying properties purely to rent out via AirBnB, making use of a surprisingly large number of startups set up to provide guest screening, cleaning and welcoming services for AirBnB guests, and having it as one of their main income sources. Not only is it the latter group attracting the attention, it's also the latter group that's bending the definition of "hotel" to avoid being classified as one.
> Router management pages

For home use, many current generation router/AP boxes are powerful enough to run a local DNS server (in addition to DHCP) and often hardcode a DNS entry for configuration, eg http://router

> internal network stuff in places small enough

The .local domain (ie http://hostname.local) has been a functional out of the box for many years now on osx/linux and NetBIOS have worked on Windows since forever.
One card to rule them all? Stratos smart card replaces the need for a wallet
IBM demos first fully integrated monolithic silicon photonics chip
Farewell to bookmarklets
I'm talking about energy, not costs. Money is arbitrary, joules are not, and you can't plug your computer to a stash of dollars and have it run. Generating energy comes at a cost to ecology, to workers and the supply is not unlimited.

RE capturing heat - heat is a low-grade form of energy and electricity is high-grade. You can't power a machine from heat at efficiency levels of electricity. And if you want an electric heater, buy a heat pump - these run at 500% (!) electric to thermal conversion efficiency (by using 1kW of electricity to move 5kW of heat around).
One reason that HIV infection is high is because it's a taboo subject. The government can affect this taboo status through education, yes, and also this way.

Punishing HIV positive people (for example, by making it illegal for them to enter the country) contributes to this taboo. Giving a government-mandated lottery ticket mitigates the taboo, and it's my belief that this will have lasting positive consequences even after the lottery goes away.

Also, people not getting infected today are not infecting people tomorrow (exponentially). Stopping infections today is exactly the right thing to do for the long-term.
That's an overly broad and sensational title. The simplified example on the website certainly isn't representative of all Haskell programmers being liars. It's unfortunate because the article about mis-implementations of the Sieve of Eratosthenes is decent.

Edit: mods, thanks for changing the misleading title.
By default all of your nearby friends are selected when you go to invite people to do something. We've found that people end up using Down to invite friends who they'd like to hang out with, but aren't necessarily close enough with to text.

Once you send out invites, everyone you invited becomes part of a group chat about the event.
Senza Peso VR: Open Sourced
You're just dropping back to the top of the conversation, before I brought up the issue of regulating specific symptoms rather than one potential cause (short-term rental).
I think it's a nice story, but for the most part unsolved problems are solved by mathematicians who are aware of their difficulty.
Not OP but I've been playing with both Elixir and Phoenix recently and I must say it's been pleasant. With experience in Ruby (and Rails) and an understanding of FP I was able to dive right in.
I'm not disagreeing with the main thrust of the OP's argument, but with the statement that "Technical Debt isn't real".

I think that it often is best thought of as "real debt" in that it costs you time and attention, and (at least some of the time) that cost compounds over time. In other words, some of your engineering spend is just going to service this debt, not produce anything useful. That's a very real opportunity cost.