__--__

Care to elaborate, or are you just throwing mud?

neither of us is qualified

That kind of thinking is how we got the government sanctioned food pyramid. I'd rather think for myself, thanks.

He's not the only anti-startup commenter here. I'm curious, have you ever worked at a startup as a programmer, not as a founder? Sometimes, it's easier to see the downside of a system when you're not the one profiting from it.

You're the only one in this thread talking about human automatons, outsourcing and broken corporate structures. I'm explaining why a healthy corporation would want to use a simpler and easier to understand system over a more complex, harder to understand one. Nothing more, nothing less.

The thing is, the level of intelligence to maintain the software has to exist somewhere.

Yes it does. Nothing I've said suggests otherwise. But, let's say you can lower the amount of intelligence required to actually understand the system. Not much, just from "exceptional" (by which I mean 10x or the top 1% of programmers working in the field) to "average" (by which I mean the median level of intelligence for programmers working in the field). If you can do that, you lower your risk over the long term. If someone leaves, you can easily hire a replacement and get them up to speed.

I couldn't agree with the article more. I should have come up with a different tl;dr for the previous post, considering everything I wrote in this thread has specifically been about corporations and not startups. Sorry about the confusion.

tl;dr: there's a reason most startups prefer javascript to smalltalk.

Which is a quality of a fundamentally broken organizational system

No, it's a quality of a robust organizational system. Let's take a program that parses html as an example. What would you think of an html parser that only works well with high quality, strictly structured html and breaks under poorly formatted html? You would call it a fragile, broken system. But a parser that deals equally well with low quality html would be a well thought out, robust system. And here's the key to the point I was making: the robust system could be relied upon to do its job consistently even under less than ideal conditions.

A system that requires exceptional engineers to maintain it is a huge source of risk for any company. If your current exceptional engineer leaves for whatever reason, you have to find another one. If the reason your engineer left is your company is suddenly facing insolvency thanks to a nasty patent dispute, all you may be able to afford to hire is a college grad to maintain what you've already got.

For corporations, consistant work is often more desirable than exceptional work. Amassing thousands of lines of code that only exceptional programmers can use, understand and modify is a liability, not an asset, no matter how efficient it is.

This could revolutionize SCA combat (and let me keep all my teeth!)

Judging from these comments, it's already there.

Neither of which actually require going to a coffee shop. It's the human interaction that most people find appealing.

If you're a software engineer, you really ought to be living in the Bay Area. There's no other place like it.

I agree there's no other place like it, but that's not necessarily a good thing. I've been there, done that and won't go back. Then again, I prefer blunt honesty to polite lies and I need my space. Just saying, it's not for everybody, even if you're a software engineer.

Something in between would be ideal for me. A center console with a touch screen for configuring settings when you're not driving, but physical buttons, switches and knobs on the steering wheel for when you're driving.

I think the question the parent is trying to raise is, is HN the right place for gender discussions in the first place? I have a dotjs script that filters out any political or social posts here because the conversations that occur are simply not constructive. That and the hate in those comments can be felt by anybody within a 10 foot radius who can see the expression on my face when I read them. I don't need that kind of poison derailing my day, so I stopped reading them.

However you feel about the original topic, you have to ask yourself: are those comment threads helping or hurting the community here?

and he should give a damn about whether you agree or not because... ??

Have we gotten to the "threaten the dissenter with bodily harm" bit already?

I had no choice but to set up my computer in my dorm room at college for 4 years. By the end of the third year, my ability to sleep in that room was gone. I also work remotely and I do so from a remote area. Cities are too noisy and the few years in which I lived in SF, it drove me crazy.

This is all my way of saying what works for one person may not work for another. Which is one of the points of remote work, isn't it? To create the perfect environment for you?

When women use the word "creepy" what they mean is they are not attracted to them and any attention received by them is unwanted. As a guy, there are two ways to avoid being labeled as creepy:

1) be attractive 2) don't be unattractive

... no. they make programmers feel like kings so they don't mind giving up their nights and weekends working for free.

Probably because these are mainstream news station and most people still don't know who Snowden is. And here's the kicker: they don't care who Snowden is or what he has to say. They just don't. It's a big deal for us, but it's an issue that has yet to surpass the unemployment rate and the declining economy as the chief concern for most Americans.

Funny, my degrees can be described the same way. BS in CS and MFA in Creative Writing.

I agree completely, that's why I used the word "inconclusive." Still, it's the only real data we have on static vs dynamic typing. Until we get better data, everything is just opinion and preference. Well informed opinions, in the case of those familiar with type theory (which I am not), but opinion nonetheless.

All this talk about formal type theory, but where are the references to the relevant studies? Where's the data? The few studies[1][2][3][4] I've found are inconclusive one way or the other and none of them focus on error rates. I found another conversation about how to go about studying error rate in dynamically vs statically typed languages, but all I really found was this article studying the affect of hair style on language design[5].

[1] http://pleiad.dcc.uchile.cl/papers/2012/kleinschmagerAl-icpc... - maintainability

[2] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2047861&CFID=399382397&CFT... - development time

[3] https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590n/10au/hanen... - development time, take 2

[4] http://pleiad.dcc.uchile.cl/papers/2012/mayerAl-oopsla2012.p... - usability

[5] http://z.caudate.me/language-hair-and-popularity/

You've never run an NVidia graphics card or had a broadcom wireless card? What about discrete graphics? My current peccadillo is the nouveau driver crashes my laptop if I try to put it to sleep. My wireless card also disconnects intermittently and has difficulties coming back from sleep. These are three major areas for a laptop that have never quite worked right out of the box: graphics, wireless and power management.

I don't want to spend days (weeks!) fixing this stuff and never quite getting 100% there, yet that's exactly what I'm doing right now. Since 10.7, OS X has become insufferable to use, so I switched back to Fedora.

I'm not trying to say OS X is perfect nor that linux is crap. But categorizing linux as "just works" and OS X as "less capable" are provably false. There's also a real vacuum right now for a developer OS that's powerful, easy to use and graphically beautiful. OS X used to fit that bill, but doesn't anymore. Linux never will.

Because not everybody wants to spend days or weeks figuring out why their video or wireless drivers aren't working. They want to get to work.

Until OS X 10.7, it was a beautiful version of linux that just worked. "Less capable", ok, maybe, but I don't see it. My entire work environment (zsh+bash scripts+vim) seamlessly copies back and forth between linux and OS X. Most linux utilities are available via homebrew. Those that aren't I compile from source. It's just like any other linux distribution on that front. It's not perfect, but I get up and running a lot faster on OS X than on any linux distribution.

I'm on Fedora 19 now and in many way I have the same issues with linux I've had since I first installed Red Hat 7 in 2000. The lack of progress on certain fronts in the linux world is staggering.

Thank you. I think I need to take a closer look at this. :)

Could you elaborate on that, please?

In this short, brutal life you have to seize any opportunity you can to celebrate.

Happy New Year :)

KeyRemap4MacBook. https://coderwall.com/p/63nzva

I've managed to almost completely replace evernote with Vim, Markdown text files and Bittorrent Sync. The only downside is adding images isn't as wysiwyg and "clipping" text from the browser can really suck.

I'm a vim guy and I did both (Capslock is Esc when pressed and let go, ctrl when held down). Best of both worlds.