msvalkon

I have worked in a team which maintained and improved a legacy piece of software generating a few hundred million euros of yearly revenue. Not technically a website but a critical backend piece of a very popular one. The application was written in Java and PostgreSQL, which leveraged stored procedures heavily. This was a _major pain_ for us.

While the separation of concerns was sometimes quite easy to understand between the business logic in the Java code and the business logic in the sprocs, there were times when it was an impossible, tangled mess. Debugging this thing was _hard_ and every deployment was fragile and hard to deal with.

There are of course many reasons as to why this particular piece of software evolved as it did. I can only say that if you plan to move any parts of the business logic to stored procedures, make sure that you have a good reason to do so and clear architectural patterns and rules to communicate and follow.

One can create the stored procedure and store it in an .sql file which can be version controlled like any piece of code. These can then be deployed in a number of ways.

Sounds like a terribly biased argument. Why would it kill for _thousands_ of generations?

I find this to be the optimal wow.

While an unorthodox merge strategy was used, this is what happens when you hole up in a topic branch for a long time. I bet this would've been easier had they merged smaller commits or PR's to master constantly. If one is afraid of deploying unfinished features, don't make them functional until they are ready. Tie them together once finished. Or did I miss something here?

Correct.

In Finland, "for life" means 12 years.

Frans Carbo, the prison guards' representative from the FNV union, says his members are "angry and a little bit depressed". Young people don't want to join the prison service he adds "because there is no future in it any more - you never know when your prison will be closed".

Well this truly sounds abhorrent.

I'm a programmer because I enjoy it, my employer seems to value the results and I am relatively well compensated for my time.

We should really make an effort to try to accommodate the people in the programming profession who do not want to spend their free time coding on projects. Programming is very, very enjoyable (to me), but I have a family with which I want to spend as much time as possible. Do I want to write a web-scraper in rust in my free time? Sure it sounds like a nice exercise. Would I rather spend that time with my kids? Yes.

I don't really understand where the downvotes come from? I find the readability concerns legitimate, and would like to understand why compression algorithm developers feel like this is OK? Is it just the math heavy background? Can't think of any real benefits to this style.

I find this hard to believe. You probably need to read the man page and perform the action over and over again.

At least personally, I need to do thing X and to achieve that I know I need to use tool Y. I read the man page of Y and very satisfyingly do the thing X. A month from now I have to do something similar to X and cannot for the life of me remember what freakish incantations need to be performed in order to do the same thing so I have to go through the man page again. This is where I'd like the tl/dr of it. I don't need Y often enough to actually warrant spending much time on learning to use the niche cli it requires..

You could use this same argument to argue against testing software. If one of the people who "gets it" has written this piece of software then there should be no reason to test it because they _know_ it works. Anyone coming in for a job interview at a professional company with this attitude will not be taken seriously.

"They" are human and are prone to the exact same errors and mistakes as anyone else. Google is technologically successful because they try to base their decision on analyzed data instead of a gut feeling.

I mostly agree with you but at least India is trying to move to nuclear[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India's_three-stage_nuclear_po...

I don't follow your arguments. Is there an actual move of trying to ban SUV's in cities or is this something you've concluded yourself?

Why shouldn't the industry be able to produce a huge oversized SUV if it can maintain emissions under the limits dictated by the law?

This discussion should not even touch the type of car. The emission hack was originally discovered in the smaller end of VW models like the Jetta and Golf with a small (<=2.0) TDi engine and now seems to span the entire range of models the concern produces. My guess is that the fuel consumption and CO2 emission manipulation also affects the entire range of models.

The problem here is that it seems to be _really_ hard to come up with a marketable engine that can meet the requirements. I guess that's why VW will be moving towards electric in the future. I hope the requirements for emission control will get stricter in the future.

"I think we Millenials are, more than any generation before us, desperately in search of our great cause."

Look no further, there's a global crisis of climate change that must be solved. We have a cause, but unfortunately not one that is nicely contained within the borders of a country.

Where I work, most of our development (includes building, testing and packaging) is done on remote machines to which we ssh to. Few people prefer gui ide's so most ssh and then run vim or emacs. Having tmux on the server hub is pretty convenient. Especially nice if you want to run a set of tests over night.

It seems to me you are not entirely objective on this. The studies (also mentioned in this article) seem to contradict your view.

Did you by chance read the article? This has little to do with opening up trade and much to do with providing ridiculous amount of power to any major corporation.

EDIT:

Suppose I'm a producer of bottled water from Germany. I bottle a lot of water in California. The Californians vote to move to heavy water rationing and regulation due to the threat of continuous draught. This hurts my business, so should I be allowed, as a corporation, to sue the state of California, have any possible trials and hearings within a closed courtroom and possibly overrule the vote?

This is a very generalizing argument. Universities are free (paid by taxes obviously) in Finland, but there is no such thing like what you describe. In here the only prerequisite is that you have finished high school, then you can take the entry exams.. It's also not uncommon for someone to go into a university later in their life. My cs courses had a good bunch of people in their fifties re-educating themselves.

ASN.1 (PER) is also used in the EU eCall -system as the encoding protocol of the data between the on-board unit and the emergency call center.

And if such behaviour was ever found, the gas chamber ate another person. The Nazi government did not take well to dissenters, especially among the armed forces.

For linux users, install xclip from your flavor of package managers and then:

    transfer file.txt | xclip

This sort of culture needs to be weeded out. We are perfectly able to create enough waste as it is, there should be no need to advocate this sort of mentality any further. Either donate directly or don't.

I agree with the pain points, for me they are unknown and that's also why it feels like I could sit down and write another communications app, but couldn't contribute to the energy sector. The utility bills sounds part sounds insane, I hope you are successful, good luck!

I hate to be that guy but looking at the app startups, don't you think it's easier to write a Yo! app than it is to actually invent and implement a disrupting technology in the energy sector? Effort to ROI in the app business probably looks really tempting, regardless of whether or not it's actually true.

Care to elaborate?

Check out Raymond Hettingers Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python talk on youtube [1].

Great talk on avoiding some of the common pitfalls new python developers step in. Exposes some nice language features.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSGv2VnC0go

As a policy, this sort of thing probably would not work but the statistic does not apply to all people. I'd be interested to see a large company which allowed the workers to decide freely. Measuring results would obviously be difficult.

This is true. I have two now. Personal time is now a dusty concept.

I have to say that the annotation is very nice. Would be a nice feature for something like Github, assuming that developers care enough to do the write up. Might get messy for larger projects though.