When someone is looking at what makes up a top-class enterprise software developer, often the conversation may turn to knowledge of frameworks and languages, or perhaps the ability to understand complicated algorithms and data structures. For me, one of the most important traits in a programmer, or indeed in a development team, is something that I'll call Customer Affinity. This is the interest and closeness that the developers have in the business problem that the software is addressing, and in the people who live in that business world.

For those of you who are unaware and don’t want to read the wikipedia article: Ender’s Game is basically a homoerotic, militaristic sci-fi coming of age story, where a prepubescent boy gradually learns more and more about his inner demons whilst attempting to save the human race. It ends with a stirring defense of fascism and was written by a deeply, deeply closeted Mormon homosexual.
It’s everything you could ever want and so much more.

About a month ago, at Chardon High School in Chardon Ohio, 5 students were shot by a kid who was apparently bullied. It is a common story that we hear about several times every year now. It seems like almost every time a school shooting happens, the shooter was a victim of bullying. The following day I was browsing through the tweets under the #Bullying hashtag on Twitter and someone commented that kids just need to learn to accept bullying as part of life. I’ve heard other people say things like that too. Well, okay then. Is American society prepared to accept school shootings as part of life too? Bullying affects all of us now. If a kid is being bullied in any school in the US, every kid in that school is at risk of dying before graduation. Bullying affects us all, not just the bullies and their victims. And it is also everyone’s responsibility to end it, not just the bully’s responsibility.

"This is the true measure of how far we've come as a nation," Stewart said. "In, like, five years, the prime talking point from Republicans about people who support gay marriage has gone from 'it will destroy society via turtle fucking' to, 'oh, of course you're for it, you'll say anything popular to get elected.' That is progress."

After a couple years at Facebook, Hammerbacher grew restless. He figured that much of the groundbreaking computer science had been done. Something else gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google (GOOG), and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.”

"I assume high-speed cameras have a function other than watching shit blow up...but I don't need to know what it is." -- jwz

"Writing code" was priority number five of five. If I had anything I needed to do in one of the other four categories, that had to come first.

A better trailer for The Shining.

All the above is sort of wrong. You can never *guarantee* exactly once (there's always some argument about whether receiving message duplicates but relying on idempotency is achieving exactly once. I don't feel it does, and this should become clearer as to why further on...)

*Very* incomplete statistics, but it's definitely not an obvious picture of total decline.

I am terrible time, the destroyer of all beings in all worlds...

You are not doing shit for life until you get in there and fight that darkness. Until you understand that abortion is salvation in a world like ours. Does that sound too hard? Do you really think suffering post-birth is more permissible, less worthy of outrage?
“Pro-life” is simply a philosophy in which the only life worth saving is the one that can be saved by punishing a woman.

A rational society would know what to do with a kid like Taylor Wilson, especially now that America's technical leadership is slipping and scientific talent increasingly has to be imported. But by the time Taylor was 12, both he and his brother, Joey, who is three years younger and gifted in mathematics, had moved far beyond their school's (and parents') ability to meaningfully teach them. Both boys were spending most of their school days on autopilot, their minds wandering away from course work they'd long outgrown.

That’s right: Facebook, a network-based application (one that is typically accessed as a web page) is using nearly half a gigabyte for documents.

In which Geeklist execs stand up as entitled chauvinist douchebags.

I came here looking for the standard, oblivious, "Hey, what's so sexist about being completely sexist?" comment.
As usual, HN did not disappoint.

Reagan is now deemed one of those reality-based conservatives whose disappearance we now lament. Wrong. Deeply informed by the whackadoodle far-right, Reagan at earlier points in his career loved to quote its nostrums: that according to Communists blueprints "by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free"; that, as he said in a 1975 interview - rehabilitating a quote supposedly from Vladimir Lenin but in fact made up by the founder of the John Birch Society - once Lenin and his comrades had organized the "hordes of Asia," then conquered Latin America, "the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, [would] fall into their outstretched hands like overripe fruit."