- a customer orders database with products with a timeseries of prices, and multiple fulfilments per order. - an issue tracking system with a reflexive user/manager database - a family relationship model

In each case I got it to put in sample model and then asked postgres.new to answer some questions about the data it had inserted. I thought the family model would trip it up, especially when I told it to put in cousins and uncles. But no, it was pretty bang on.

The only thing it didn't quite manage is that some of the relationships are reciprocal (i.e. my sibling also has me as a sibling).

I asked postgres.new to review the data and it fixed some, and i asked it to check again and it fixed the rest. This is a very useful tool that I can see myself using!

Having lived in the US I know things get complex when you start mixing in state taxes, but this is federal taxes right? Or wrong?

100% this. I'm a bit competitive, but only a bit :). After 20 years of being a dev I realised I didn't want to compete anymore and shortly after that I quit as a dev.

I've now switched more into an analyst role and because I've been a dev i think I know what makes a good analyst because I know what I would have to know to write the code - if it were me. But here's the best part, the mark of a good developer is their attention to detail. And attention to detail is also the mark of a good analyst, but as an analyst you don't have to sacrifice yourself to the detail of tool-chains, stacks and frameworks.

Working on large scale problems as a dev, and doing it right, is slow (with a small number of devs) and chaotic with a large number. But as an analyst I can work at the speed of thought, work on many projects simultaneously, and see the fruits of my ideas take shape as the devs start to deliver them and I shepherd them into existence.

So for now I'm pretty happy, I write code in my spare time for fun and like the OP - I'm back where I need to be.

In my experience business people often have a 'nose' for the right number and will bluff it out if the numbers are wrong and they're challenged.

Blue sky things or stuff you're putting in the annual report should be left to hoomans IMHO.

Is the rudeness excusable? I guess. Especially if I understand where it's coming from. Otherwise it's just rudeness.

And I guess that the point of the article, but you need to get to know people before you can make the judgement of why someone is how they are. That takes time.

What's different now, as the article points out, is the growth of micro-service architectures. Effectively creating a lot of tiny producer/consumer problems across the solution space.

Sometimes, I'm glad I don't write code anymore, but only sometimes :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producer%E2%80%93consumer_prob...

So I suppose the real answer depends on the environment you're in. If the project is meant to be agile then you probably need a bit of interaction with the user to get the job done. If the project is not agile and all the requirements could be known up-front then you're probably wasting effort having programmers determine what those requirements are. IMHO.

And to be honest some of these MOBA pictures do that too, they're actually not bad at all. It's just perhaps not intentional, but does that matter?

So to call it bad art, is going a bit far.

Even better was the ability to attach to the running ui or server (yes we had both), replace some of the code on-the-fly, and disconnect. Perhaps not so amazing these days, but it was way ahead of anything else I'd seen upto that point and pretty mind-bending for a C/C++ coder.

This is 'data mining' right? And I've occasionally wondered about this, since I don't work in a scientific field but did once make use of the scientific method for some research I did. And yes the findings weren't especially conclusive but I'm not sure I could've tweaked the hypothesis to make it work.

So, had I found something really interesting that didn't fit the hypothesis, is the 'right way' to conduct a new experiment from scratch? So say I did that, and used the 'tweaked' hypothesis, of course I'd find something interesting, because it's already there.

In this new 'pre-registration' framework, how can I correct the problem and pursue the interesting idea but keep the science in-tact? Because, if I used some sort of cross-validation at the outset and I have all the data available I presumably can't change the sample, so the hypothesis presumably has to change.

More annoying are the privacy concessions that are the result of secret anti-counterfeiting measures (which is what I assume the measures are for).

Well I happen to (vaguely) know the author and have worked with him in the past and he has done a lot of great work, not all of it in the public domain though.

Comparing him with an organisation that employs 17k people is a little unfair but he comes out of it favourably IMHO!

Disagree. Over the course of a week it only means over eating 250kcal per day. What's that an extra muffin? Seems entirely plausible to me. Of course if you're expending 1750kcal additional kcal a day on cycling then THAT's a bit excessive, IMHO.

This article [1] from last week seems to support that view. There was something else on HN on Friday that offered the same opinion but included a lot more studies. Can't find it now, but the message is the same.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/22/obesity-owes-...

So the question should not be how do you justify earning it but just how much can you justify keeping it?

Kind of lefty, I know, but it's Friday :)

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing-Do-ebook/d...

Turns out being a programmer is a very portable skill, and good ones get paid well. Life isn't so bad.

I imagine if I'd spent the last 10 years in management I probably wouldn't have changed jobs and be just as frustrated, just in a different way.

But let's not get carried away here, the OP (and I) might have been pretty poor management material after all.