jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I'll ask again: What is the objective and repeatable metric of programmer productivity? One of the reasons I avoid writing about productivity is that I have no idea how to quantify it.

But if someone can show me how to measure it, I'm confident I can show him how to get paid by it.
When I'm not sure which library to use, I just choose the one with the most commits

I have never seen anyone use that logic.
The painter themselves can take the photo. Photos can help if the subject or the scene is hard to be around long enough to paint. Say, an artist painting impressionistic city streets in the rain. It’s hard to stay in the rain and paint, but they can take a photo and paint at home, while recalling the feeling of being at the scene - the cold, the wetness, the sound of the splashing water, cars driving by, etc.
In fairness, enthusiasts from lots of language communities got duped into using MongoDB.
> I'm of the persuasion that nearly everyone is fine without Facebook.

I can mostly agree, but there will be large and interesting practical effects. For example, everyone I know in Prague uses Messenger on a daily basis. I think this is true in many places. I also wonder about where small businesses, who have come to rely on FB for one thing or another, will migrate.

If this story applies to Messenger, this would lead to the biggest DAU migration in history![1] Kind of interesting.

[1] In the areas affected.
Nobody is really sure where all this (plus the internet censorship) is coming from.

In a word, it comes from fear. Fear that the badies are going to blow us up while we sleep. Fear that the sexual deviants will molest us, or more likely just that they will have more fun than we can allow ourselves to have (being good religious folk). Fear that if someone holds an opposing viewpoint, this may make me feel like my own ridged, black and white outlook is not adequate to address the complexities of reality.

A lot of people know where it's coming from. That doesn't really make anything any better though.
Proprietary protocols only, which could be easily banned on ISP.
Do you know this, or is it a plausible-sounding theory you came up with just now?
The high-five thing started completely from the bottom up, by Russell Jurney (rjurney here and on Twitter). Jeff was over in analytics area (on an unrelated matter, iirc) and happened to step into an impromptu-created high-five zone and has adopted it.

The atmosphere surprised me as well (given the fact LinkedIn's a professional network) when I first interviewed and later joined. Another fun thing I noticed, check out the company guid for LinkedIn:

http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1337
I didn't mean to say it would be easy to support in any given software package :)
If you're a developer:
Git is faster to work with and more powerful to use from the command line if you take maybe 20 minutes to go through a good tutorial. It took you much longer to learn how to program, and it's worth taking the time to get good at it.

If you're a designer, writer, etc:
Even though it only takes 20 minutes to learn, if a GUI is what it takes to get you to use version control I guess that is the lesser of two evils :)
That would be great. Thank you.
Yes, but that doesn't mean Jobs likes games on his beautiful slab of glass. His initial reaction to them, back in the early days of the SDK (pre-release and right after release) was basically one of disgust.
I'm still divided how I feel about these things. On the one hand, I actually find them very useful for staging and unstaging changes and visualizing branch/merge history, but on the other I worry for the people whose only interaction with git is via one of these GUI wrappers. To my mind, they keep you "too far away" from the gears of the version control system, and in this case a distributed version control system — a very important point to remember, as people who only use this and never a command line wouldn't have a hope in hell of using the distributed part of git — rebase a branch? merge in several heads? I'd like to see them try.

As for this particular one, though, I can't see it offers any advantage over GitX, apart from the "it's not a RubyCocoa app", which isn't really that great an advantage to my mind…
vitalik (ethereum founder) used an interesting system. He split the key in 2. Wrote both on paper. Gave 1 paper to family and kept the other. Even if the police raid him (hypothetically), they cannot raid the houses of his family and friends at the same time

This way the police or anybody else cannot get your private key.
Look at the bright side - they still have ability to take classes from their favorite instructors for a year! Isn't that an amazing perk for being fired?

P.S. I cannot wait to hear about what actually happened to the employee stock options.
> Is it considered white-hat to try this myself?

Contact the email address on https://news.ycombinator.com/security.html

There's already algorithms in place against voting rings and similar vote behaviour. I've seen spam submissions with 50 upvotes and none was counted, the story never reached the frontpage or 2nd .. 10th page.
Just don't assume that's to do you any favors - credit card fraud is 100% on them, the removal of features is to minimize fraud and if it's a feature you still occasionally need it's being done at your expense.
We commonly see, online entertainment providers, online ad providers, AI/ML companies, Edge & private cloud builders.

Every company that builds a private cloud or edge can easily adopt this technology.
It's designed for cloud practitioner, DevOps, and NetOps engineers in mind.
In the scenario outlined there would be no unauthorized access to any systems, whether owned by Bitfinex or anyone else, so I really don't see how the CFAA could possibly apply here. As for the cryptocurrency network itself, the protocol is that anyone who has the private key is authorized to spend the corresponding funds—how the key was obtained is irrelevant.

Of course, correctly guessing a 256-bit random private key is exceedingly unlikely, though if they key is based on a lower-entropy password (a "brain wallet") then the odds of a correct guess improve dramatically.
MS Teams is well integrated within the Microsoft Windows desktop environment, which is what is used by most enterprises. I appreciate that it is integrated into my outlook and onedrive and co-authoring documents is easy in a meeting.

From IT departments' point of view, buying MS Teams license is a no-brainer.

edit: typo
Yeah I think the odds of "how about you give me cash and I not turn you in" are ... possible.

Bitfinex was offering a reward….
But what if the ops engineer can pass the coding challenge? He maybe trying to change roles.

Or the dev that only knows pascal - if they can pass the challenge using pascal then I'd think they could easily learn whatever coding language your team uses. Learning a language is easier than learning coding.

That's what I like about coding, and about these blind challenges - it's purely skill based. If they want to apply and can pass the test, they they're worth talking to. If the wrong people are applying (and passing) then your job description and challenge are wrong and need to be calibrated.
Yes, there was a reason they did it that way. They were unable to comprehend that +4+3 = +7.

I found it "lacking" because it was tedious and exasperating to stand there with a little pocket calculator adding 4, then adding 3, to make price tags for hundreds of items, one at a time.
Ah, this is also a great question.

So, regarding the hashing stuff: password hashing is supposed to be slow, which is why bcrypt / scrypt are so popular.

A lot of people (probably not most HN readers) sometimes don't realize that this can actually cause performance implications on busy servers. Even if you're running a small business on a reasonably sized EC2 instance, handling the password hashing on an already busy server can definitely cause problems if you're serving several requests per second (or more). It's not a big issue, but certainly a real one that many people don't realize they have. (Interestingly, if you use NewRelic and do Bcrypt stuff -- check it out!).

In regards to user data -- you're completely correct. It's not an authentication problem.

I wrote about that quite a bit as I think it's important as user data is also sensitive information. Just like you wouldn't want to leak user password hashes, you also wouldn't want to leak user data.

At stormpath, we provide the data service because we think it's critically important to have your user data secured in the same fashion as your user authentication information -- and as a side effect -- it helps users scale this.

If you're on EC2, you'll likely get the same latency you'd have writing to a Cassandra database locally (with very small overhead) from the Stormpath service. Furthermore, our clients implement really smart caching rules, and can do interesting stuff like transparently handle object caching to a memcached or redis cluster, smartly handle data synchronization, etc.).

Hope that helps!

Also: I really do appreciate these comments, it's an incredibly interesting topic, and it's really useful to hear what other people think! Thank you :D
I'd really like to hear more about this. If anybody knows where to find it, please reply.
I can't find a reference for this, but I seem to recall that Azul uses virtualization features of modern CPUs to decrease the read-barrier overhead; if that is correct, then that's a case of the general-purpose hardware fortuitously getting features to out-compete special-purpose hardware.
It works perfect on the Mac but I wonder if that would be the case if you could still run old 'classic' apps.

You'd think Microsoft of all companies would work in compatibilty fixes for at least the major apps. Like how they worked in so many fixes to make them compatible from 98-XP and such.
Isn't it obvious? West-Virginia's well-funded coal mining lobby doesn't like the competition from Bitcoin mining and moves one of their pawns to block it.
On the iPhone, calm.com takes you directly to the App Store page without even prompting. You can try going to the deeloper's website from there, BUT that takes you to their Facebook page. From there it links back to calm.com.

Worst. Experience. Ever. And I haven't even downloaded the app yet!
For those having a hard time with the site color(s):

(document.getElementById("content")).style.backgroundColor = "black";
I'm finding it really hard to justify TechCrunch's continued practice of publishing purloined documents when there is no public interest at stake.
I think the inverse correlation you've found is easily explained. There are folks who design languages from the perspective of academia and there are folks who design languages from the perspective of practicality, and there is not much overlap in those communities. Perl and PHP are imminently practical languages, but they never would have been put forth by academia, because they are not pure, they aren't interesting in a research sense.
Wasn't that because of the switch to 64bit? A lot of older printers didn't have 64 bit drivers.
Absolutely positively nothing, their so-called "compliance" is strictly voluntary. That's why I'm calling them out on claiming that they are "HIPAA compliant."

If they were upfront I wouldn't give two fucks, I truly don't care. Like, I really really don't care. It's that they tried to lie is why I am called them out. They were caught with their pants down. I wouldn't be a thorn in their side if they were honest.
Can you give us a couple examples on these external help?

Also is there any nonprofit working in this area to provide this kind of help?
Link please. My wife's a groomer and recently evaluated the available software there, not many options - would like to see the similarities.
That is really strange - I just searched for both on bing.com and got relevant results back. Search bubble?
Why wouldn't you do it again if it was a good experience?
I haven't hired from them but I bet they have a high hire rate because they have connections. The people who run the program are likely well connected with companies and can find positions for the students. I've seen this with university programs. I know someone who studied a non-computer related bachelors degree. He followed it up with a 1 year masters in software developer (no experience in software before this) and was offered a position at an IT company writing Java after only a few months (on the conditioned he passed the masters). Connections are important.
I create videos, mainly focused on agile techniques, that I distribute online. Currently all of my videos are on Pluralsight but I've signed deals to start branching out to other distributors with new content in 2015.
http://www.pluralsight.com/author/jeremy-jarrell

Currently the videos generate about $3,500/month in revenue. There's little out of pocket expense for the initial production of each video (stock imagery, reference books, etc) and no ongoing expenses after production is complete.

I started out just focusing on topics that I was interested in but didn't have a lot of success. Once I started approaching things as a business my return improved dramatically.
Declarative is what we'd like programming to be in the future. At the highest level we could say "Computer, make me a first person shooter set in WW2" and receive a ready to play game from that.
We do have social security disability provided by the state.
i remember when they started talking about how society treats black people and people with handicaps and i dont know about you personally. since im mixed race, but if i was only white. i would still want that blind black man to run my engineering room. that was so normal in the show. its "cool". i love startrek with all its blemishes. (i heckin hate kirk) but people dont get it. startrek universe is a sandbox to run scientific simulations of weird scientific concepts that can be hard to visualise or internalise. people who complain that its inaccurate or two episodes are not logically possible in the same universe etc. those people dont get it. people give white people so much shit. but that world, driven by the curiosity to explore this world we all are suddenly born into. with all our tribes and oddities. we work together to lessen suffering when we see it. even stuff like the tribbles can teach a kid about invasive specieces. just so much. yes all episodes arent great. but thats ok it. good art that changes people is not something you can create on demand. i love how it has everything. ferengis are such a funny thing they added. i disliked Q as a kid because he felt annoying and i did not understand his part. but its about the experiences he has. not if its possible or not that a q could exist. its a beautiful sandbox. :) i love your take on it.
I'm baffled. Is there some broader context that makes this make sense? From what I can tell, this fellow (the one sending the email) is being paid money to develop priorities for updating the FreeBSD handbook. His response is to send an email to the /announcement/ mailing list, with a list of all the relevant bug reports he could find, asking others to do his job for him?

A reasonable survey to send around might be "how often do you use the FreeBSD docs?" "How often do you notice errors in section 1? Section 2? Section 3?" That's not what this is. It's "here's a specific error, and I'm gonna run a /poll/ to figure out what the priority on fixing it is".

Even ignoring the "that's why we hired /you/" component---this must be a singularly ineffective way to gain reliable information. Very few people are going to reply (because each of the ~100 questions is rather technical!). The responses are therefore going to be self-selected to... I don't know, whoever has the time and will to waste on this.
I hope I'm not going to be the only wet blanket here but I think you need to seriously consider your options outside of software, at least in the short term. Your story makes it sound like you're in serious need of some income and/or support and you need to take care of your basic needs before you have the flexibility to do what you're passionate about full time. I hope I interpreted your situation right because this is a worrying position to hear about.

Your dismissal of the education system is a little sad too but as a non-American, I'm not in a position to judge the situation. Despite the bad rep education systems get, I think the benefits of formal education can't be understated. It's not just the skills you learn directly from courses but the critical analysis and other soft skills that you pick up which are often most valuable. I'm glad that you seem to have the interest to direct yourself toward new knowledge - that's just as valuable and not orthogonal to formal education.

I had a look at your Github and, IMHO, it's not something that would cause me to hire or partner with you. That is one person's random opinion on the Internet though so please don't take it as rude or disheartening. You are writing code and it is interesting, that's a great start especially for someone as young as yourself. Keep writing code when you can and I'm sure you'll end up doing something you love.

Good luck and I hope you get some good advice from this thread but remember that you should put your health and basic needs first. Passion and repositories usually aren't enough to pay the rent.
It's simple math: the equity a founder gets is paid for with less cash than your salary downside as an early hire.

So it makes no sense at all to me. Just about the same risk and none of the upsides.

In contrast, a later hire comes on-board at a time that most of the risk has been absorbed or mitigated.

And in most cases there won't be any later hires because the company has folded.
Would depend on, among other things, how easy it is to "schedule" complicated cases. For some specialties this is straightforward, for others, it's not.
We already bring in 1,200,000 immigrants per year.

Limiting the number of new graduates is exactly what doctors and engineers have done to keep their wages high.

Only a fool would destroy his own livelihood. VCs would never, ever support a policy that would threaten their oligopoly on the good deals, for example.

Don't be a sucker. No one is looking out for tech workers but ourselves.

P.S. If these companies can successfully relocate to Vancouver it totally torpedoes the VC-sponsored idea that San Francisco is somehow essential. Limiting all the jobs to one city is NOT good for tech workers. Silicon Valley is not a good place to make money because the cost of living is stupid. I would go so far to say that the Silicon Valley anti-density and anti-development culture and government make Silicon Valley a shit place to start a company, and companies should be moving.

I would rather work in Vancouver or San Diego or most any other urban center than get raped by rent-seeking landowners in SV.
That's got to be tough on the skin at the tip of the nose, that's not exactly the most rugged spot to be rubbing on something all day long.

Related:

http://www.mfpa.uk/
Amen. $500 sales with procurement cards pigeonhole you, and getting renewals is going to be difficult, unless you're engaged with very high level people.

If you're not just doing one time deals, find a lobbyist in the branch of government that you're interested in. It will cost $40-100k, but will get you in front of the people who matter. Usually these people can hook you up with the right partners as well.
I wonder how long time this will live on the frontpage of HN before it gets "censored" to back as the discussion of PG's piece did?

With the all internet's "direct communication" and "netizens democracy" it is funny how we cannot have a non-bullshit discussion about a subject like this.
A lot of west coast companies are in Vancouver. It's not their headquarters but having a Vancouver office gives them access to large pools of foreign talent that they can't easily bring into the US. It's also conveniently located in the same time zone as California and Washington which reduces the difficulties of having remote workers.

Any standardized test will be gamed. Just look at all of the books and other resources you can find for how to solve the types of problems that get asked in coding interviews.
If they had stuffing on the menu it would be a pretty good substitute for a Christmas dinner.
It's called metal.
Comparing implementing SSL/HTTPS to securing your front door with an electronic time lock, armed guards and dogs on patrol is a bit of a stretch.
I can do one for pennies on the dollar. The other one is a lot pricier (what with dog food and all).
Oh, I totally understand that users want to know why a company is shutting down - myself included. Heck, I'd also like to know if they are selling any of their services/IP, who they are selling them to, and, as long as we are playing this game, I'd _love_ to know what the terms were, how much, and whether the team will be moving to salesforce as well. These are all things that I very much am interested in.

My Nit with the OP is that they made a comment about how etacts was handling "transparency" with their user base - and I believe that they did 100% of what I'd expect any service provider I'm with do - give me a heads up, in advance, as to what the next steps with their organization and service were (and issue me a partial refund - I'm not sure if the etacts guys had paying customers yet).

As a interested observer, I want much, much more. As an etacts customer, I'm satisfied that they've provided me the transparency I'd expect of any responsible service provider.

Compare this to how Yahoo has been handling delicious - "Sunsetting?", "Closing", "Keeping up", "Selling?" - who knows - it's not even clear they know/knew.
That's simply not true. I don't devote any significant portion of my time to reminding the rest of the world that they're stupid, but I still think Comic Sans looks dumb.

And no, it is not similar to using a salad fork to eat steak. You've even pointed out the difference in your comments: "Do you know what the purpose of that sign is? It's not to evoke en emotion…" This recognizes that choice of font has a significant practical impact in many contexts. Which fork you use for salads is always just a fiat, and experts in the field of dinner etiquette realize that it doesn't have a rational basis.

Wearing panties on your head is a much better analogy. Granny panties will keep your head warm, and people who want to feel superior and open-minded might say, "Hey, stop being elitist about what counts as acceptable headgear" — but none of that changes the fact that wearing panties on your head looks silly and there are better ways to accomplish that goal.
Regardless of why he turned down the job, why would you bash or judge him at all? Especially since you aren't 100% sure that he doesn't have a good reason for turning the offer down, it doesn't seem productive at all to say anything bad about the guy.
Paul, Always enjoy your comments and insights. Glad things are working out so well. If you are in Atlanta for the holidays i would love to grab drinks and catch up.

Steven.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/12/carriers-net-neutrali...

Link to the original.
While operating costs can be a reason startups are forced to shut down, I'm sure its not the reason startups close shop. I would assume advice is optimized for growth and traction to make something people want. After all, nobody is in this game to build a business slow and marginally (although there's nothing wrong with that).