skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's say that rather than peacefully settle next to you, he decides to take the fruits of your labor by threat (or use) of violence. Then, you either have to give up your wealth or focus on defense against violence instead of being industrious.

Let's say you make an agreement that this neighbor that you'll give him food throughout the year in exchange for him repairing your infrastructure at the end of the harvest. If he takes the food but then doesn't help you when you need it, what do you do? You either have to fight him or cease dealing with him and absorb the loss. Either way you're worse off.

Lets say your skill is canning and preserving food. Bartering with food producers is easy since you fill a mutual need with each other, but bartering with blacksmiths, bankers, and people that provide other services is much harder. You have to trade your services to people that value it less, or spend a lot more of your time to make arrangements. Any of which could be reneged on (see previous paragraph).

Hence government monopoly on force, contract law, and currency. Three things we've had for so long that we forget they're there. Three (of many) intangible things that you gain increasing benefit from the wealthier you are.

Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, or Michael Bloomberg would not have become billionaires living in the 1500s, nor if they were born in Zimbabwe (well, I guess they could have been trillionaires in Zimbabwe but you know what I mean).
> Apple if your listening, why not just open source PastryKit?

Why? If you care to learn the lessons of PastryKit, you can view the original source. Its not in Apple's best interest to support yet another web framework thats kind of Cocoa-like. Both SproutCore.com and Cappuccino.org provide web application frameworks that are more complete, better documented, and actually maintained.
There was a license file in the uncompressed files, and it was, if I remember correctly, the Apple Open Source License. This may have not been intentional, but if you archived that license file along with the rest of the repo (or if its still up) you have a clear claim.
I like Radiant's simplicity. A PHP port of it is FrogCMS. I don't see myself using Wordpress as a lightweight CMS again, Radiant/Frog are easier to setup and maintain, and the code is well organized so they're hackable too. Every time I need to dive into the PHP of Wordpress I get frustrated with it's spaghetti-ish ways.
"If nothing you did in school had any relation whatsoever to the real world, you got screwed."

And, since no one ever gets screwed, we can therefore conclude that your original argument is correct!

(See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences)
Don't let the iPhone fans hear you say that. Apple's competitive advantage is the UI handed down from Olympus! The sleek hardware! The brand! The integration with iTunes! How could you possibly imply that their advantage is actually just the fact that they're a closed platform that Apple exercises total control over? Blasphemy!
body { font-size: 62.5%; }

This alone is gold if it works.
I think that there is easily a 10x disparity in output divided by hours worked. Why did the Etherpads just make 8 figures over the past 3 years, while I made only 6 figures? They certainly didn't work 100x more. By the economist's definition, they were easily 100x more productive.

I think that there's a more interesting question in the article - why do salaries "flatten out" the productivity curve, so that programmers who would easily be making 100x more as startup founders are instead making 50% more, with the balance going to the employer? After all, if we measure by revenue generated for the employer, I'm in at least the 7 figures, within an order of magnitude. And I doubt Aaron etc. were making all that much in salary when they were Google employees either.

I suspect the answer to this has to do with risk allocation. Because technology markets tend to be winner-take-all, there's a lot of variance in productivity that's not the result of the coder's actions. In other words, it comes down to luck, being in the right market with the right product. You can work hard at the wrong thing and still produce nothing of value, despite being smart and dedicated.

When you sign on as an employee, your employer agrees to take on the risk that you'll work hard and still nothing will come of it. And in return, they get nearly all of the upside if your hard work does result in something great.

I suspect that the 10x more productive figure is a result of sample bias: when you look at what people have done, there are some folks whose projects were 10x more useful than what other people have done. All the people who worked equally hard and produced equally large amounts of code are lumped into the "not productive" category, because in hindsight, their projects weren't all that useful. If you try to predict, a priori, who the 10x coders are, I bet you'll have a much harder time. If you don't, you have a sterling future ahead of you as a venture capitalist.
He meant in the class of 10x better than the average programmer, which would include all developers in the world, not just the few you can see.
I've experienced a 10x difference firsthand - and not against bad coders, but against average ones (they were former game developers, so they're quite possibly above average vs. the rest of the software industry). And you can slice the productivity along a bunch of different axes - systems designed and built, loc (not a great metric), complexity, features, etc - and the metrics still hold up.

That said, this order of magnitude is pretty rare (and it was against the slowest of the programmers) - but if you have a few true superstars, you can expect at least a 4x difference against the average in a group.

As far as compensation goes, at my last internet startup there was approximately a 5x difference, once you factor in bonuses. In the games industry, it was more like 2.5x.

For the worst coders, we tended to fire them after a few weeks if they somehow made it past the interview process. So there was a well-correlated difference in compensation there - we either paid them a few weeks of salary or 0$ in the latter case. :)
<Sarcasm> Its not like they contribute to the development of open web standards or browser libraries. </Sarcasm>

When Apple is scared of web applications, they'll stop improving WebKit.
With microbenches sucking in general, this test is especially CPU bound. I ran it on a c1.medium instance ($0.17/hr) with -c 160 -n 100000 and got 8602.92 [#/sec] (mean). That's more than 3x the performance at <3x the cost. EC2 gives you all that CPU continuously, not just in bursts.
Predicted Surprises for 2010: Buffet Steps Down, Gold Tumbles, etc.
It wouldn't be useful, but it would be novel, and that makes it light-hearted and amusing.
I don't subscribe to any, but the ones I read (either in online or print form via other subscribers) are The Economist (global news, finance, business), Technology Review (published by MIT; awesome tech insight), and Wired (just for fun).
Which is spam, even if well intended.
But, as the author says, it's still the best general CMS, even though it's a good blogging platform.
The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas
Yes, the gp's argument seems to contradict itself.
I'm not really 'up' on involved rules with respect to web programming / interfacing with Apache, but is it standard practice to return a 404 when your search finds no hits? Technically it's not a 'page not found.'
Dark matter holds the key to the universe
Drilling juggernaut
Apple telling people not to build a project around unreleased code doesn't mean that they are "scared to death" of better quality iPhone native apps. It means they don't mean for that particular piece of code to be treated as open source.
Why would the developers you couldn't see be 10x better than the developers you can see?

Could there be a dark matter halo of great programmers lurking around the world's mediocre-programmer-filled corporate cubicals?
I just got a Dell Precision M70 laptop way cheap (around $300) on eBay. It has a resolution of 1920x1200, the largest I've ever seen (in a 15.4" matte screen). What do people consider a 'large' resolution?
Just like everyone else, I subscribe to The Economist for all of the reasons elucidated in far greater detail elsewhere.

Unlike everyone else on the thread so far, I also subscribe to GQ because a) the articles are periodically interesting and have nothing to do with technology, b) just because I write software for a living doesn't mean I can't wear Diesel or Marc Jacobs (and GQ helps me stay on top of such things).

I used to subscribe to JPG Magazine, but never re-renewed after they stopped publishing for a few months.
I meant "the developers you can see" to imply the people around you. That's a small sample size, and not representative of the entire world.
In my experience as a lifelong resident of the Centre Of The Universe (that would be Southern Ontario to non-Canadians), we buy butter by the pound, not by the 454-gram-package - no matter what it says on the wrapper.

Also on the cooking theme, oven temperatures are measured in Fahrenheit and recipe quantities are measured in cups, teaspoons and tablespoons.

For weather, summer temperatures are generally measured in Fahrenheit (because it's just not that impressive to say, "Man, it's 40 degrees out!") but winter temperatures are generally measured in Celsius (because it is impressive to say, "Man, it's minus 20 out!").
Have you considered applying JSONSchema or Orderly to your current project?
Next Big Thing in health care: chronotherapy
This is getting uncomfortably close to the project I'm working on. I'd better hurry.
It would require extra programming, so is not done unless you think of it/get a special request for it.

Should you use a 404? I could see arguments both ways. A "no results" result, is still a result. So it's not a 404.

I would do a 404 if you try to link to a product that does not exist, but not for a zero results found page.

BTW madars don't use url shorteners here - even for really long ones.
He claims that it's the best general CMS but the only information he offers in support of that contention is the fact that it won this year's popularity contest. Last year Drupal won. Was Drupal the better CMS last year and WordPress the better CMS this year? They've both improved but the relative differences between the two are much the same.
"It's a recession when someone you know loses their job. It's a depression when you lose yours."

I know people, personally, that are losing their homes. I'm kinda wondering how large your social circles are if you don't know anyone in that situation.

Now, the people I know in foreclosure probably should be in foreclosure - they got that way through bad financial decisions in 2006 and 2007, and they were certainly warned at the time. House prices can't stay overvalued forever, and maybe this'll give those of us who were more prudent with our money an actual chance to own a home. But "propaganda term"? Really? These are real people with real homes. And they're not as uncommon as you'd think.
I wish computer music wasn't so expensive in the US. It's over $100/yr to subscribe from here.
Evolution of a Python programmer (Can't believe I am submitting a 4chan link)
Stem Cells Cure Partial Blindness
It all sounds very impressive, but the Motorola Droid continues to have a trump card: Verizon.
even sometimes dealing with the naming of functions and variables

Ugh. Asking a CS major to adhere to naming conventions is like asking an art major to color within the lines. It has very little to do with computing.
How insects see flowers very differently
Functions are data (and very cool data, too)
But it does kind of suggest that apple is going out of their way to impede the quality of web-apps on the iphone rather than try to help it along.

It does not. You're projecting motive onto an action when you have only seen the action itself, not the deliberations that lead to the action.
Well all of the laser tag systems I've seen you have to where a vest with sensors on it that detect the enemy lasers. Which really sucks when you shoot someone but miss the sensor or say you go for a head shot and nothing happens.
When Should a Startup Start Charging?
This makes front page after all those downvotes I received for commenting about essentially the same thing? Seriously?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011277
Actually, WordPress has improved leaps and bound this year while the public release of Drupal has remained fairly stagnant. WordPress has a new dashboard look and feel, automated system upgrades, automated upgrades for plugins, etc. Many things that make it super easy to use for non-techies.
Right, I agree that scaling out is great. However, bursting is also a great feature; most loads are bursty (you're caching data and have a cache miss or timeout, you request an admin page which does a lot of computation.) All time-sharing involves statistical reasoning, even within your own application: all requests might be served from cache, or ten people might issue different cache-miss requests near-simultaneously. You just reason that under normal circumstances e.g. 80% of your requests will be served from cache, and that determines your typical load. Short-term bursting means that maybe you can size your machine closer to the mean load, rather than the 2 or 3 sigma load.

So, I want _both_ bursting and scale-out :-)

The benchmark is fair for measuring CPU bursting performance, but we do need a more comprehensive benchmark suite.
This is one of the best posts I've read in a long time. It is easy to forget that, with regard to creating wealth, there are lot more factors at work than raw programming skill.

Networking, for instance, can greatly increase your output if you choose an awesome cofounder. It has a benefit that is not easily defined because of how hard it is to decouple the work and effect of each individual team member.

I know of one person that is worth easily in the 8 figures range, but he got in early to the venture. This does not mean he's a better programmer than everyone else, but he does benefit from a lot of factors that sum to being more important than programming skills.
A Possible Future History of Logic Programming
I left it in Los Angeles: a metaphor for accessing L1, L2, and disk seek times
I would probably refer to it as a music protocol, rather than a music browser.
What software would you use to write this?
I am about writing a book and i would like to know the best software to use, something that would enable me include images, graphs and figures and finally generate a PDF. Pls Microsoft Word is excluded.
Same combination here. The Economist is without doubt one of the most interesting magazines and even though I usually agree very much with them, it's not boring at all. Big plus: they have podcasts (word for word read by a professional speaker).

GQ has quite a few interesting articles which are usually burried deep within the magazine between a lot of ads. But I usually enjoy looking at the ads too. It's a change from my day to day stuff.

I also enjoy reading national geographic but I haven't renewed my subscription because they don't focus enough on technology.
I disagree for two reasons: one, Apple is not raking in huge profits on the app store. After credit card fees, bandwidth, developer/support time, etc., they're probably barely breaking even on their 30% take (although they do sit on your money for a while before disbursing). I still think they're primarily a hardware company that realizes that their sales are driven by software.

Secondly, a web app highly optimized to the point where it acts just like a native iPhone app is not that much more cross-platform than a native app.
Ron Conway
Hah! Good call.
I don't see anything negative about what he said. Build the thing, or don't. Whether you believe Zed's previous outbursts were Andy Kaufman'esque genius or simply the tantrums of a petulant child, he brought this scrutiny on himself.

My opinion, of course; I'm often wrong.
+1 (as long a /b/ stays up to keep the trolls from wandering)
>the only information he offers in support of that contention is the fact that it won this year's popularity contest.

Did you miss this paragraph and a half?

>WordPress bridges both the blogging and CMS categories due to the ‘Pages’ feature, and is extremely useful for managing a blog-focused website. Mostly. That is, until you want to do something that a CMS should be good at, like have an event calendar, custom form, photo gallery, etc. – which is why WordPress is not focused on being a CMS in the first place. Yet it does such a better job at the basic things like creating new pages, tagging, categorizing, comments, and having custom SEO-friendly URLs out of the box that it edged out other software projects like Drupal and Joomla! whose sole focus is content management. Sad indeed.

>The fact that I can go through literally hundreds of open source content management systems and still end up settling on WordPress because I know it’s the only one that won’t totally confuse my client is what’s sad.
Can Touching Your Toes Test Your Arteries?
The rumors that it won't work on AT&T's 3G (UMTS) being true would shock me. In order to support T-Mobile's 3G (UMTS) network, it would have to run on Cell, PCS, and AWS (850/1900/1700/2100) spectrums. Currently T-Mobile only supports UMTS on their AWS (1700/2100) spectrum, but that could change in the future. AT&T's 3G network runs on Cell and PCS (850/1900). They would have to intentionally disable UMTS on Cell and PCS in order to block out AT&T's 3G network, which would be extremely stupid considering that T-Mobile will eventually move UMTS to their PCS spectrum in the future.
Is this supposed to be a link to an iPhone app? All I get is Apple asking me to install iTunes.
The fact that there is no linux version is no impediment to determined hackers.
> Zed is having an awfully hard time convincing people about this idea.

I speak only for me here, but he has a hard time convincing me because I don't understand what the heck it /is/. Maybe I'm too daft to 'get it' (totally likely), but I agree with you; build it or don't build it, but stop trying to tell me what it is not.
I'm skeptical. What evidence do you have for this? Maybe some people who have a better start (those who are "naturally" talented) receive better instruction, or are more inclined to practice more often.
But this reasoning applies if:

1) Knowledge is entirely linear. If there some tasks programmer A fails at and some tasks programmer B fails at, then all you have is an apples-to-oranges comparison (which is what a lot of the x10 chest-pounding comes down to).

2) Knowledge isn't shared in the group. My proudest moments have involved actually teaching my co-workers how to write a recursive descent parser, why ACID matters in databases or how to divide a multi-threaded application between worker and consumer threads. It might be true that if I'd just kept my knowledge to my self and laughed as they failed, I might have been a 10x or even a 100x programmer. But it was more pleasant and satisfying to be the guy who actually helped everyone.
Fuzzwich (YC 07) featured on the Rachael Ray show (of all places)
An Experiment in removing anonymous sources from political articles
What's left after the "news" from the anonymous and unnamed sources are removed from political articles?
iUI might be an interesting alternative (if I understand PastryKit correctly), a CSS/JS/HTML/images framework for native-looking iPhone web pages:

http://code.google.com/p/iui/

http://iui-js.appspot.com/
The author wants an event calendar:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-manager/

and a contact form

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

and a photo gallery:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Photoblogs_and_Galleries

Wordpress does all that with simple plugins or built in functions. Perhaps it is a CMS.
Why is the Nook on the list and not the Kindle2/DX both of which went on sale in 2009?
Using a url shortener shows you're "hip". If you just paste a url, people may worry you don't understand what's hot and what's not.
Gall's Law: "Any complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galls_law
Wow that is surprisingly more complicated than I would have thought. He made has a bunch of geolocation stuff to find the exact date of the user to give the answer.
IT was a link to an iPhone app. The iPhone app appeared to just be large letters that said "no".

I'm not entirely sure what the point of this is supposed to be.
An old aviation saying:

A good landing is one you can walk away from.

An excellent landing is one where they can use the 'plane again.
But it is not a measure of the productivity of a programmer. It may be a measure of the productivity of an entrepreneur, but that is not what this article is about.
Getting a Job with the Skills Nobody's Paid You For (yet)
And this kind of hostility is why I left corporate america.
In the real world the amount someone is willing to pay for your work is greatly influenced by how it is marketed and sold. I known some great programmers whom I suspect would fall flat on their face if forced to start their own company, but when placed in a team where they can focus on their strength can produce great things. So while it might be good way to measure the productivity of companies it isn't a great way to measure the productivity of individuals.
What is the point of your comment here? It looks like you got downvoted in the other thread because you were whining about something irrelevant.
Use pixels.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001212.html

The only browser that doesn't support zooming is IE6. Zooming has become the default scaling method for every other major browser.
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.ta...

is a better source, it shows 3.1mm incoming links...

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.ta...

Shows that only 267k are from outside sources. Target is getting the credit of internal link structure from all their other pages. </educated guess>
Our little segment starts at 2:00 in the posted video.

The best part...

We have been working very hard on a new product to be released in the next month. My head has been buried in work and I, the guy in charge of all the servers and infrastructure, somehow missed the memo we were to be featured on Rachael Ray, a show which receives an average of 2.6 million viewers. Our poor servers are in a long transition to a new setup and weren't prepared for the load. Fun morning.
Novice CL user writes mysql access in CL as an exercise
By way of Zach Beane: http://xach.livejournal.com/238408.html
When you search google for some random term that doesn't exist, does it send back a 404? No.
"Magazines"? What's that?
Anonymous sources: an experiment
"Agriculture, and later city-building, is all about destroying nature "

Destroying ? That's some bias there. How about "altering nature".

Humans are part of nature, and changing things around us is natural. Sometimes it is an act of destruction, but building homes and planting crops hardly fits that description.
lsof predates the proc filesystem if I recall correctly
Prominent Chinese crystallographer faked data for years.
This is a result of Google's reliance on domain authority over relevance and pagerank now.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-spam-illuminates-the-algos...

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-rankings-algorithm-ha...
Gray squirrels munch on LED lights, except red ones
How accurate is this?
but what I don't get is , lets say I searched for "somerandomthing" and target.com uses this URL http://www.target.com/gp/search/177-0785452-0780336?field-ke...

to send a request back and then gives me a page saying "We could not find matches for "somerandomthing"

Now for Google to index the above lengthy URL and show it in search results when somebody searches for "somerandomthing" in Google, the lengthy URL needs to be used as an hyperlink on some other page right?So where is that page?

EDIT: Ok no smartass answers saying on this page :-)