skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that talking about a 10x engineer or 0.5x engineer misses the right optimization: good software is built in teams, so build a strong team. Cross-skilling, pairing, and blocker removal all help give people a collective sense of commitment and autonomy: you have the right to touch the systems you need to accomplish your job, and it's my job as servant-leader to remove whatever's stopping you. But you have less leverage and less resilience without that sense of collective ownership.

I've likewise experienced both 10x and 0.5x situations. The latter invariably arose from sitting in a corner, divorced from context or support. The former is extremely rare and I've only achieved it on personal projects. But I'll settle for a motivated and healthy team of 5xers any day.
Ask HN: Why doesn't Sony sell PS* emulators for PC?
The same goes for Nintendo and MS and their consoles and also for arcade console manufacturers.

The emulator scene has shown that it's perfectly possible to emulate pretty much any console architecture on a zero budget, so it can't be a matter of resources, either money or engineers. Sony is reselling its back catalogue emulated on PS3, PS4 and Vita anyway, so they're already emulating their older architectures on newer ones.

So why not also do it on the PC? There's bound to be some PC gamers who don't own consoles, but wouldn't mind playing console games on a PC. And Sony could even sell them peripherals (I for one have a PS4 controller for my PC gaming needs).

So there must be another reason- probably something political, or marketing-y. What is it? I can't think of it. Help me HN! :)
> The EU is never going to work

It works already.

> good luck expending your business to Germany if you don't understand the German market and law

Example: German companies have expanded all over the globe, learning the local markets and laws. What are you talking about?

> that it is still everybody for himself and rightfully so

The Greek are still in the EU.

> I was fine with the EEC, the EU is an experiment and us citizens are the guinea pigs.

I'm fine with the EU.
Seems quite useless to me. For, what if you want to prefix the file with a header first, or add a trailer? Or what if you want to escape certain parts, or zip the file before sending? Or if you want to send the file incrementally?

It is better (more powerful) to have simple primitives, and work up from them.

If you really want something like sendfile, you could also just find the right library.
To be a 10x engineer, you don't have to be 10x smarter. There are a lot of ways to get to an overall multiplier of 10x.

You can be 2x smarter and 2x more experienced and have 2x better research skills and 1.25x better administrative skills/support (time management, office layout, etc.) with the net result of 10x effectiveness.

You can be 12.2% better in 20 different but mutually-reinforcing skill areas.

Or, thought of a different way, an ordinary engineer might solve 90 problems easily but get bottlenecked on 10 challenges. You can approach 10x by solving 99 problems easily and only bottlenecking on one. Being an outlier isn't necessarily a matter of one big advantage, but can be about combining a lot of small advantages.
They said the same about 4G and it did not happen.
There's nothing wrong with what they call "guilting users." You're simply wording the negative value proposition in a way that they might easily empathize with. That way the user can best evaluate their options rather than the "Subscribe/cancel" model.

If someone hates signing up for emails, you want to convince that person that this is the list to sign up for. There's nothing shameful about selling a product. If you think there is, you're not selling hard enough.

I'd recommend allowing a path that offers a limited experience, so they can at least try your value prop before they buy it. It's hard to sell someone on GQ's "award-winning journalism" if they've never read it before.
but will it scale because of meteor and mongodb
I need to do this for job hunting purposes. What's my greatest accomplishment, they will ask. I'm not sure how to answer that. I don't have much stand out stuff, at least not career wise. Should I mention a cool coding project I worked on for a job? That seems somewhat underwhelming as a "greatest" accomplishment.

Any advice on this front?
The problem is that a regulation like "be secure" is impractical, because to a close approximation no system is actually, 100% secure - it's just a matter of the effort taken to hack it.

So the regulation ends up being "go through the security process" (take something like PCI compliance as your model). This always ends up being a crappy fit because the guy doing the process can typically only throw out a list of "best practices" that may or may not make any sense for any particular application, and in any event aren't comprehensive enough. It's also wildly expensive, since the process is embedded in a regulatory-certified person who charges N$ / hour.

Empirically the best you can do absent some specific industrial setup is a series of bright-line rules like "don't store passwords in the clear", but that's far from sufficient.
You're talking about exceptional geniuses, of which there are maybe a few dozen in a given field across an entire generation of people.

Every two-bit company is demanding "10x engineers". That is what doesn't exist. There are not tens of thousands of genius software developers in the world.
Isn't it common sense to at least set a randomly generated password as the default one? Especially for something as sensitive as an Internet webcam.
> Everything follows a normal distribution.

Yes, this is why the 60 wealthiest people have as much wealth as half of the world combined.
I would go one step further and say that those features in Rust (and ML, Haskell etc) aren't even metaprogramming. So D uses metaprogramming to make up for a weaker type system.
I can't wait when he reaches the bronze age.
Templates for GitHub Issues
I think we should strive to avoid 0.1x environments. I work in a cube farm and there are plenty of days when my neighbors are so loud that my productivity goes to 0.1x or less. When I work at home on Fridays I often get more than than during the 4 preceding workdays.

Add to this constant meaningless meetings where everybody is late and unprepared.

I often hear "I will work tonight or on the weekend so I get things done". I don't understand why everybody seems to accept that the workplace environment is bad and nothing can be done. I have raised this to senior management quite a few times but they just shrug their shoulders.
There's an easy way of safeguarding against that:

Estimate the amount of units you (Lockheed Martin, Boeing?) will need during the next ten years. Triple the amount. Order that amount from mouser.com. :)

Seriously - LEDs are commodities nowadays.
Call him a prophet because we are having the systemd conversation all over again :(
Thank you for your thoughts. That is very helpful.
Java actually allows for 10x work because it's so simple and let's you work quickly.
If he built all the systems and especially the cash cow, isn't that some objective measure that he's more valuable than the average employee?

Maybe he's messy, but nobody pays the janitor millions of dollars to clean up everyone else's messes even if they tell themselves he's important. Rather, they pay the people who made it worth cleaning up the building in the first place.
What he did with the NYPD scares me a bit but I think overall he was truly responsible for cleaning up that city (physically). He also implemented the first "Data science" team for a city, which was used to prevent building fires and sewage pipe bursts, among other things [1].

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/nyregion/mayor-bloombergs-...
> In this regards, Rust is actually the Blub compared to D and C++.

I think this demonstrates a significant weakness in Blub as a concept: there is not even a partial ordering of languages by power. The essay only works because Graham picks the two sides of the debate: Lisp, which Graham believes to be the most powerful of languages, and Blub, a theoretical language that can be stipulated to be less powerful than Lisp in all ways.

Outside the essay, "blub" only exists as a slur for a despised language or an insult for another programmer, and it's only useful as a way to start arguments.
No, I think the parent is referring to the fact that anyone can easily become an Uber driver. The incentives would be good because a big chunk of drivers striking would create high surge pricing.
But the guitar (or driving, or typing, or ...) practice isn't nuance so much as moving things from (slow) conscious thought to (fast) unconscious processing.

The practice isn't about acquiring information, so much as it's about moving that information to a different internal subsystem.
This is why the public option was so important, but even the democrats couldn't agree to that.
Fun Trivia Fact: Rust's type system was[1] Turing complete. So you could actually have monads. You just wouldn't want to.

1: The program that proved this no longer compiles, so we're not sure if the type system is or is not at the moment.
It is in fact very very useful but underutilized, for a very specific purpose - serving very large amounts of data from pretty much any runtime (like Ruby or Python). With those runtimes it works great because you can avoid stuffing the contents of the files you send out into the VM memory, greatly reducing memory and GC pressure. You can also cache the computation product in files, and then send those files out via sendfile() - and the computation can happen on a background thread or in a parallel process.
Ionitron-issues: custom issue tracker for GitHub with issue ranking/scoring, bot
Bloomberg $36.5b [1]

Trump $4.5b [2]

Clinton (household) $111m [3]

Bush $21m [4]

Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Presiden...

Sources:

[1] http://www.forbes.com/profile/michael-bloomberg

[2] http://www.forbes.com/profile/donald-trump

[3] http://moneynation.com/hillary-clinton-net-worth

[4] http://moneynation.com/jeb-bushs-net-worth
I guess I need to learn how to step away from these debates even when I really, really know that "the other people" are wrong...

(By the way, just a random thought: I know that you are a moderator because I read it somewhere, but there is nothing in the post or your profile that shows that you are. Perhaps it could be useful to have some sort of optional "show moderator emblem" flag when you post these things, in order to cut down the amount of misunderstadings.)
> not everybody is as skilled as them so the software should be designed and written accordingly.

I don't know if I'm a 10x dev, but I've heard this mantra few times.

It's most annoying when it happens because I actually strive to make something simple. Like I once needed to index members of some C++ STL container, so I used std::map<key, container::iterator>. It went like that:

- WTF? A map of iterators? It's complicated! Remove it!
- But the objects need to sit in this container and this extra index is also required.
- But... but.. It's complicated! Remove it!

Man, I hate people at times.
Evidence of Burial Ground Is Discovered in East Harlem
> The distributed nature just means that if attackers find one exploit, they can apply it repeatedly to the distributed application, to give themselves an entire botnet

That may or may not be true... In any case it's completely orthogonal to unikernels. Distributed applications, and any security advantages/disadvantages, are a fact of life.

> All code is privileged, so any remote execution exploit in any piece of code makes you own the whole machine (physical or virtual, as the case may be). A buffer overflow in some HTML-template-stuffing code is as good as one in an ethernet interrupt routine. Wee!

I'm afraid you're parroting what you learned about security without really understanding it. Yes, an exploit will give you access to the individual machine. But what does that mean if the machine is a single trust domain to begin with, with no privileged access to anything other than the application that is already compromised? In traditional shared systems, running code in ring0 is a big deal because the machine hosts multiple trust domains and privileged code can hop between them. That doesn't exist with unikernels.

Add to that the tactical advantages of unikernels: vastly reduced attack surface, a tendency to use unikernels for "immutable infrastructure" which means you're less likely to find an opportunity to plant a rootkit before the machine is wiped, and the fact that unikernels are vastly less homogeneous in their layout (because more happens at build time), making each attack more labor-intensive. The result is that the security story of unikernels, in practice and in theory, is very strong.
I wholeheartedly disagree about letting regulators have anything to do with technology. It moves too fast and has too many interpretations to be codified into common sense law, leaving just the big pocket corps to write the regulations just like they've already done everywhere else.

How do you define reasonable security practices? If there's PII, what's reasonable then? What's reasonable today OAuth, tokens, 2FA was over the top crazy/impractical/expensive/impossible in 2001. You think there's going to be a committee evolving this crap every month in perpetuity?

On top of that, if actual harm comes to users of these devices as a result of these devices then we already have plenty of consumer laws protecting them. Granted, they're going to have to come up with ways to apply it sometimes and you're going to have to prove it was that device that allowed the harm, but we have it.

I will say this though: I'm mostly okay with laws (whether they exist or not yet) that say that if your negligence or stupidity was the root cause, as a manufacturer of these goods, you are on the hook for a multiplier of damages. There are a lot of companies out there that know they are pushing shit to market in a race to the bottom and then just claim security is hard and they tried their best when clearly, they knew about an 8 year old bug and shipped anyway. I'm that case, I'm okay with hitting them hard.
I don't know why you're getting down votes, it's a reasonable question.

Most capture schemes require the rocket to survive structural forces it isn't designed to handle. Increasing its structural thrength would increase its weight. Spacex tried parachutes on early designs, but gave up on them. A parachute landing on the ground means impact forces, landing in the ocean means salt water corrosion. Also even parachutes have a cost in weight, including structural strengthening. SoaceX and Blue Origin have both looked at the various options, crunched the numbers and opted for propulsive landing.
Logodust
Citations please. This is the second time I'm asking.

If there are bulletproof STM implementations, there should be some papers which back that up (preferably not academic toys). What throughtput and latency profiles did the STM implementations get, how did that scale with cores, what work profiles do they work well with, and how did all that compare with regular threads? How were livelock and side-effects handled? Was this put in production, and what shortcomings were there (there are always shortcomings)? Etc, etc, etc.

Also, reread my initial post more carefully. I qualified it at the very beginning with "in the context of high performance applications”, and I qualified it again near the end; I didn’t simply agree with any sweeping claims. Yet here I am, getting lectured by someone who says that "performance assertion showed he was full of crap"... which I have demonstrated isn't true.

Back your claims up; maybe I'll learn something interesting.
I'm torn on this.

- I would LOVE to see a significant voice in politics outside of the two parties.

- He would only be capable of mounting a campaign outside the two-party system due to his billions of dollars, which is exactly the problem.
I haven't written C++ with any significance in a few years, and done little with Rust at all. So while I don't feel qualified to speak to the comparison at the core of the blog post, I did find the first example to be disingenuous. It rests entirely on assuming the C++ programmer will rely on inheritance to achieve polymorphism, simply because they can?

Additionally, the C++ example doesn't produce the same output ("Value: (x: 7)" and "Value: (x: 5, y: 10)"). The addition of that goal might lead the programmer to treat the C++ version of print_me as something more abstract, accepting a string and having class Foo and class Bar simply return their own string representations.

I acknowledge that the premise was "a beginner C++ developer", getting hyped up about inheritance and using it as the only tool in their toolbelt, but how many people are learning C++ as a first language these days? It used to be the norm, back in the OO-will-save-us-all heydey, but has anyone run into it lately?
There are a couple of hundred 10x footballers or artists or writers or what ever compared to.the millions of people who try to do it.

Somehow there are 10s of thousands of people who think they are 10x engineers or have somehow hired a 10x engineer.

That's why they aren't actually all these 10x engineers people talk about.
They don't want you to find the global maximum of impressiveness. They want you to tell a story of how you solved a problem so that they can tell themselves a story of how you'll solve a problem in their business and thereby cut costs or (preferably) increase revenue.
Huh oddly that explains a lot of the aesthetics of NES games.
Linux audio is leaps and bounds better then it ever was. ALSO ALSA is not a dependency for PulseAudio it uses ALSO uses OSS which after version OSS 4 it has become my sound interface.
I haven't but it's a good idea.
I'm going to take an educated guess and say it's because they make a lot of money on accessories and having the software on a PC makes it much more vulnerable to exploitation and pirating.
If he does, he's just handing the election to Trump.
Bernie $528,014

Source: http://moneynation.com/bernie-sanders-net-worth/
The author wrote Luigi at Spotify, which is a pretty good example of a small amount of code with immense leverage on other people's productivity.
Any well written server application eventually comes down to how fast can you copy the data. This avoids a copy so it can double performance.

As for headers/trailers, it's a file descriptor, nothing prevents you from writing to it before or after the sendfile() call.

Simple primitives are fine but this is faster. Unless you are going to do the page flipping tricks that Irix did, you can't approach this speed (and Irix tricks aren't as fast as this, better than the bcopy() but not as fast as this).
This is also a good habit for folks who occasionally have a problem with their brain telling them that they are worthless and can't do anything useful.
Does 4G mandate IPv6?

I do think v6 adoption is now happening.
An animal can fall and not die for many hours; the elephant might be incapacitated but not be dead.
I can see why Musk would like this alternative remedy.
Yes, just think how many throwaway unicorn greenfield projects these Java developers didn't participate in because they absolutely have to insist on maintaining crufty decade old code bases that actually solve a tangible business problem instead of thinking software is an afterthought to a fluffy full page HTML5 marketing video about revolutionizing the world.
what programming languages do i need to know to hack on libreoffice?
This is sand
Were Quartz holed up in Antarctica throughout 2015? Even on my side of the Pond, Uber's regulatory battles were well-reported, to say nothing of the stink from London's cab drivers and Transport for London.

A slightly disingenuous piece, IMO, considering the role of consumers in Uber's proactive approach to challenging the status quo.
I was right with the author on this until they referenced Donald Trump as some sort of role model. Ugh. The final paragraph of TFA is quite relevant advice for Trump: Don't Brag. And advice for everyone else: Don't Be Like Trump.

That said, I think self-reflection is fantastic. Maybe you feel like you're always running in place? Write down what you've been doing for the past few weeks/months/years, figure out what you think has been valuable or not as valuable, and adjust going forward.

This practice has been super-helpful for me also as a morale boost going into negotiations about compensation. It gives me both moral courage that I have been valuable as well as specific details that I can bring up to demonstrate how I've provided value to the company.

In all of this, though, beware that we tend to undervalue the contributions of others just as much as others undervalue our own contributions. Even for the smartest/most productive of us, our own accomplishments still stand on the shoulders of others'.
Yeah, I agree with my sibling comment above that Blub is kind of a weak concept for this reason.

It's hard to say because the work for those features hasn't even been started; the MIR refactoring is still underway. Once that's done, RFCs for this stuff will start to appear, and we'll have a better idea of overall schedule. I would say that the current schedule is "longer than months, shorter than a few years".

I myself _really_ want higher kinded types, but at the same time, I would rather wait and do it right than rush and regret thing slater. We have a solid language as it is; the need to get these more advanced features is not particularly urgent, in my opinion. I like to think on the long scale when it comes to the language: if it's going to be around 40 or 50 years, we're in year one. There's plenty of time.
Yes, mention the cool coding project! We're mostly average[1], most companies/jobs are average, and most employers should and do value our average accomplishments[2]! If you enthusiastically and knowledgeably describe a cool coding project you'll be winning vs most people I've interviewed.

If you're going for CTO of SpaceX, yes, you'll need some overwhelming accomplishments. If you're going for developer role 437 at SpaceX, less so :)

[1] when compared to peers, e.g the people going for the same jobs as you

[2] and will definitely prefer a nice 'average' person, to an obnoxious 'genius'
I agree with a lot of the points, but..

> Most of the 10x factor is most likely explained by team and company factors (process, tech stack, etc) and applies to everyone in the team/company. Intra-team variation is thus much smaller than 10x (even controlling for the fact that companies tend to attract people of equal caliber). Nature vs nurture…

Definitely not true! I have been in companies where 1 engineer outperformed 10 others with everything else being the same and on the same team. It was really obvious too. It does happen. eg, he could handle 10 bug or feature requests in the same time it took some of the other engineers to handle 1.
Definitely not doubting that. I just hate to see solutions that treat the effect and not the cause. So. Many. Commercials.
Another Intel employee here (don't know the author). I work on Intel's Open Source OpenGL driver, which is part of Mesa. Most of the work I do is on our GLSL compiler and Gen hardware backend.

I've never used VTune (but it looks very cool) and some of the notation is different from what I'm used to.

If you're using an Intel GPU made in the last 10 years on Linux, the environment variable INTEL_DEBUG will allow you to see the disassembled shaders for a given program. Try "INTEL_DEBUG=fs,vs glxgears" to see the fragment and vertex shaders' assembly and the dumps of some intermediate representations along the way.

The Gen (or i965, as we call it) instruction set is really powerful, but does take a while to understand fully.

I've actually been trying to finish up an article about some tricks we do in the i965_dri.so driver (think bit twiddling hacks, but each using some interesting features of the instruction set). I'm curious if there's interest in such a thing. I'd probably be more motivated to finish it. :)