skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
20 developers has lower productivity for a lot more reasons than individual incentives. This has been widely recognized since The Mythical Man-Month.

Concrete data point for you that I ran across in Software Estimation by Steve McConnell. The average team of 5-8 programmers can get a medium sized project done in the same calendar time as a team of 20 programmers. As teams grow beyond 20 programmers, total throughput improves. This is from a study with project side measured in lines of code. There is every reason to believe that the larger team has more reinvention within their project, and therefore their project of equivalent size has less functionality.

The fundamental reason has to do with lines of communication. As you add a person to a team, the number of lines of communication you add is the size of the team. At some point people take up more energy from others than they contribute useful work themselves. There are a myriad of organizational techniques which try to mitigate this problem, but all suffer from the defect that they force people to use less productive forms of communication (for instance writing documents that can be read by many others), and therefore lower individual productivity.

Therefore if you've got 20 developers you should seriously consider going back to a small team, find a way to partition them into groups with minimal interactions, or scale your organization up until you have a lot more developers than that. The first two try to solve organizational problems that lead to low throughput, the last accepts the issues but lets you tackle problems that the small team couldn't.

Another random suggestion. If you're interested in productivity, pick up a copy of Peopleware and Rapid Development, read them, and pick a set of best practices to try.
The other day I calculated my net contribution to the IMVU client, in lines of code. Excluding third-party libraries, I have subtracted about 100,000 lines since 2005.

Reminds me of an old presentation by Alan Kay. He was demoing some networked virtual world he'd written, including avatars, portals, and chat. He wrote it in Smalltalk, and said it summed to 60,000 lines. He said with a bit more effort, he could probably reduce it to 20,000.

There's something to be said for a complete lack of duplication in the system.
Is there anyone on the net who thinks this filter is a good idea? Pretty much the only people who do are the ones who don't even use the Web, and just keep shouting that it's inherently evil. Oh, and the ones with the government contract to implement the filter.

When no one will listen to the people who will actually be affected by this, what other options are left?
Who was that guy who suggested using lines written plus lines deleted. Was it Knuth?
Performance optimizations, managed code and leaky abstractions
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It would be like punching mist. Hell, if someone gets in jail for being part of anonymous (or, more accurately, for participating in a DDoS advocated by people under the banner of anonymous, or even more likely for having their wifi used by someone to participate in such a DDoS), it will just make all the others more angry. Fighting them would be like fighting tor, or bittorrent; highly distributed, highly decentralized, with no real command structure, and no allegiance to any single website (if one goes down or is monitored, they can always move elsewhere). It's not even an organization, in the old sense; you might as well say that slashdot or HN are organizations[1]. On the upside? Most of them, most of the time, don't care - except when someone makes them angry, they seem fairly passive, more interested in their own amusement than anything else (yes, I occasionally lurk on 4chan) - and even then, there are probably only a few thousand who actually participate in things like this [not that I have actual numbers to support this, but still - someone who's more interested could start lurking on IRC channels mentioned in image macros (such as the one in the article) and keep track of how many unique individuals show up].

Or you could always kill them off by destroying anonymity in the internet - force everyone to use their real names everywhere, to provide concrete linkages to real personalities. That's the only way to stop people from taking advantage of anonymity.

I'm sorry that this turned into a rant; it was originally going to be a lot shorter. I just kept on thinking of things to add, you see ... and I haven't ranted for a while.

[1] Lots of like-minded people, who read content on sites, post content, and occasionally take action/respond to that content, when it means something to them, or is so easy that there's no reason not to.
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The separation of presentation and logic.

Anyone who's spent the 1990s coding Perl CGI will tell you just how big of a step backward this is.
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Scott's argument is weak, though. He tries to pivot around 1620 as a "fact" about the date of Plymouth landing, but all his reasons for why the date is interesting are more interesting than the date itself. The fact that the Pilgrims were fleeing persecution, that the Jamestown colony was underway etc. and had views on the Pilgrims are relevant and interesting facts around the story about how the Pligrims were ironically not tolerant themselves. But the date of 1620 is not an important part of that story - in fact it's irrelevant.

In my own opinion, the dichotomy is not so clear-cut. Historical stories are interesting if they are relevant in some way, because we relate to the cultures, ideas or personalities involved. I don't see that there's a big difference between Justin's interesting stories, and Scott's stories as resources; interesting stories are resources for the present. If nothing else, you can entertain with them!
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In my opinion this "fuzzy" separation is exactly what frameworks like Django (and many existing PHP MVC frameworks) tries to avoid - they specifically disallow things like arithmetic in their templating language for this reason. As soon as you get more than one person working on a site, you're going to have an overly ambiguous demarcation point between the presentation and the logic layers and it's going to wreak havoc on the development process. It will take an enormous amount of discipline to have a parallel design/code workflow.

Does this offer any benefits to XML comprehension beyond syntactical sugar to allow echo avoid the use of quotes and to remove the god-awful <?php ?> syntax (which puts it at par, at the very best, in my opinion)? Does it handle XML syntax errors gracefully? Can you do native transformations on bound variables, for example, or do any more sophisticated XML DOM-ish tag functions? The post doesn't mention anything about any of these issues, which is where the real advantage would lie. If any of that were possible, you could put the browser DOM (and validation) one step closer to the application logic. As far as I can tell this just attempts to ambiguate the VC in MVC, where Django tries to replace V with T (template).

As far as I'm concerned this only increases the squinty-eyed "WTF" factor between PHP and other languages.
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confirmed - and nowhere is this more apparent than when dating/getting married.

I have seen veritable geeks give in to the (strongly family enforced) sentiment of rejecting partners from different castes - it's not so much as marrying into a lower caste, as it is about marrying into a different caste.

I am seeing lesser and lesser people even knowing about the relative positioning of castes - however their cognizance of being a different caste still holds.
iPhone SMS allows forwarding of SMS messages. Is this a common feature of phones? Of smartphones, or more?
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on iphone I see the buzz UI, despite it not being visible before on a normal PC browser. Thanks!
the issue i have is that the government will tell the uniformed voting public that 'we', (those who protest these moves), are trying to harm the government through these hacking attempts.

to mrs and mrs family voter, this makes those who protest look bad and can sway their opinions on the censorship.
I believe the program is Croquet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project
I feel it would. Imagine a script kiddie in Australia decides to join the DDOS attack on the government site.

He is easily traced by IP, and the Australian Federal Police come to visit.

His new 'rights', now that he is part of a terror group include:

Being held for up to nine days in detention without being formally charged.

Warrantless searches

The seizure of any objects associated with the terrorist act (this is quite a wide open definition, basically anything you own is up for grabs)

Also the AFP have some quite invasive computer techniques that are used to go wandering through your system before they knock on the door.
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those big cell phone providers being the same ones providing the data network to carry the voip calls, of course.

it wouldn't be a stretch for at&t to claim their feeble network can't support voip and block it or just deprioritize voip packets enough that the calls are not clear.
A senior counterterrorism official said on Wednesday his agency lacks "Google-like" search capability that could have identified the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing.

No problem GoogleCIA plugin can be developed in short time using Closure. All that is needed is some form of Levenshtein distance algo.
Thanks! I think you're right! I saw the video in 2004 or 2005, so he must've just begun the project.
> He is easily traced by IP

I have a feeling that a group of people calling themselves 'anonymous' have probably heard of torproject.org
Someone who offers three solutions to mimic lookbehind's in Javascript:

http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/mimic-lookbehind-jav...

Also, there seems to also be a lot of support for leveraging PHP's regex functionality on the server-side to accomplish this.
I've been a TA at Georgia Tech during this period (9 terms).

Cheating in the introductory courses was quite common. They tried approach after approach after approach to deal with it. Eventually some of the classes made the homework something you were supposed to work with people on, made it worth less, and made the grades on in-class things worth more. Around that time period I moved onto the C programming/good software development practices class so can't speak anymore.

They had auto-compare tools from 1996 on from what I understand, and definitely had a few students caught in it.
If you continually do it back and forth, it also becomes a voluntary mechanism to show that you're still alive/online/paying attention. It's basically a human ping.
I have this argument a handful of times a year with various people. It's a pet peeve of mine, too. Glad to see others blogging about it.

I guess part of it comes from the unfortunate use of "viral" conflicting with "word of mouth" which kinda sounds like a way to transit real viruses.

I can see why it's confusing for people, but I agree with you 100%.
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Good. Now delete those lines making those annoying ads ;)
Presumably he means allowing users to thoughtlessly work with unsafe values. One way that XHP could mask this problem is clear by looking at:

echo <span class="username">{$_POST['name']}</span>;

Now someone comes along and decides the span is unnecessary, turning the code into the (erroneous):

echo $_POST['name'];

However, I don't think this is a problem with XHP's approach, except in the sense that XHP doesn't go far enough in fixing PHP's faults.

If PHP gave all unsafe values the type "unsafe string" and disallowed all implicit conversion to safe types, then XHP's approach would be a welcome way of doing the right thing by default. Programmer-introduced errors like the above example would result in fatal type errors instead of exploits (presuming "echo" won't take unsafe strings and so requires a conversion function, like htmlspecialchars or the hypothetical unsafe_cast).
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She finds a cheaper and more attentive rubber duck to replace the need for a live human being to discuss code with. How cost effective!
To me anon is like the guys from fight club. If someone starts fighting them seriously, it's only a matter of time before they get cornered in a bathroom and given the whole "we are everyone..don't fuck with us" speech
There's a great parody of this kind of teaching by Mark Steele (UK Broadcaster).

Teacher> What did the Vikings come in?

Student>Ships miss?

Teacher>Wrong

Student>Long boats?

Teacher>No they came in hoards, that's what it says in the book
We already have teams of 3-4 developers, working on separate projects with minimal interactions. If we didn't do that we would be thrashing. We're aware of the Peopleware/Mythical Man Month issue.

But still, I think we could do better. Working based on hitting external goals adds invaluable focus to a team.
This is going to pose some competition to TextMarks - which has a very powerful, yet simple API. This works out to be cheaper although you don't get the shortcode like TextMarks has. Glad to see Clickatel is facing some competition.
"Until now, psychologists had thought the developing brains were not capable of the difficult art of lying until four years old."

Where did the journalist get this bit of fiction from?

One simple web search reveals this:

"Children first begin lying verbally around age 3, the time when language development and the ability to control one's own mental skills combine to form a child's theory of mind. Also at this age, children have learned their parents' rules and the consequences of breaking them. So what does a child do when Mom finds a hand in the cookie jar? Lie."

http://www.apa.org/monitor/jan08/liar.aspx
Wouldn't using an encrypted onion routed network put a bit of a pinch on the amount of DDOS traffic one could push? Not to mention that there is probably an upper bound to the amount of traffic any given exit-node is willing to allow for. How many exit nodes restrict outbound connections to common ports?
Firefox reports this as a bad site, "Reported Attack Site!". Cannot be good for their business when people click the back button.
Sorry, that's people, not code. ;)
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That seems to be unrelated to the concern here (as belied by the grandparent citing magic_quotes). XHP (like plain PHP, for that matter) can be used in a way that, for all intents and purposes, separates the concerns of presentation and logic. It's more a matter of convention than constraint.
I thought I was going to be the only one commenting on how terrible this article is. Its a few sentences away from being aimless. Someone just has a personal problem with Facebook. The crowd that's using Facebook isn't the same crowd that was inhabiting some old message boards with him/her back in the AOL days. Those are the borderline geeks.
The fact that reddit & friends started talking about Flash recently doesn't mean that anything with "Flash" in the title should be on the HN frontpage...

Is there something particularly of interest in this?
I understand, but I question the effectiveness of the prior peaceful protests in fighting the legislation in the first place. They obviously didn't go over too well.

It's possible that Anonymous' muckery could stir up discussion about this topic that otherwise would not have existed as the average Australian lapsed back into complacency. It's also possible their attacks will end up being counter-productive. Either way, I have to admire their reckless vigilantism against censorship, and can only imagine the LuLz being generated in the formal setting of Australia's bureaucracy.
I'm not wishing to argue that labeling Anonymous as a terrorist orgainsation would be a good thing (it would be monumentally retarded, which is why I also think there's a good chance it will happen at some point, I have little faith in government common sense these days) but this problem of how to handle these distributed non-orgnaisations that we see today is quite relevant to the way governments were/are trying to handle terrorism. I remember watching a documentary - I think it was called The Power of Nightmares - that stated amongst other things that after 9/11 the US Government basically began using laws originally designed to combat organised crime (Mafia et al) and applying them to these new, relatively flat, loosely organised and decentralised groups with very little success, primarily because there was no command structure similar what they had been used to dealing with.

Governments are still wrestling with what to do about this issue I think. It seems that the best solution they have so far come up with is reducing civil liberty and surveilling everyone. Not ideal from my POV.

Not to mention that as the saying goes, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
This did not work for me, either. sadTrombone
From that I conclude that you've probably never done A/B testing and discovered how difficult those deltas are to accurately measure, or discovered how changes upstream waterfall down through your site

We've done it before. We've launched new screens, measured the usage, then done a bunch of changes to the screen and seen usage go up. We also have a lot of good data on which screens generate the support call, data on the conversions of all the different screens, etc.

But again, your points are all good. We have pretty good data. But it's nowhere near as simple and clear as the same type of measurement for a sales person. Would the data be good enough to base pay on? I don't know.
Oddly enough, from the command line, I don't get the point of UFW, straight iptables is much easier for me. I mean, if you understand the concepts of iptables, UFW is just an alternate but by no means easier way of manimpulating iptables.
> Is it possible that people are doing "consulting" work for <$50/hr

Ding Ding Ding. Real consulting starts at $100/hr and has no cap on effective rate. One month of this should pay one person's bare-bones living expenses for at least one year.

"Freelancing" is the term most people think of when talking about bullshit web programming jobs that pay very little. They only take these jobs because they've failed to save up enough money to say "no" and they lack the experience to know that real money can be made consulting.
"The technique is known as monkey-patching. "

There seem to be two views of this among Rubyists. People who think this sort of practice is inherently suspect, and those who see it as no more unusual than reassigning to a variable.

The first group use the term "monkey patching"; with all of its underlying tone of ad-hoc-ery and last-resort duct tape coding.

The other group just refers to it as re-opening classes.
> getting enough consulting work to pay the bills

"Consulting" does not just pay the bills. You're thinking of freelancing for dipshit entrepreneurs who think $10k will buy them the next facebook.
The article is an unfiltered, unedited quick transcript of a conversation I had with Alex.

I actually have used both Django and Python, and I'm not alone in my criticism. Django avoids external dependencies, and has been criticized by others in the Python community for encouraging use of it's own custom middleware when standard WSGI middleware could be used instead.

In contrast, rails 3 embraces dependencies (we put a bunch of time into general-purpose Ruby dependency management to make this work). We also heavily leverage rack, making Rails 3 a first class Rack citizen.
Bowing is so integrated here that I don't even realize I'm doing it anymore. It becomes second nature, and you pretty much do it before and after everything.

Even though I don't really understand the intricacies, I can usually get-by by overdoing it all the time. When in doubt, bow.
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I'm wasn't suggesting that they'd use Tor itself for the DDoS, only that through it they can hide their traces.
> separates the concerns of presentation and logic

WHAT? The explicit purpose of this is to combine the presentation (HTML) and logic (PHP) layers.
What evidence do you have to suggest that is not the case?
Strangely enough, I'm reading your PHP code just now :)
When I was in college, taking a Shakespeare course, it was standard practice to go up to the music library (where they had LPs of nice productions of the plays) and listen at 45 rpms while reading along in the Riverside Shakespeare. Worked quite well.
But what does the market look like for "laptops with webcams"? Windows might still be winning, but I bet its not by much.
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Your list makes me feel a little sad. In Japan you can be searched or held for up to one month without being charged - no need for even a terrorism excuse. Heck, according to the laws I could be banned from the country for forgetting my ID card at home. I hope Australia and the US don't go further down that slope.
Heh, which code is that? If it's anything to do with a certain salesforce-like system at a certain log-searching company, I apologize. :)
How exactly is Wave not innovative? Not to mention the obvious GMail, Earth, Maps, Adwords/Adsense, ...
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If I had to put money on it, I'd bet on lower birth rates being the solution. I should point out you're ignoring pie-in-the-sky solutions such as colonizing the galaxy and mind uploading.

Here's a crazy idea: The amount of enjoyment parents get from raising a child has stayed about the same for thousands of years, and it doesn't look like it will increase any time soon. The amount of enjoyment provided by video games, movies, music, and other media is increasing. Not only are artists and designers improving their craft, but new, more immersive technologies are being invented for entertainment. Nobody died from playing Pong. The same is not true for modern games such as World of Warcraft.

So maybe video games will become addictive enough to save us all from a Malthusian catastrophe.
No, thank god that (salesforce-like system) is dead :) Something called 'spacecake'...
These days the main reason for blocking FB - Farmville. It has made people ludicrously unproductive.

Next thing we could expect is a Farmville in Gmail.
AFAIK anons don't have access to botnets and such, they flood from their own computers. Their sheer number makes it 'distributed'.

Like when they modified the Times most influential person ranking, it was just a lot of people running an auto-voter on their machine.
I've skimmed through the docs. Each tag that you can use is a PHP class. It knows exactly which attributes it can take and it can do some validations on the attribute values. I'd assume that it knows when there's supposed to be JS in an attribute value and when there's supposed to be text.
huh? To be able to use history as a resource for living in the present you need to know and understand the what, why, and consequences of actions/choices. Knowing that starting a land war with Russia in fall/winter time is fraught with peril is a lesson. One I can apply to my decision making. Knowing that France/Napoleon in whenever? and Germany/Hitler in 1943? both got there asses handed to them by Russia is trivia and not a useful resource for living in the present.

What happened and what order != memorizing names,dates, and facts.