skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's crazy to think that hackers/developers/etc are using all these cloud-based things with slow interfaces and controlled schemes by third parties. I'm not even a true geek and I find this behavior a bit bewildering. Where are the heroes?

Export your bookmarks to HTML, modify your HTML page to be as many sub-pages as you want, add descriptions under each, and you're done. Put your main page with your chief faves as your only "saved" bookmark on your browser.

No clouds. No one can erase your data. No one can charge you for your own bookmarks (the absolute height of insanity).

Modify as you see fit in your fave code editor.

Oh my... you must use Cmd-D because you are in a rush? Trust me. If you're that in a rush, you aren't even cataloging or archiving the source correctly. And honestly, probably 90% of bookmarks aren't worth saving anyway. You do know about search engines, right?

I also like to add notes as to Why I Saved This: because if I can't really drum up a good reason, it isn't worth it. Things that do NOT count for that field are "for later", "because", "it's cool", "maybe so-and-so might need it" (what are we doing? saving for other people too?).

You can use tags if you want in your descriptions by putting a hashtag in front of the word, but why bother? You can Ctrl/Cmd-F your whole bookmark page and fly through your options far faster than other methods. All text is searchable, right? Must we insist on the insanity of prefixing certain words with #?

Look ma! You can even change your fonts and get all hackathonish with CSS, if you get bored.

Need to send a collection of bookmarks to someone else? (Warning above about this, but still....)... Just cut and paste part of your webpage into your email, etc. Look at that. Your descriptions are already there, guaranteeing that they will be more likely to look at your links, or causing you to be noted as an intrusive link-pusher, but either way, goal accomplished!

Now, some HN readers will insist on mobile-sync. That's where they are wrong and you'll be right to ignore them. Anything worth reading or noting is on the real web, not the mobile web, and standing around with your phone collecting and sending links is about as inhumane of a task as you can do. It was bad on your laptop; it's downright madness on your phone. Do yourself a favor and skip it.

If you must save some links for mobile use only (I don't know... the website of your local library so you can look up its hours? Oh wait... Google/Apple maps instead), then just save them ONLY there for quick access. You don't need to sync. Repeat after me. Sync is a lie from the devil to give clouds the power. Stop doing it so much. Also, stop printing stuff (another lecture for another time).
Show HN: Tickers – Your News and Notifications App
Hi everyone,

I would really like to get honest feedback from all of you.

I had this idea for my app called tickers about two years ago, put a lot of my free time into it
and would like to hear what you think about it. And you can ask my anything about it.

Tickers is a free and anonymous realtime notification app and service.
Just think of it as a generic liveticker: Most of you have probably
installed a sports app on your smartphone, where you select your favorite team and
whenever it scores or wins, you receive a realtime notification. Tickers uses this
basic concept and extends it. You select your favorite ticker, subscribe it and receive
realtime notifications. But in tickers, everything can be a ticker: news sites, blogs,
YouTube channels, etc. And you can even start your own ticker and send realtime
notifications to your subscribers.

It's available for Android, iOS and Windows 10.

Thank you
Marko
I think the phenomenon of the 10x programmer does have analogues in physical work. I feel a big part of this is having the ambition to absorb the entire problem domain. A 10x programmer does not work on just one part of a problem, they work on the entire product, each subproblem having a solution that simply flows from the constraints of the entire system. It's this full comprehension that allows the programmer to work without costly analyzing pauses, which I bet is the root cause of the delays associated with the 'regular' programmer.

I think I experience this in my hobby projects, when I fully own the project even when it is fairly complex, every time I spend an hour or two on an evening I pump out a few features that on a big team project would feel like they could've cost weeks.

The physical analogue I offer which might be a little far fetched is the construction worker. I have been renovating a house, doing demolition, basic construction, electrical, plumbing, and hopefully in the future finishing of the house. I'm a total novice, so obviously it's going slow, but eventually I will have constructed (most of) an entire house. Because I do everything, there is little to no overhead (besides me having to learn everything) when switching between tasks, I own all of the project. I bet that someone who solo-renovates houses as a full time job is ridiculously productive, much more so than a general contractor managing a team of subcontractors.

Anyway, obviously this is all just hypothesizing based on anecdotes.
Recently I had to do something I always avoided since it was platform specific a huge unknown space to me - code something in C#.

It was one of the most pleasurable experiences with "programming" since those Pascal times, and gave that feeling of being close to the code. I attribute it to fast compiles, no need for context switching (due to superb autocompletion), and everything just working well inside the tool. Documentation was also very good, and the huge API you're exposed gives a feeling of power (like I felt as a teen with computers, that I could do so much).

(My recent experience was Python, C (embedded too), Golang, and JS in the browser.)
In this thread: mostly people responding to the headline, not the actual content of the article.

There's some fantastic stuff in here about how great design is the key to increased productivity. For example:

"It is very important for a designer to recognize all the parts of a design that are not easy wins, that is, there is no proportionality between the effort and the advantages. A project that is executed in order to maximize the output, is going to focus exactly on the aspects that matter and that can be implemented in a reasonable amount of time. For example when designing Disque, a message broker, at some point I realized that by providing just best-effort ordering for the messages, all the other aspects of the project could be substantially improved: availability, query language and clients interaction, simplicity and performances."

redis itself is a masterpiece of pragmatic design - the feature set is brilliantly selected to make the most of what you can do with shared data structures exposed over a network. Let's talk about that.
That means any idea that could be a huge benefit has to come from someone who also has the skills to research and execute it. That's going to be a huge barrier to innovation, and it could potentially cost the business a huge amount of money.
I don't have the book ready here, and it's been a long time since I last read it, but wasn't that the productivity for specific, limited and well-specified tasks? How about the productivity of tasks that only a subset of developers would be able to solve (which don't have to be that hard, like a bug-free binary search, which according to Bentley[1], eluded 90% of professional programmers)? How do you quantify the difference in performance for that?

[1] Programming Pearls. Jon Bentley (Column 4)
Look, connections that can't be opened are obviously 100% secure. #sales #winning
Here it's meant as a ratio of personal productivity, not a multiplier on the state of the codebase.
That's a good question. A big bag of fuel hanging outside is a fine place to store it if you don't care about temperature or pressure. You would need some kind of mechanical means to squish the bag to get the fuel out though, so maybe an accordion with a motorized retractor?
Raymond Hettinger made an interesting talk about Python's dict (hash table) and how Python's core development team evolved it over time. He's giving the polished version of talk at PyCon this May but if you can't wait for it, here's a rough version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p33CVV29OG8
It's like in driving - most people think they are above average, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
I would add "reading the manual" to the list of things that people don't do enough of. I'm often shocked by people just diving into coding instead of doing the research to see if something has already been provided for you. You will go very far if you understand what the technologies you use are capable of doing.
I'm not sure if it's only me, but I started to see a lot of 1/10x programmers in startups. They can know all newest "cool" technologies, go to various conferences, have a lot of followers on twitter and reputation on stackoverflow, but when it comes to the real work, their value for the company is around zero, usually can't even solve simplest tickets (probably busy tweeting stuff?).
A Visual Introduction to Probability and Statistics Using D3.js
It's pretty cool.
Maybe this is the distinction that throws off these "10x programmer" threads: the idea that a 10x programmer produces ten times the amount of code in a given time. The best programmers I have worked with frequently replace thousands of lines of code with hundreds. Programmer productivity is about value delivered, not lines of code.
Quite hypocritical of you to criticize unconstructive statements and then going around and doing the same eh? May I dare to venture why you think so?
Yes, people say racists and sexist and mean things at work. Just because you haven't personally seen it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I've seen it, personally.
I was voting against Uber by not using it from the beginning: it seems to me unethical to dump entire taxi industry by not being profitable, but by attracting investments from VC and decreasing prices below profitability just to screw others.
> Their code worked, but it was also incomprehensible to everyone else on the team.

It's because the 10x programmer is too fast for the team. Therefore its code is not shared with the team (no time to explain, to time to document, no time to teach), so the team doesn't understand it. But it's not team's fault, nor the 10x programmer's. It's the delta between them.
yes exactly, funny when I was writing that I had the same thought about what I was like when I first started - I had a flashback to spending days writing out some C code for a linked list. I thought it was cool at the time, comparing that me to this me, then it would easily be a 10x difference. qed.
10x programmer is like Linus, who programs and set structure of the working code. rest of the feature addition and bug solving can be done with 2x programmer.
If you do the decryption in your business logic, and store the key separately (Amazon KMS for example), then if somebody hacks the database directly the data is (slightly more) secure.

Agreed though. Encryption is only a stopgap and the DB should never have been public in the first place.
Show HN: NameLabs – Get Serious About Naming Your New Business or Product
Excuse me if I'll print your comment and pin it in front of my desk. It means I'm not hopeless :-)
Writing a FUSE filesystem in Python
Like this: http://i.imgur.com/VXomB7p.png
I travel without cellphones and tablets all the time. Last time I went to Spain, I bought a prepaid phone while I was there.
"How is it even a debate?"

Because having different output has nothing to do with being more productive. It's just different, that's it. And productivity is very hard if not impossible to quantify. Relevant experience and knowledge might boost productivity on a specific problem, just like it might make code nearly defect-free with little to no effort, or make someone much better at quickly understanding large code bases. But it doesn't mean that a person is going to be motivated and rested enough to leverage it for the benefit of their employer or that another person is going to be just as unmotivated or that it's not going to change for a different problem, etc.
New – Manage DynamoDB Items Using Time to Live (TTL)
Antirez is a 10+x programmer in most peoples' definitions. Writing nice to read code fast. So it is good to read this from him but then again he always appears quite humble.
WIFI Fail: Skipper navigates 50ft boat with iPad – crashes into ferry, sinks
What countries can you DoS your employers' network in?
Thinking of Leaving Your Startup? Read This
I think this myth stems from a lack of understanding of what we consider to be "work". For example, one developer could crank out 10x as many features as their peers, but never consider deploying or maintaining. The reality is that they are making everyone else slightly less productive. Similarly, they could work on 1/10th of the features, but help their 10 peers become twice as effective. Taking this even further, there's developers who can complete 1/100th of the features as their peers, but help thousands of other developers become 5% more effective.

In my mind, the mythical 10x programmer is the person that can complete business objectives while helping make those around them more effective. This isn't actually a myth, and "10x" is a completely arbitrary number that doesn't mean anything. It might as well be 2x or 1.1x -- they all mean the same thing to me. They can do their work at 1x speed, a baseline set by the developer in question and not their peers, but they can simultaneously help others around them be more productive.
Boston Dynamics – Introducing Handle [video 1:37]
Maybe Hollywood should make a "Party Patrol" about a group of CBP officers joking with hungover college kids returning from spring break in Mexico. Think along the lines of "Super Troopers".
Maybe I'm missing something import here, but isn't that just what we had with self-signed certificates and adding security exceptions in the browser?
Two-way communication achieved in Brain-Machine interfaces
Exactly. Years ago, one company I was at proposed we start a bonus plan based on lines of code. I wrote a script that inspected the RCS commits (it was years ago) and generated a report that showed that most of our best developers were net negative lines of code.
You may be "calm now", but nobody wants to read this. And at this exact moment there is a perfect comment directly above this at the top of the thread. Not only are you, and those like you, not the center of the universe, nobody wants to spend their time sifting through these comments on public boards. I know I'm screaming into the hurricane here, but if you were both entitled enough to post this and also self aware enough to know that its a self-serving rant maybe, just maybe, think before you start mashing keys.
Yes. I have been sucked into the JavaScript vortex.
> Are there any boards like this which actually have decent wifi?

Doubtful. It's a race to the bottom for any SBC which isn't a Raspberry Pi or ODROID.

It's highly unlikely someone will make a board that costs $15 and has great WiFi, because everyone blindly buys the $8 board (because cheaper = better!) with shit WiFi and then complains about how crap all these Chinese SBCs are.

Especially when websites post stories about these board releases never bother to update their articles and essentially just give the manufacturer free advertising. [0] [1]

Hell even Intel tablets running Windows 8.1/10 are using shitty 2.4GHz Realtek SDIO based WiFi that still isn't supported in Linux.

In the race to the bottom, good software support is sacrificed first.

[0] http://linuxgizmos.com/headless-orange-pi-zero-sbc-has-wifi-...

[1] http://hackaday.com/2016/11/07/orange-pi-releases-two-boards...
Wow, I wasn't aware. I'm sorry. That's awful.
What about having two (or several) sets of devices, each sets having "a life", software installed and used etc?

A laptop and smartphone for travel and another set for home.
Why would anyone competent allow unrestricted ssh through the corporate firewall?
I don't understand how anyone can say 10x programmers don't exist. There are programmers who DRAIN value from projects and companies. The most insidious I've dealt with are people who assure everyone their part is going to be done on time, but come the deadline, they have nothing.

I am today, a 10x better programmer than I was where I started. In terms of quality, complexity, efficiency, readability, maintainability, everything. I was paid too much when I started and/or not enough now!

Notch and Carmack are 1000x better game programmers than I am. Linus is a 1000x better file system and operating system programmer than me. Monty is a 1000x better database programmer than I am. DHH can build a website at least 10x faster than me and do it in a way that would contribute 100x more to the community than I could.

If you discard people with decades of experience. If you discard people who have specialized. If you discard the many geniuses in our field. And then if you start to make excuses at the other end, and if you narrow it to a specific set of tasks, with a specific set of complexity, then maybe there isn't a huge gap. But even then, I feel that if you apply yourself to that task for a decade or two, you'll find that you're a 10x better programmer than you used to be.
Disrupting the disrupters: Singapore rattles sharing economy with rule change
I guess the RAD market vanished with Rails and its competitors.

Back in 1998 - suddenly - it was possible to develop quickly a web application with a CRUD web scaffold behind to start feeding data.

The problem we have now we is the need to maintain loads of dependencies and libraries nobody knows who's in charge its development: they're just "popular" and have some documentation.

That's the bad part.
I think the real key is simply experience. From what I've seen a 10x programmer is simply one who has worked on 10x as many projects as the baseline. The things the article points out are common traits of such people. A 10x programmer has worked on several teams and has lots of side projects.
She put enough information so that the parties relevant would be able to identify all the actors but the parties not involved can't. That's not strange - she wants to tell her story and have it attached to her by identity but not name.
I'm not trying to defend Uber! They're certainly a company that has very 'flexible' morals and ethics.

However the claim "Kalanick has an ordered list of employees he's ready to fire until this thing goes away. [He probably did] hire someone just so he can fire them after a month or two." is absolutely unfounded and is based in such little reality that it doesn't belong here on HN.
You already trust the DNS root, as long as domain names are what certificates are based on. If you can transfer a domain name illegitimately you will have no problem getting a completely legitimate certificate signed.

But the fact that domain names are hierarchical means you have to trust one or two entities at most. That's why domain name theft is historically less common than illegitimate TLS certificates.

You'll find all sorts of arguments that the CAs do more things than that and no end of security professionals who work for them. Some of these arguments are probably correct but that doesn't change the overall picture how a secure global TLS PKI should operate in the presence of domain names. It does the current system quite resistant to change however.
Ah, I've also seen that situation. But both times it was because the lead programmer was an autocrat who would scream at people if they did things wrong or revert their code or fail their code reviews, etc.

They were, as individuals, very productive, but they suppressed the productivity of the rest of the team.
I wonder if it would be possible to harness these methane reserves for energy production?
Nah, just remind them you made a design decision to focus on the meaning, and not the grammar, which let you write the post 10x faster ;)
Come on, Antirez is a x10 programmer, he coded one of the most brillant software of the last decade. It's so well done I use it as an example in my trainings, making people compile it to stop being afraid of building from source because I know it never fails and it's so damn simple.

And programmer reading anything on his blog, or anything on HN for that matter, is not an average programmer anyway. The simple fact you are interested in your work singles you out.

Guys, you need to come out of your super power bubble and come to work down here. Where people uses PHP, SVN, and don't know what an environment variable is. Where they work for money, not for passion. Where Vi is scary and they pay the licence for Oracle even if their DB has one table.

This is the huge majority of the devs : plumbers.

I find it disrespectful when people don't realize this, because it means they live a life ignoring a vast majority of dev tool users.

Not only those people are numerous, but they create a lot of wealth because they are so many.

Don't assume:

- devs know the command line

- devs know how to setup a server

- devs know how to use a package manager

- devs know how to version control, unit tests...

And above all, if they don't know how to do that, don't assume they can't do their job. Because according to their employer they do. And they are paid for it.

They won't do a graceful reload, they won't compress their css and won't escape the user input. But the website will be online, serving customers.

This is why on my blog I have articles explaining what's javascript, what's RSS, how to setup the Windows PATH, etc. Because for important tutorials on Python, I can reference those, not assuming people know what I'm talking about.
Getchip.com costs less, can actually be purchased and has onboard flash
You've never encountered an immigration officer in Asia that flat demanded a bribe? Cause I have.

In China I was required to register with the authorities every time I switched hotels.

I've had interactions with Canadian border agents that was very unpleasant and seen German border agents armed with submachine guns take people off of trains.

Now, I think we (the US) should change the way our border officers behave & I think demanding access to electronic devices is dumb & harmful, but border patrol everywhere are agents of the state and can be scary to interact with.

For the record I've also had great interactions with Chinese, Canadian, German & American border agents.
Usually the best indicator of this is when the initial snaglist for a piece of work grows after the snags have been "completed".

I think that's probably quite normal, except for small pieces of software.

If the snags aren't becoming less significant though then I agree, that's a big warning sign.
Tracking Hackers on Your Network with Sysinternals Sysmon [pdf]
This bit articulates what I consider to be the main advantage of experience in programmers:

> Often complexity is generated when there is no willingness to recognized that a non fundamental goal of a project is accounting for a very large amount of design complexity, or is making another more important goal very hard to reach, because there is a design tension among a fundamental feature and a non fundamental one.

It happens all the time that requirements are very complex. Junior programmers will fail to implement them. Better programmers will manage to implement them, but it'll take too much time to develop and especially to maintain their solution.

Experienced programmers recognize what's happening and have the personality to stand up the project leader and get a simplified version of the requirements accepted.

It's also why very large software projects fail, especially the type that is intended to save costs by replacing many different existing informal systems by a unified one. The requirements will be ridiculously complicated (have to do everything all the projects to be replaced do), and nobody in the software development part has the power to change the organisation first.