skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An excellent programmer can routinely do the work of ten mediocre programmers

Quit repeating this crap. Quit it. Look at your hands, count the fingers. How many? Ten fingers. Ten fingers is the reason that the number "ten" appears in that sentence and that is it. In fact, an "excellent" programmer can be from anywhere to less valuable to infinitely more valuable than a mediocre programmer. But if the market needs 5 such people and there are 6 available, then the prices will reflect that rather than some cliche that gets endlessly repeated.

can go out and pound the pavement or join a start-up

Thus resolving all of your and the original author's objections. Yep, that's how the market works, that's how it's always worked and always will. There's simply no use expecting every company to magically know the "right" price. There's no such thing, ever.
On the scalability of Linus
I don't follow the logic of some of the complaints, but specifically, what is wrong with tag clouds? I find them quite intuitive, and in fact they help you give navigation streams or word-lines if implemented right.

Also, the author's choice of having the masthead of the blog grayed out does not seem consistent with his criticism of gray type in the design.
Has that particular StackExchange has become a serious destination for foodies?

They don't really have content that can't be found elsewhere, and my experience with other food sites (all recipes, martha, chowhound, etc.) isn't nearly as annoying as it is with SO's competition (ITToolbox, Experts Exchange).

The only place that I've seen cooking.stackexchange.com mentioned is on geek sites like Hacker News, and Joel's RSS feed. They've got a long way to go before I would consider the cooking site a success outside of the nerd community.
What did the socially malformed do before computers were invented, anyway? (And I don't mean the Erdoses of the world, I mean the socially-malformed non-geniuses.)

Or has the invention of computers increased the number of socially malformed people out there?
Movies/Music/TV are more portable than games, steam doesn't have to deal with portability (multiple different devices, not explicit PC's that run the games) (yet) which is why it's a good system for what it is.

Essentially a Steam for everything would never be able to have DRM otherwise certain devices would get locked out, which returns us to the original problem of DRM. Steam just locked onto a niche market and realized their potential.
Hmm... let's see...

Politics is a field that is underpaid and consists of mainly putting out fires, being beat on the head by numerous (often very slimy) special interests, trying to convince fickle people to vote for you, and being blamed for everything that's wrong and ignored when things go right.

Count me in!
Facebook going head to head with Google with an Aardvark-like service?
Excellent clarification and expansion, thank you.
Really? People upvote things without reading them?

Wow. That just seems dishonest. I hope it's not the case.

Can anyone who has read it provide a summary to restore my faith in human nature and HN readers? Thanks.

ADDED IN EDIT: As of 15:32 Zulu time this has comment is on Karma 0, so it has received at least one down-mod. It's interesting to speculate why. Perhaps someone just thinks it adds noise to the site - yet more navel-gazing - which is against the culture. That's fair enough. But perhaps it's someone who does upvote things without reading them and thinks it's unfair that they are called dishonest for doing so. If you think it's not dishonest to upvote something without reading it, if you think it's fair and reasonable to upvote something without reading it, I'd like to hear your point of view and reason for believing that. Thanks.

ADDED IN FURTHER EDIT: The comment has now had at least one upvote, so it would appear at least one person agrees with me. I find this sort of feedback an interesting insight into the mindset of the people who read HN. Thank you.
I assume it refers to the AMD/Intel settlement from last year:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/technology/companies/13chi...
Open Source could be an advantage for them if they change their license to the AGPLv3. With an AGPLv3 license, any competitors would be required to make their modifications available for download. But as the copyright holder, the OP would not have to release any source he didn't want to, giving him the flexibility to run private, closed source extensions/enhancements if he chooses.
That's quite a flamebait title for something that is just reiterating the classic "hard work counts" theme.
Agreed. I've hired a dozen programmers in my day, and I'd rather hire a music or philosophy or math(s) major than a IS or business major. To me, a CS major is neutral; I've seen too many people with CS degrees who couldn't code themselves out of a paper bag. (A CS degree after 5 years of production coding experience, on the other hand, would be a big plus.)

There is a strong connection between music and programming, that shouldn't be ignored. Doesn't mean that programmers are necessarily musical, or vice versa, but programming well requires similar thought patterns to music (and writing, and philosophy).
Well, at least with engineers you won't have to worry about the sex scandals too much. [1]

[1] I'm educated as an engineer so it's ok for me to stereotype about this. [2]

[2] Humour.
A Smell of Pot and Privilege in the City
Wait a second, isn't the AT&T tethering plan $20/month? That makes becoming a developer a much cheaper way of getting tethering.
This is actually about MKL not ICC, but the principle is the same.
Your high traffic will kill your site.
A List of Grievances is not a 'Case Study'. The ego of the author elevates his Opinions to be Facts.
"We need the loudest and most opinionated voices among us to not be the ones..."

Aren't the loudest voices always the ones that represent any group? Look at religion... most religious folks do not agree with hate-mongering fundamentalists or crazed wild-eyed apocalyptic preachers, but look who gets on TV.
2010/07/21 15:02 Zulu time:

Error establishing a database connection
Actually the number from my old software engineering class is on the order of 36:1 in productivity from the most to least productive members of a team.
While agreeing with what you say - i would like to add one caveat - only if you are working in a Business Critical (read Front Office) role.
That's exactly why we need other people to step up and be louder for us - lest we get viewed like that.
The pay is a large issue. In the UK, being a Member of Parliament, you get around £65k. That doesn't compare well to business jobs of similar responsibility etc.

Even the prime minister is on less pay than several civil servants which is ridiculous. No wonder we have so many people in government from wealthy families.

I don't remember quite where it was but I read that somewhere in Asia the government/MPs get paid a million or so, which results in better people, and obviously less corruption/fiddling accounts etc.
Cool stuff. The first thing I thought about was the latency. One of the problems running VNC or remote desktop over internet is always latency. I tried running VNC to EC2 instances for a test but the experience is terrible. It will be nice to see this run faster.
I don't think you can change the root domain, but I'll have to check that.
M. Night Shyamalan, Mel Gibson, and John Wayne
Bank software update hits mortgage repayments - thousands undercharged
Every vocation has its stereotypes.

Politicians, marketers, and other "people professions" are slimy and superficial fast-talkers. Businessmen are sociopaths. Neither of those is any more flattering than "engineers are autistic."
I interpreted the 0 as meaning “so trivial as to perhaps not be worth it, and therefore optional” – you can start at item 1 if you want. Or perhaps it meant “too obvious to mention, but mentioning it just in case”.
Ask HN: What makes Ruby so great?
Ok, I'm sick of reading articles where the writer says, "Ruby is awesome, you should use it." and ones that compare Ruby to C or some other language that isn't used for the same things.

Each language has it's pros and cons. It's unfair to compare apples and oranges. It's also unfair to to just say "it's awesome" and that you need to use it.

So what makes Ruby better than PHP? Python? Perl? All can be used for web programming (Which is what I'm talking about here). Which brings me to another point. Ruby on Rails, I had no idea that Rails was a framework at first. It's the same as using a framework for PHP (Symfony, Kohana, CakePHP, etc) or for Python or for Perl.

Please HN, why is Ruby so great? Ruby fans seem like Apple fans to me =\

Thank you.
Ask HN: TechCrunch Ads
Did TC remove all their ads? Why?
Because if there is any training that stays relevant forever it is old college software engineering courses ...
First, he'd need to figure out what is a "good" and "bad" reaction, which is mostly about reading very subtle expressions.

The whole thought experiment is a bit weird, because the range of dancing skills on display in the typical nightclub in all the parts of the world I've been to recently is really not that large.
Wow... that's worse than I thought.

I've often wondered if part of the problem with mismanagement and corruption in government is that politicians are actually underpaid. Anyone really good wants to go into business or marketing, fields that demand similar skills but that pay way better. Corruption becomes a problem because it's the only way to get a raise...
I assume that's on purpose.
Screen defect found in a number of Droid X devices
I suspect it isn't 'trust' that's holding OSX back in the enterprise world, but the software available (or lack thereof). If so, then it can't be a fast change.
You can't do pretty much anything.
Welcome to the internet.
Just get over it.

By the way, you can also translate from english to another language and then back to english.
Now just fix broken grammar and you might have what you called a spun article.
Apple responds to Congress, swears location data is private
Is Ubiquitous Encryption Technology on the Horizon?
How to multiply 3 digit numbers in a single step
What's the Best Search Box Size?
It should be noted that the ads in the main column disappear when you have accrued 200 rep points (which isnt that hard if you use the site often).
I think you've just summarized more than 50% of the links submitted to Hacker News.
Page not found. Deleted already?
i'd point out that this is pretty common for his posts.
170k in US.
Based on the confusion that others and I had, I suggest changing your name and dropping VM from it. It really doesn't convey what you are trying to accomplish. When I first heard it, I thought you were making a VM together with an OS with an eccentric stack allocation algorithm or sth.
A good corporal punishment essay should enlighten a reader
There is an ongoing debate on whether corporal punishment is ethical whether it should be banned. In some countries it is prohibited in schools only and in some countries no ban at all. This article shows how a case study can be used to prove your point.
You're just not thinking evil enough. They could set data prices such that a VoIP call costs as much as a voice call. Or they could use IMS to impose billing on SMS and VoIP.
I've never been to Cameroon, but I've been to a lot of countries where they think Americans speak too much (and too loudly!). That doesn't mean that they don't have conversations, just that they don't yabber on quite so incessantly about nothing as Americans do. Americans really do talk a lot, and about nothing.

One of my first exposures to real-life Americans was riding a bus in London with a bunch of American tourists who kept saying "Ooooooooohhh, look at all those _peeeeoplee!" as if they were shocked that one of the major streets in one of the world's largest cities should have a lot of people on it.
Fundamentally, the problem comes down to the other 90% of the toolstack. Even if you get people to use your language, are you really going to get them to change their source code control, every person's text editor, build system, scripts that run over the code, the external localization service, the third party code escrow service, automated performance and security assessment tools, etc.? Anything that is more than a toy project has real requirements, often with tools that are outside of the control of any one vendor or even the company -- they are sometimes requirements of the industry.

This code-stored-not-as-text-thing came up so often (it was a recurring Serious Question about once a year while I worked on Visual Studio) that it was simply referred to as the Emacs/grep barrier. Any tool solution that prevents the use of Emacs and grep out of box is just dead unless you have a from-scratch codebase and team.

The old Smalltalk hands (some of whom worked on original Smalltalk systems) also like to relate the biggest single issue they had. At one point, they needed to reconstruct the basis library for a new implementation... but there was no code. How do you do a review of a system where the code was (in this case) completely gone, as it had long since become something interpretable as a jump point in a heap image but not as code? (Punchline: they rewrote most of it from scratch, recreating decades-old bugs)
No offense but I read it like zatanic :) .
I think he just wanted us all to know that the article would be relevant to us.
A Strong Sense of Community
I would use it instead of always have to re-download putty when I'm not on a linux box.

For the money part, you might also consider setting up the domain and redirect for a small fee. For instance, my-name.com could be my VMs securised with a password.

Also, what is the limit of GB I can put on the VM? Say I want to upload files and mp3s.. is there a limit? May I pay to increase it?

Finally, I would like to be able to connect to my VM from other way than web. Say I'm on my linux box with my terminal prompt, it would be nice if I could just ssh to my-name.com and get my VM.. upload/download stuff with scp, and connect to it with FTP. But of course, this would work more with the linux part I suppose :p

Anyhow, congrats also for the "I started my startup" which is, in my opinion, amongst the hardest part (starting!).
Perl 6 gives us little languages, but they are still shackled by ASCII-based notation.

Latin-1 in truth, but a fair point. Even so, what's wrong with text that alternate input forms (graphics, speech) can fix? You can be inspecific with speech, and you can organize volumes of text with far more efficiency than you can images.
You may be on to something. I always thought navigating the StackOverflow interface was like using phpMyAdmin.
And I would expect my comment to elicit their thinking. From the post, it seems a little pollyannaish, paraphrasing: open source for the hackers, charging money from the start for the business, everybody wins, yay!

On the other hand, perhaps their thinking on this is part of the secret sauce, and it's being kept secret for good reason.
>Also, what they don't tell you is that a prestigious accent can and will improve speaker's credibility.

I was going to suggest the same thing.
Flatter and insult your audience in one sentence: it's the greatest attention-grabbing trick since... I dunno, boobs.
Interesting! I am trying to work out the price plan for my startup as well. Can I ask if you got people signing up for paid accounts directly or they did the free plans first and convert later?
Nice. You missed "1999 Heavy", with its big swooping 3d-edged curves, 9-image table-based rounded buttons, "mystery meat" image-based navigation, and 400kb pageloads back in the day of the 56k modem.

I've kept my old eMachines box running in the corner these past 10 years, and it's still waiting for the NetZero homepage to load (using its NetZero dialup account of course).
I was always under the impression that Dark, Grunge, and Minimal coexisted with each other in this stage.
I like the general idea as I've been grappling with it, though I tend to approach it differently. I like to introduce one or two new habits or areas to focus on, do it for 2-4 weeks until I've got it down to a rhythm that can be done quickly without excess thinking about it, and then add new objectives.

I do think on what my top three outcomes for a week should be at the start of the week, and choose which of them needs to be worked on the next day, and then start the day putting 2-5 hours into that or until it's complete. At least, that's the theory, sometimes I "check just one thing" before heading on to most key stuff and then too often the entire day gets hosed. But when I start with most key objective or two, the day almost always goes well. Then I've got a list of general stuff I fill into the day - situps, vitamins, some deep breathing, very short meditating on my death bushido-style, respond to emails, write a letter to someone I'm out of touch, handle admin - I can fill that stuff around the edges whenever I can steal 5-10 minutes from my day. If I start with the most key, difficult objectives first the rest of the day tends to fall into line.
I would consider my wife a foodie (a baker not a chef). I thought she might like the site (she enjoys answering questions about the recipes that she posts on her site). So I pointed her to it, showed her the basics, and left. Came back about 30 minutes later and she was trolling through other food blogs answering questions in comments.

She tried to up vote an answer and got the yellow box (Login or register). She ended up on the OpenID page and couldn't find where to put her e-mail or password. She has a GMail account, and I told her she could click on the "Google" icon.

She found the "Click here to sign up" link, but that just sent her to MyOpenID. A site she'd never heard of. And I've grilled it into her not to create accounts on sites she hasn't heard of or hasn't been recommended by someone or that she was redirected to.

So the site has some novice computer user problems. In my wife's defense, she is a great photographer, baker, and has several master's degrees in science (even worked at JPL for a bit on the Mars rover that burned up in the atmosphere). But she is a complete novice when it comes to computers. And the site turned her off in about 5 minutes.
Ask Hn: Rate my Html 5 Canvas Gauge
Hi HN,
I had free time and wrote a small gauge gadget using html5 and canvas element. Maybe it's not a big deal but can i have your opinions ?

ps: ie not supported.
I actually dislike in-place editors. As a writer of posts, I actually prefer to edit and write text outside the context of a webpage. There's too much visual distraction - images elements, ads, columns, etc that end up cluttering the editing workspace. Concrete5's model of using overlays also screams distraction to me. Why not just use a clean admin interface? It's also better for professional writers who don't need to know the minutia of which column and which part of the site the text is going into.

Concrete5 might be easier for people who want to build websites, but in-place editing just doesn't work for people who only want to write and put together actual content.
Google takes the FTC to school
It is not just you: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://angel.co/
Why not take the SQLAlchemy approach with its lower-level expression language?

You can indeed do that. I prefer SQL to ORM; de gustibus non est disputandum.

I love perl, but why strings?

Even structured data, such as a nested data structure serialized to JSON, is a string until you parse it. I don't understand the question.
Very true, you certainly won't get the big bucks no matter what you do for HR or Facilities.

But you will get paid well for fixing headaches in the back office (referential data, clearing, etc). Perhaps only 5x as much as a mediocre programmer rather than the 10x you'd get in the front office, but it's still a big multiplier. Line work costs banks a lot of money; if you can put 100 humans out of work, they (or someone else) will pay you.
No matter what your criticisms are of the finer points of his critique (I agree with some, not others), the OP mocked-up a much better concept for the site. (IMHO)
I use stackoverflow a lot and I'm a "designer". I find the original UI to be more utility-focused and information-rich than his interpretation. His interpretation also lacks the presence of authority, which I think the original UI does well by emphasizing numbers (votes/views) and colors. My 2cents.
Culture fan that I am, at first I misread it as Zetetic.
Itanium Sales Forecasts Versus Actual
What Is Google Editions?
You're correct. Only the path (and not the domain) can be changed.

From the article:

* For security reasons, you can only change the path of the URL, not the domain itself. So you can change anything in the URL after my-domain.com/[change-the-stuff-here.html].
Anything as big as android has more than one purpose.
Repost of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1477776

My response to this still stands: the problem is an education problem, little more. Read the full response here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1478331
Note: Spoiler alert.

The author says, "Meaningful variable and function names would have helped, but..." and I don't really see why he needed the "but." The first function can be renamed "get_exponent(base, exponent)" and the second, "get_random_integer()", and that's the end of it. What more comments would really be appropriate?
Mark was born in May 14, 1984, contract was signed in April xx, 2003.

So unless my coffee did not kick in yet; that would make him under or around the age of 18 which is below the age of majority in NY state:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_majority
Although Ruby is a very productive language, I think its more about the community. Its moving incredibly fast, and the people in the community are doing really awesome things right now. Resources for programmers are abundant.
I voted you up, but jokes are usually off topic on hacker news and get voted down pretty quickly no matter how funny.
I think a comment specifying the name of the algorithm would be great if you want to dig deeper when the function isn't working.
I think it looks hideous - it reminds me intensely of phpBB, with the author icon / info etc. on the left, and the stench of phpBB is definitely to be avoided (IMHO).
From a legal perspective, I wonder if modifying content like this counts as producing a derivative work, which might possibly violate copyright law.

If I recall correctly, Blockbuster got in some hot water for censoring some of its videos and certain Hollywood directors did not appreciate it very much.

I suppose being "free to modify" would then depend on the consent of the content provider whose work is being modified.

Any lawyers in the crowd with insight on this?
I disagree. If you write ten benchmarks, and they finish in the same order on all platforms, the median really doesn't give you any information apart from how the middle one did. At least the mean will be changed if the slowest benchmark for some reason is a lot slower on one platform. In this case, there was some variation, but for the most part it looks like the median is just one of 4 or 5 middling benchmarks in all cases, so you're really just removing data, if anything.

The box plot is a good choice here. What I would like to see is a graph plotting time against {VM} x {benchmark size} to see how each platform scales within a benchmark.

With the data you've got, apart from confusing me a little by including the mean and median, you did a good job presenting it. I'd love to see why some platforms do so much well than others in some cases (except JRuby which everyone knows is a memory hog), but this seems way out of scope for this article. :)
The article asks the question "what does this code do" but never reveals the answer. The first algorithm is fast exponentiation.
That's a good point. The author said, "... a comment explaining the problem the code is trying to solve [would have helped]," which is what threw me--that's what the function name is for!