skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’ve worked with people who are the “10x developer” people are talking about. I hope I can explain the confusion.

First: let’s just replace that with “much more productive than average” developer. 10x is a silly statement, a bit like saying someone is a 10x footballer etc.

It’s correct to say these people get a lot more done than others. They often have admirable traits, such as great focus or enthusiasm for their job. They’re dedicated and will work long hours to get things done. Great for a CEO or investor to have. On solo projects, they’re exactly the man for the job. And startups usually begin as solo projects.

The reason there’s such a backlash on Twitter is that there is a huge cost to the rest of a software engineering team when working with such a colleague. Every instance I’ve seen of this situation has a common factor: as others joined the team, the MPTA developer monopolised the codebase. They won’t delegate, and preferred to spend time coding rather than helping others do their job.

And here’s the thing: The productivity gap is mostly a function of this dynamic

Try to take ownership of something, and the MPTA dev will use the time in the evening to rewrite your code in their style. They are extremely opinionated (though often correct) and unwilling to delegate and bring in ideas from others. Make a mistake (inevitably as you pick up the codebase) and the MPTA will roll their eyes at the CEO and replace your code. Working in a team is not about who writes more code, it’s about how to work together to move the company forward. And a happy team building a large product will always outperform a MPTA developer by long-term measures.

With no documentation, strong communication, team ethic, and delegation, employing a MPTA is unsustainable in the long term. If you’re a VC or early stage startup you probably don’t care about that. But most developers are in teams in bigger companies, and perpetuating the 10x myth makes their lives worse, and makes them look bad.

Moving on from the idea that a 10x developer is good for a sustainable development effort is a significant step in the maturation of software engineering as a field. They have their place and can be an incredible asset, but great software engineering is about teamwork and communication.
Compare the NIST curves to RSA. For RSA we know there cannot be any backdoors. If you generate good quality primes you are in business (assuming you don't make mistakes elsewhere).

For NIST we cannot say anything about backdoors. We don't use those curves because we don't trust NIST. Not because we have any prove they are bad.

So to avoid that, there is a parameter selection process that supposedly leaves no room for backdoors, though at some CCC congress DJB described how you could use a similar process to add backdoors.

So basically, EC is based on magic. We cannot prove it is bad, we just have to hope there is no hidden magic.

Note you say 'only marginal room'. Soon the whole world will use exactly one curve. With 'only marginal room for hidden backdoors'.

I feel way more comfortable to know that with RSA what you see is what you get.
I hesitate to tell people. They are doing it wrong but if you write JSX like how we all wrote PHP back in the day then you are doing it wrong.
Mining Monero on googlebot anyone?
Those smaller companies will find out maintenance is costly either way.
As an American, I was taught that our style of debate, with its understanding of dialectic and rhetoric, was ultimately grounded in ancient Greek traditions. I don't know how true that is, though.

Most public policy debate is so empty as to be worthless, and these tools don't change that. The typical English-language dialectic debate suffers from poor metaphysics and ontology, and in the USA this is compounded by a society that shuns math and logic skills. The typical USA debate is about feelings, not about evidence.

There are two investigations into philosophy, namely speech acts and pragmatics, which happened in English-language philosophy first, and may be due to English itself.
So... no job at Atlassian for Torvalds??
Maybe that firing pan is owned by a rockstar ?
Amateur radio digital communications 44.0.0.0/8 partial sell-off
Agreed. It's an interesting story, but the title is pure clickbait.

The story itself also fails at inverted pyramid, which is something you'd expect from a piece under "News/Australia" on the site, but I guess they just put in in the wrong place, and inverted pyramid itself is a concept that became forgotten in an ad-supported journalism era.
No, You're Not Bribing Your Kids
Because brilliant people move things forward by leaps and bounds. And anti-intellectualism has a proven track record of accepting failure in exchange for social control. Up until they get their asses kicked trivially when they try to push someone who hasn't slacked off.

Why should bullshit be tolerated when it leads to waste and stagnation? That sort of attitude is why Detroit fell so hard along with many post industrial wastelands. They scorned higher education or going another direction and then their keystone economies collapsed.
Some times ago I was working in one company. We were building some platform and have the big task to integrate with another technology. I was involved in an absolutely different field and only participated in some meetings during the planing phase. The discussion lasts for a few months and when I completed my other project team already spent some sprints on development. When I have joined I wasn't familiar with underlying libraries and spent almost the whole week to improve my knowledge. When I have started to coding I found that whole project size is only 3-5 days of productive coding including tests for one person. My firsts thought was "I don't understand something", but when I ask some other guy to do pair coding during a day he barely did one class during 6 hours without tests and other things. And it was their normal pace for the whole team. But they get their bonuses and endless meetings.

Definitely, I feel myself as a 10x developer that days working with my normal 1x speed.
> I can't help feel describing that as "having nothing to do with job skills" is probably not the right way of looking at it.

You'll note those words are not a quotation. They're the journalist's phrasing.
Agreed,it seems incomprehensible that you would accept such nesting problems.
The parent literally said it was a "shitty solution".

I agree design by committee can produce awful results - and I said nothing about a single person doing a design as being an issue.
Oh, a thousand times this. Absolutely. I would love to work with that developer.
Consistently applied standards are good. But if a developer change can interfere with a country's politics, it's because political actors have coopted the developers' work for leverage in their own system. Dev teams like Mozilla's are under no obligation to give a stable platform to anybody's political goals.
I have done this when I was younger, after reading Modern C++ Design and the Template Metaprogramming book. I am sorry.

Please not I'm not saying those books are bad, just blindly apply stuff because you think it is cool and fancy is probably not good leadership.
I think the author raises a very good point. Developer productivity does not lie in a vacuum, this is overlooked a lot mostly because for small teams most developers manage their environment and toolings and for big teams there usually are standards to follow but there is a huge gap in the middle where if a developer is not vocal enough or has sway in a toxic team a good developer could spiral downwards in productivity.

As to a solution to what the author asked: "What could have been done". I think the way to handle that situation is to approach the manager with a solution. Tell them, if you give me A, B and C I will be productive, I do not have these now and they are causing me pain. To do this one has to have self-awareness and experience in what they need for a productive environment. one also has to be vocal and willing to fight for it.
Do 2x developers exist? And what about 5x developers?
I would go further and say it is impossible because it is up to them to be pissed off or not. You can only not antagonize but to fanatics not serving them sufficiently is antagonizing them.
True enough, as you point out I would be expecting to do_something with m. :-)
Alcohol consumption has purposes other than mere intoxication. Likewise I wouldn’t execute a pharmacists who sells opium for legitimate reasons.

But sure, if you have an alcohol executive cutting their wine with methanol, pushing it to middle school kids and breaking interstate laws shipping laws to evade enforcement, like you did in prohibition... screw him.
There is some good modern medicine, but the fixation on genes handicaps certain investigators.

> the heritability of ASD was estimated to be approximately 80%, indicating that the variation in ASD occurrence in the population is mostly owing to inherited genetic influences, with no support for contribution from maternal effects.

I think they’re trying to say “it’s not the mother’s fault the kid just has bad genes.”

In the real world there are non-genetic causes behind almost all of the symptomatic presentations of children medically-cursed with the diagnosis of “Autistic”. One group of researchers recently published a paper about the microbiome’s role in the condition [1]. My understanding is that less-desirable bacteria don’t synthesize vitamins and other useful substances (biotin, etc), and make more noxious endotoxins (that overwhelm the liver), than friendlier bacteria.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3564498/

The type of fiber in the diet has a significant influence on the type of bacteria in the intestines. If I had an Autistic kid, I’d try to feed him/her inulin from Jerusalem Artichokes (the food with more of this prebiotic fiber than any other), and avoid all the fake foods they sell in the grocery stores. Many thickeners (carageenan, carob bean gum, etc) are cosmetic food ingredients...
This is one potential solution. Good read on scaling shiny: https://appsilon.com/alternatives-to-scaling-shiny/
They’re a 10x code typer then. This is not development in a general sense, which involves working with people.
I imagine most 10x developers just have their life together as a whole and that's what allows them to be so productive.

So many developers I see are overweight, drink alcohol often, play video games until 2AM and then sleep 5 hours, no exercise at all, bad diet, porn addiction.

By having such a bad lifestyle they are really low energy and tend to go into "autopilot" which of course translates to worse output at the job.
And you're not even talking about data gravity...

Moving data from one provider to another will quickly drive your costs up.
I wonder why their calculator left out a lot of airports. (e.g. RDU doesn’t work)
There are no brilliant jerks in the upper class?

I dunno about that. Sometimes I run into folks who went to "a small school outside of Boston", and well...
Greenland wildfire part of unusual spike in Arctic blazes this summer
Related: "In the past 3 months we surveyed all internal XSS bugs that triggered the XSSAuditor and were able to find bypasses to all of them." --http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/07/18/google-chrome-is-...

(Disclosure: I work for Google)
Or a creep. It’s not just drivers who make our cities bad.
I wonder how much carbon the average national newspaper puts out, with the print newspaper itself and it's distribution, online edition servers, journalist travel, accommodation etc.

Sure, we should fly less frivolously, but many other activities can improve their carbon footprint (flying, not so much, until we switch to butanol or whatever), and many are also less necessary or beneficial than flying.
Safe Deposit Boxes Aren’t Safe
Lessons from a one-man iOS app business
Startups Are Abandoning Suburbs for Cities with Good Transit
>Which likely is a major reason why it is so popular. It's cheap for the consumer, the kids. Which is another problem, as anime is mostly for kids, not adults.

This is patently false. There are lots and lots anime for adults and there are so many adult fans nowadays. To be honest this statement alone would probably disqualify you from giving any opinion worth considering in this discussion.
In the 90s and early 00s I worked on applications where the bulk of the business logic / processes have been encoded into Stored Procedures and sometimes Triggers. And it's easy in a lot of ways because you're working "close to the data". The issue it that SQL isn't the best language for encapsulating complicated and / or changing business logic.

From a design perspective you end up creating "transaction scripts". This is great if what you are creating is simple and unlikely to change. As complexity increase and you received more and more Change Requests it becomes harder. Dino Esposito's book "Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise" covers this well and my experience reflects what he says. And while it's also easy to create "transaction scripts" in C#/Java, you can't take a Domain-Driven Design approach with T-SQL.

I also agree with Brent's comment below, testing is far harder, although whatever project you're on automated testing has to be fully embraced or it's just overhead.
(
Zillow estimates are not to be taken seriously in circumstances like that. The point would only be valid if the valuation came from a professional appraiser.
The problem that I have with the '10x' label is that it is often linked to an understanding that engineering ability is innate.

Whereas, everything I have observed suggests that engineering skills are taught, and only taught. At one time, John Carmack couldn't code like John Carmack.

With the right training, guidance and mentoring, with the right team to collaborate and build with, and with the space and motivation to deeply consider how to solve problems in a useful, pragmatic and productive way, almost anyone can be a 10x engineer.
And if you oversample multiple exposures, you get more “bits” through the averaging process—if the quantization noise is overwhelmed by random noise.
Flying consumes around 2-3 litres of fuel/100km so it's about twice as efficient as driving the distance alone in a car. Problem is that too many people want to (and can) go to the other end of the world too often.
Yeah, from the title, it would have to be an invention that has saved the life of virtually everyone on earth. Perhaps something that prevented a nuclear apocalypse or the like.

Or, at the very least, something that's saved the life of virtually every person likely to read BBC news. ;)

As it turns out, it's the "black box" flight recorder. A great invention to be sure, but hardly of the scale just described.
One of the reason why sight-unseen I would actually prefer to be dropped into a c based project than a c++ based one.
As bad as air travel is in absolute terms the way they cram people in it's not too bad on a person-mile basis. About the same as a typical car being driven with two people in it.

https://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_128.shtml
Yes, race equality is measured against the standard of "white" - people advocate for blacks to become richer and less harrassed by the police, not for whites to become poorer and be harrassed more (btw, both would achieve the same amount of "equality").

Same for men vs. women - the drive wasn't/isn't to make men work less (and stay at home more, i.e. like women used to be and like my ideal world would look like), but to make women work more.
I think there are more < 1x teams out there than people think
One of the Most Insane Flights in the World
That’s not true, there’s an entire subfield of stats/ML dedicated to anomaly detection.
It's not going to stay long enough on one page to do so.
> This is a way more common situation than the one you're describing (John Carmack)

FWIW i remember reading that Carmack didn't really document nor explain his code and all people who bought id's engines got was a single day to ask questions about it to him and that was it.

On the other hand for the vast majority of its life, id was a very small studio (IIRC the entire team who made Doom 3 was just 21 people - this includes programmers, artists, designers, etc) so chances are if someone wanted something they'd just ask him directly. I also remember a comment about programmers at id not having meetings and decisions were taken in informal discussions.
Meow :-) What happened to being civil
Same. Reading "Five Myths of Community Design" on the same site [1] left me kind of wondering if they really built a service people would want to use. Personally, I've always thought the "like" model of modern online interaction is broken, but my idea about fixing it would be to add "Agree" and "Disagree" buttons, but only display the sum the two as a measure of engagement.

[1] https://coralproject.net/blog/five-myths-of-community-design...
I own a kidney.
Tried and Tested Tester's Strategy to Performance Testing
So tell us, how is a shitty solution better than a well designed testable solution? Literally every book on project management is about the development cost vs maintenance cost and how the latter beats the former. But yeah, keep dreaming.
The math seems to be off in this article (by 3x). It claims 3,153 Kg CO2 from London to Perth.

A Boeing A380 creates 75g per passenger per Km[1]. The distance between London and Perth is 14,470 Km = 1,085 Kg.

[1] https://www.environmentalleader.com/2007/11/airbus-a380-could-have-jumbo-sized-carbon-footprint/
Avoid Conditions in JavaScript
The meaning of 10x has blurred considerably - when coined, as far as I can tell, it seemed to mean that sometimes the most productive developer on a team is 10x more product than the least productive developer, not the “average hire“ - which is a very different claim.
This whole "equality" thing is a big pickle. IMO governments should actively subsidise kids, both via parents (e.g. paying for childcare, school, etc.) and via companies (e.g. giving a company extra money/tax cut for each worker on parental leave, to equalize the amount of value (to the company) of a worker on leave vs. a worker actually working).

All of this assuming we (as a society) actually want people to keep having kids (which, at least in the West, societies/governments seem to want).
Basically everything from the demoscene...

AVs have also turned into moral police with their detection of cracks/keygens/"potentially unwanted software". Detecting worms, ransomware, and the like is one thing, but I think going beyond that crosses a line.
Yes it is as if the gas never goes out. Because the gas never goes out.

Another way to think of it is, it takes different things to make the different systems go out. The electricity can go out quite easily for a variety of common and not-infrequent reasoms. While it would take a earthquake to take the gas out. If you are having some event that manages to take both out at the same time, then you no longer care about the heat as you are on the roof trying not to drown or running for your life from asteroids.
How do you know how to use the new shiny things without real practice? My friend, we have all done this. (after about the 10th time the 'new technique' turns to a mess, you become very conservative about 'new things').
I'm sorry but the author misunderstood the situation:

- He explained to the manager that a simple Hello World took a lot of time bla bla bla. The manager already knew this, that was his "achievement". He also took it personally as most people do, because when you tell him that something was bad, indirectly, you criticized his work (and so him) in the last years maybe.

- The author tried to explain rationally the situation. The manager didn't want to hear it because he was already desperate. The manager knew that the end was close. A desperate man does not think rationally. All you can say is that you will fix it and then proceed as normal. They just want to hear that everything will be good even if you know it will not be. You are his psychologist/priest now.

- The project had to failed. When you as a developer are in a situation when management is bad you should not do your best to save the project. The badly managed projects and companies must fail in order for the sane ones to survive. If you save a bad project/company you are the reason why there are some many bad jobs everywhere. Also this is the reason there is so much burnout in this industry.
Extraversion-introversion is a different personality axis from agreeableness. It's also distinct from sociopathology.
This was my conclusion too while using one of those calculators. One year of eating "normal" amounts of meat instead of being a vegetarian has about as much CO2 equivalent impact as one flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

I'm still trying to reduce meat consumption (and choose e.g. chicken over beef) but going on holiday e.g. via train instead of by plane is way more ecologically impactful than becoming 100% vegan...
You know it's okay that other people don't want the same thing as you, right?

It's difficult to go anywhere without putting yourself in a
"deadly metallic stress machine", whether it be a car, plane, train, boat, etc. I suppose if you have that much fear of transportation, living somewhere with ample options within walking distance is best.
"And the only reason we’re not is because of anti competitive behavior from Google."

I closed at this point.

I'm no fan of Google, but if your business fails, I expect there to be some self-reflection.
Sciatica affects people over Joint Flx Review age 30 and is almost always the result of a problem with the lower spinal disks causing radiculopathy, or compression/irritation, of the sciatic nerve that sends pain and/or tingling, numbness down into the legs. Let's talk about what causes lower spinal disk problems. Fibromyalgia is a little understood illness that still has the stigma of not being a real disease to many ignorant people and doctors.

However, people who do have fibromyalgia would argue that the reality of their life with fibromyalgia includes pain, stiffness, fatigue, and difficulty sleeping. As a recent patient told me everything but my eyeballs hurt. I have also been told by patients that it feels like you have the flu...achy all over...but it never goes away. Perhaps studies of the brain changes and chronic pain may help researchers and doctors better understand illnesses like fibromyalgia.

The latest research is suggesting that fibromyalgia has a connection with the central nervous system and is the result of a malfunction, or dysfunction, of the central nervous system. A. Kuchinad and colleagues studied 10 women who had fibromyalgia and compared them with 10 women who did not have the illness. Among the women with fibromyalgia, Kuchinad's team found a reduction in brain tissue that wasn't found in the controls. This finding was backed up by yet another study not long after. Other research has shown awake like brain activity in patients with Fibromyalgia when sleeping. No REM sleep leads to the unrefreshed sleep common with the condition.

https://healthscrutiny.com/joint-flx-review/
It's not really that linear because taking off and landing both consume significant "flat" amounts of fuel.
> I also don't want to work, because it'd be more fun to be with babies all day and make more of them.

I mean, this is just not true, you know. Being with babies whole day every day is not fun for overwhelming majority of adults, neither male nor female. They may see meaning in it, but like, fun it is not. And it definitely is not easy fun when you are on fourth or fifth baby, meaning care about siblings too.

Also, managing both 5 kids and full time job would be pretty hard even if good daycare is available. Your "she can go to work because she has college" completely ignores logistics of it and expectations on software engineers these days.
Org-mode on web, built with React, for mobile, synced with Dropbox, Google Drive
Just wondering. Can we all be J. R. R. Tolkien?

Other industries have people who are clearly Superstars. Why would they not hold true for development?