skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are we speaking about the Israeli or the Palestinian side of the border? On one side economic development maybe suppressed, but across the border people struggle for the basic necessities of life. As everyone knows, there is no easy solution to this except for both parties to redress their mistakes. As long as there is oppression and no justice, both will be the losers.
I don't see how it's really debatable that some programmers can be 10x more productive in certain domains. This is especially true in technical domains where it can take years to gain the knowledge required to solve the problem at all. I can think of real-world problems that would require the average programmer several years to solve, yet I know people that could solve them in a day. In fact, almost any specialized task works like that.
why not just do it, then? (edit: "it" = use kickstarter)
I think the "10x" myth persists because we all imagine that we're the programmers who are "10x" better than average.

It's nominally true because many programmers have zero or lower productivity, sometimes due to no fault of their own. If you work on a project for three years, and then it gets canceled, you could say your work had no economic value because it never got in front of customers. If some PHP hack manages to pound something out in a month that brings in $100,000 of business, he looks like a hero, no matter how bad the code is.

In my view, superproductivity is about alignment with your environment. If you work for 12 months a year, but spend 3 of them on side projects that go nowhere, spend 3 months being a sysadmin, and then waste another 5 months on reworking a GUI, there goes about 90% of your productivity.

The "Mythical Man Month" says that about 20% of the time on a software project is spend coding, the rest is requirements work, testing and that kind of stuff. A superprogrammer with supertools might be able to do that in time that approaches zero asymptotically, but unless you can get rid of the other 80%, project cost and time don't get much worse, even in comparison with a coder who is half as productive as average.

The moral? If you want to look like a genius, find some place where (i) requirement work takes little time (and wastes little time downstream with changes) and (ii) testing, deployment and all that is minimal.
Quora makes plenty of sense once you're in, but I agree overall, and Path.com is certainly over-doing the vague pitch way too much.
It would take others years to solve what someone else can solve in a day?

I would love to hear an example of that as that seems a pretty extreme claim.
I have never logged into Quora. Yet I find the fact that a few of the people answering the questions are authoritative sources fascinating. So stuff like being deluged by a stream of activity from people you follow on Quora is irrelevant for me. In a way, I think Quora stands out because its community of users acts as a sort of imperfect funnel for quality. Interesting questions and answers may become popular. With Twitter, it's hard to see what is relevant. But with Quora, if someone passes along a Quora link you almost know it is going to be good. Especially in the narrow niche of technology and Silicon Valley. Twitter is too democratic; Quora is more republican.

Also, clever name.
Trivia: the space shuttle avoids the blackout by its shape, which allows it to communicate upward to the TDRSS satellites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_blackout#Reentry...

"[T]he Shuttle can communicate with a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite during re-entry. This is because the shape of the Shuttle creates a "hole" in the ionized air envelope, at the tail end of the craft, through which it can communicate upwards to a satellite in orbit and thence to a ground station."
Christmas Trees Become Lake Habitats for Fish
Starbucks Unveils a New Logo With No Words
Why don't you create a mockup of your ideas and send it to whoever you want at Lanyrd?

If you want to be taken seriously you also should stop phrasing things like: "sloppy", "is this twitter", "just poorly designed." These comments lack content and create emotional reactions.
Does anyone know/guess what tools/engines he used?
Me too, I quite agree.

http://www.jeremyhutchings.com/2009/12/rock-star-vs-rock-sol...
We know we still have a lot to do. Generally, we're trying to find the right balance between building new features that are strategically important to the product and cleaning up the stuff we've already built.

We're a very young site - we only went live in September, and we've actually been travelling on honeymoon (Morocco, Egypt, South Africa) while building the site at the same time. We're now focused on it full time, so expect a lot of improvements.

Out of interest, are you on an iPad? We've only recently seen the site on the iPad, and there's a bunch of stuff we need to fix there.
It went unmentioned cause it wasn't really relevant in the article.

The danger all of these type of applications face is that it's very very hard to tell if you're delivering anything of value, when you're not charging money.

Some people just delete their account.
Some people stop logging in.
Some people log in but far less often.
Some still log in as often, but are bored when doing so.
Some do it, but are really just waiting for the next big thing.

The risk of the high valuations is that all of these guys look like potential users, people who will click adverts.

Bebo had a shit load of active users when AOL shelled out $850,000,000 for it. The danger is that no one ever checked if any of the users actually gave a shit about Bebo.
The 90k is an example of "list the salary" and not "pay at least this much to have attention".
Have a look at the article, the quote in question was said on the phone to some higher-up in Hamas after it was discovered they were operating undercover doing shady business in Dubai
CC-Licensed HTML & CSS Teaching Materials
Er, the stylus thing is not entirely off the mark. My N900 has a stylus, and there are programs I cannot use without it (notably, the web browser is nigh useless without it, since text that's perfectly comfortable for reading means links that are way too small to hit reliably with a finger). So, a stylus actually can be a point in its favor.
Going to take a dive here from Mossad fanboys, but Stuxnet can just as well (if not more likely) be a U.S. product, precisely due to its technical sophistication.
Iterative Application Icon Creation
"It is not that only perfect icons will lead to success, but if you have limited other advertising resources at hand, then it is certainly advisable to optimize the hell out of your icon."
I had the exact same feeling when I first looked over HTML5 Boilerplate.

The HTML itself isn't so exotic. But my eyes glaze over paging through all the CSS & JS. And then there's the .htaccess -- all sorts of black magic in there.

Very useful as a reference for different issues, but there's no way I'm going to start with all of that baggage before a single line of original code. It feels over-engineered to cover every possible corner case.
Exclusive Interview, Prevue, invite only community founder, Pete Usborne
It's all about inspiration :) It doesn't matter what actually pushes you to do it, it's that you actually do it. All great ideas start somewhere, and most (if not all) are inspired by other ideas and people.
How the Starbucks Siren Became Less Naughty
No, I was viewing the site on Chrome 8 and Firefox 3.6 (both Windows).

I'm glad you guys are always working on improving it. Lanyrd was one of those sites that made me go "how come this didn't exist before".
Just Friends, or a Secret Club? (Facebook-Goldman)
How is this scary new development? The budget option of proprietary bundled services has always existed, with the upsell being the unfettered internet. Youtube and facebook are not "the internet", but proprietary services that have been developed upon it. Surprise surprise, network providers used to bundling services look for a lowest common denominator for their base product line. That these services happen to deliver over IP is of little consequence.

However, don't think that I'm advocating for walled gardens - the important part is to keep innovating and creating a wide demand for The Internet at large so that carriers are unable to presume that most customers only want bundled discrete services in the first place (thereby pushing competition on generic bandwidth. bittorrent+RC4 has done wonders for wired net neutrality).
"UX overhaul" - I'd suggest what you are talking about is actually "visual design" and not "UX".

Lacks focus? Disagree. Lacks the touch of a seasoned designer, agreed.

sigh "UX" overused and generally misunderstood.
Beans make you gassy, and other advice from last night's first YC dinner
Fair enough, but you can fail in something other than a bootstrapped startup and learn from it, all without risking your own personal stress, finances, etc.
Out of 7 points, 5 were specific issues.

I understand your point and it would be valid had I just written "it's sloppy and poorly designed". Except I supported those points with a lot of specifics.

UX is about emotional reactions anyway. Regardless, I spent time going through their site and documenting some UI issues I found.
To be fair, MS was seemingly riding the CE-train into the grave up until the day they pulled back the curtain on Metro.

So it's not unthinkable that they might have another tablet group either adapting Metro or starting fresh and this is just the choked sputters of work that was started back before it was obviated by modern tablets.
Processed World magazine archive
What’s tragic about this (at least from Microsoft’s perspective) is that Microsoft can make a pretty good mobile OS. I have no doubt that Windows Phone 7 would have been extremely competitive if it had been released a year earlier. They are just too damn slow and seem to lack focus.

It’s not yet sure whether Windows Phone 7 will succeed now in any way, will it be good enough to be similarly late to tablets? They certainly must have already started developing some sort of Windows 7 specifically for tablets (as unlike Windows 7 as Windows Phone 7 is unlike Windows 7), everything else would seem extremely stupid.
You're right on both counts. Although I do think it could use a bit of UX improvement but the bulk of my complaints were "visual design".
"Tree Style Tab" does it.
The real issue is studding programmers is expensive. In class assignments or contests you can find a huge range of time to completion. But, paying a statistically significant number of programmers to solve the same task is prohibitively expensive let alone a wide range of identical tasks.

PS: I have completed the same task as other programmers in less than 10% of the time. However, assessing overall productivity requires that someone is consistently faster on a wide range of tasks not just that they happen to solve something in 10% or even 1% of the time.
Cron job - deadman switch. I would assume a full forensic workover of your phone just like a computer, if arrested for anything: police will collect it and let the DA argue admissibility later, in court.
Deal Of A Lifetime: First Marriage Proposal On Groupon
I think “requires” is the important word.
I just posted an article about this whole issue today: http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/companies/2011-year-ipad/, although I missed this tidbit in the article and it would have been nice to mention.

2011 will be the year Apple basically takes the entire (tablet) market for itself since everyone else is clueless or incompetent to date...And woe be to those arriving late to the party.
On some weeks, I am 10x.. no, scratch that, 50x more productive than myself on the others. And I've seen some people who are capable to sustain that indefinitely.
Thanks for the very informative article. It's sad that there's not enough interest in scsh for anyone to have bothered fixing these warts in 17 years.
Simonw, have you considered using other methods than Twitter for signing in? I don't feel comfortable tying services together both as a user and as developer. I'm curious as why have you chosen for to only allow signing in with Twitter?
Developer productivity is near impossible to define, much less measure.
I would love to know how a study could be conducted in such a way to prove or disprove this notion. Any ideas? Any existing data sets that could reliably mined for info?
I poked around for a bit and didn't find any mentally stimulating interactions going on, and it was poorly organized/moderated. Anybody else?
This game is perfect for the 3DS
It's not just a PDF—it's 34 PDFs! Each chapter, sidebar, and other section is separate.

It makes for a kind of minimalist DRM. (I don't know for sure that the publisher meant it that way, though the way the copyright notice is written specifically to allow only reading "on the World Wide Web" suggests they could have an inkling.) There's no impediment to randomly browsing the full text online, but if you want to load it into an offline e-reader you have to deal with all the pieces somehow. Not that difficult, but it might be easier just to buy it.

Sure, overcoming this is a minor hurdle given a bit of effort, but you can say the same about cracking typical DRM. (I expect a lawyer could point out differences from the point of view of DMCA's anti-circumvention clause.)

Then again, the publisher may not have that much of a clue. There's no way to pay for a single-PDF version. And look at the links where the copyright notice punts you for information on Class Use [1] and other Permissions [2].

[1] http://press.princeton.edu/class_use/

[2] http://press.princeton.edu/permissions/
That's definitely a bit on the crazy side, but I've seen job ads that are along those lines.
> That they were selling MBS tranches to clients, then simultaneously taking out options that would pay GS money when those exact same tranches failed, really tells you all you need to know.

No, it doesn't. This not necessarily scummy or a conflict of interest. GS could have hedged its own long positions, for one (i.e. still net long). Or GS could even be net short, overall, and still have independent divisions, advisers, or traders who are individually long.
I don't claim as extreme productivity differences as the parent but I've seen people do pretty impressive engineering feats and have heard first hand stories of others.

In the cases I've seen what makes people a lot more productive is experience. At Google, Ken and Russ ran circles around me in terms of writing compilers, but I had only written half a dozen toy compilers while someone like Ken has written many more production ones.

My current co-worker Mikko just spent a few weeks re-writing the code to extract a mesh from our level set data. It's a distributed algorithm and our literature search didn't indicate it had ever been published. Starting with someone without domain experience it would be several weeks until the algorithm made sense. It probably would take years to replicate the feat.

Programming is a very specialized endeavor. Some parts of more than others. My own experience indicates that individuals can have magnitudes of difference in their performance when applied to some of these specialized areas.
Remember the Sudoku debacle? Or should I say Sudokugate..
Article talks a lot about science, and then provides no actual studies that refute the original claim. That's not how science works. Devise a hypothesis. Develop a test to confirm or deny. Run test.

And then he tears apart the study with strange assumptions. "Well they were debugging, not programming." Because no programmers in the real world spend a significant amount of their time debugging. I'd consider that to be a significant amount of time for a programmers day. Wish I had code complete in front of me, because I know it did do a break-down of developers time. The one that said that most developers spend more time walking than reading software books.

If you're going to refute McConnell or even Peopleware, you've got to do a study. You can't just say "well cubes seem more productive than an office."
I dunno, introductory level programming classes create an opportunity to observe anywhere from 5 to 200 people solving the same problem.

I've never taught a CS course, but back in my college days I helped a friend with his CS homework by taking advantage of weak file permissions to copy other people's homework. The shocking thing was that, looking at a small sample, most of the programs didn't work correctly. To complete the assignment our way, we had to fix bugs in programs that other people wrote, which is fantastic preparation for a professional programmer ;-)
I have seen programmers that are more than ten times faster than some slow programmers. There are debugging tasks where some people struggle for days, while others would find it in one hour.
Just as the majority of hackers are decent people, so are the majority of people in government. But just as there are black hats among hackers, there are black hats in government. Just as it would be imprudent to ignore the potential threat of black hats on computer security, it would be imprudent to ignore the potential threat of black hats on freedom.
Microlenders, Honored With Nobel, Are Struggling
Another way to look at that state of affairs is: the required stylus is a point against the n900's browser.

Styluses, particularly for navigation, have been rejected by the market. So relying upon them is simply a bad idea if you dare to dream of outperforming anything in the graveyard of Windows-Tablets-Past.
> 2011 will be the year Apple basically takes the entire (tablet) market for itself

I don't know about that. I think 2010 was the year Apple did that, and 2011 is going to be the year that Android and iOS compete in the tablet market. With Gingerbread tablets coming out some time in the next few months at competitive prices, I think Apple will see some healthy competition. (Microsoft, of course, will not be a part of that healthy competition.)
>the relational model does not lend itself to that kind of storage

>Storing that in SQL, while maintaining easy queryabilty would be a huge pain in the backside, to say the least

I don't think those words (SQL, Relational Model) mean what you think they do.
Wow, this is an endless list of apologetic statements trying to paper over Erlang's many deficiencies.

"Your first contact will suck but it's not Erlang's fault, it's yours".

Way to motivate.
Unreachable Aspirations
This comment perfectly underscores what's wrong with a certain section of the startup community. It underlines the complete and utter lack of respect towards developers as human beings. People like axiom and the Jason Calacanises of the world have created a toxic environment where employees are being totally dehumanized and treated as resource which must be exploited to their fullest extent rather treated as fellow human. And developers are mocked and called "entitled" for having perfectly reasonable demands as pointed out in this article. 90k was an example of a salary, if you have limited resources sure something like 50-60k a year with no overtime is a reasonable, but then as an employer don't demand or expect they work 60(or even more!) hrs a week for a meagre 40-50k.
Microsoft has changed Windows to fit tablets. Many of the UI changes in Windows 7 are touch-centric:

* The big buttons and slide-to-expand of the new Taskbar

* Multi-touch gestures in Explorer, IE and more

* Aero Snap and Shake to make window management less fiddly

* A redesigned on-screen keyboard

It's not a total redesign, so obviously it will never be as smooth as iOS or Android, but I'd say they did a decent job without breaking compatibility.
Another take on how Google is one trick pony
:-) It's a personal peeve!

It certainly could do with some usability improvements, but nothing really sticks out as "bad" interaction at the moment. So I think they are correct in focusing their efforts elsewhere!

Edit: that said, Si & Nat, a quick fix, maybe 2 hrs tops, of the glitches would be nice!
They didn't buy the product but they are using the tool for user acquisition and paying me on a rev-share basis which I feel is win-win for both sides.
See my answer here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1981364

Short version: we don't just use Twitter for auth - we also use it as a way of linking conferences to speakers who have not yet created their profile on our site. Doing that with other providers is fiddly.
Relevant thread on LtU: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/492
How much debt do private equity firms really use?
I think users with enough reputation (>10k) should be able to accept answers on behalf of the asker. Maybe after a few days when it's clear that the OP has no intention of accepting or even coming back to the site.
it's unfortunate but true that a small handful of developers have zero or lower productivity because they are incompetent.
It's talking about this right?
http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/04/asus-eee-slate-ep121-offi...

IT HAS A BUILT IN WACOM!!!

TEN times the RAM of an ipad. It runs on an i5core. This is not remotely in the same league. The audience is not your mom and pop who only has to use Facebook and skype, this is like a thinkpad for creative professionals.

This commentator is very ignorant.
You may want to use Invested.in (from what I understand it is more "open" while KickStarter projects are edited / filtered).

Disclaimer: Invested.in is my brother's company.
When I search for a band, I get results in the autocomplete/dropdown but when I hit the "find music" button, it says not found.

It's pretty cool, but I think the layout needs work. It's more vertical than I'd like.
Mac App Store Awakens Tomorrow Morning
Top 15 young uk entrepreneurs watch list for 2011
"Anger is a very powerful motivation"
I wonder if Apple released the 16GB iPad just so that every article would compare every competing tablet device to that $499 price.

iPads range from $499 to $829.
I've just been pointed to a recent article by Tom Gilb on measuring productivity, I'll post it when I've had a chance to read it.

http://www.gilb.com/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=144
It's pity that some of the videos are of awful quality and some are almost broken.
Looking for a technical co-founder 
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WebGL is pretty close to prime time as of FF 4 and upcoming webkit based browsers. We have been developing in production mode for it in over 4 months now and are pretty satisfied with the results. AFAIK we have only encountered one crash bug, possibly an ATI driver issue, which was easy to work around once diagnosed. Performance isn't as fast as native but close enough for most applications that aren't bleeding edge (read AAA games).
Comparing this to an iOS or Android device is silly. This is running a full OS and is not limited to an App Store. It's extremely portable being a tablet but the difference is you can pull out a keyboard and it becomes more than a large phone.

Edit: I think iOS and Android are great when on the run but when I'm stationary (most of the time), I want a keyboard/mouse and full OS. If this device could be booted into Android I'd be all over it. If iPad's could boot into OSX when docked, I'd be all over it.
I think if there's any sense of entitlement it comes from the people doing the hiring lamenting that they can't find qualified people.

Well, if qualified people are in short supply, you've got to give them what they want if you want one of them to work for you.

You can't on the one hand complain that developers ask for too much and then on the other complain that you can't find developers. The problem in that equation is then the person looking for developers.