skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a big lie. It’s not hard. There are no 10x developers. Most people doing a job of the same title in a similar team are likely worth the same money.

People on HN say all kinds of crazy nonsense about it being hard to measure software engineer productivity. It’s nonsense that helps suppress wages and keeps the situation set up as a fight between engineers who should be cooperating for mutual betterment.

Companies don’t approach measuring the worth of any employee with any sort of fine-grained metrics except in highly commoditized jobs.

Also, as a software engineer your value is not all (or even mostly) from writing software. There’s reviewing resumes, attending recruiting events, evaluating new technology the company might adopt, filling out forms, sitting in meetings, sitting in diversity training, etc., etc.

You might even be adding value just by being a name on a sheet of paper. Your headcount tells a small portion of a story that wins the next funding round or puts the company in a better position with an acquirer or gets the company a high rating from a regulating agency or brings hope that causes other key employees to stay at the company or whatever.

These are reasons why some people make 100% bonuses and millions in equity while others get 15% of a low-ball base salary in options they end never able to exercise.

The reason pay is wildly unequal is not because it’s hard to measure productivity. Companies aren’t doing that anyway. Even if they were, they’ll do anything to avoid paying what you’re truly worth.

Pay is unequal because developers don’t know their worth or what forms of compensation are negotiable, because it’s all kept very secretive. Developers don’t develop good negotiation skills and they let themselves often very foolishly believe less tangible and less enforceable properties of a job (like “interesting”) are worth a big pay trade-off.

It all boils down to the same thing. We have crappy pay (compared to the real value we add) and we get stuck in open-plan hell hole offices and on and on because developers won’t say “no” to these jobs and seriously negotiate under the willingness to walk away if conditions and pay don’t improve.
Very well put. It is a great paradigm for problems that you understand very well.

But I think we can also define it more inclusive and still be fine: TDD is a good paradigm for programming against well defined APIs.

For example if you are handed an API specification then locking down your interface(s) with tests in advance can be very helpful.

What is even more helpful is to have a higher level language or abstraction that encodes the specification in detail and generates the tests for you (Clojure spec comes to mind).

edit: typo
The font DMCA Sans Serif
“Parser Parser Combinators for Program Transformation” by Rijnard van Tonder
> you either spend money on software that deals with the hardware being unreliable and save money on software (pioneered by Google) or you spend money on hardware that promises to be highly reliable and save on software.

Seems like the first "save money on software" shouldn't be there.
Think like an embedded developer. They’ve done a lot of work in this area.

https://elinux.org/Boot_Time
Personalised but running on a cloud server, controlled by any third party is a step too close.

Who's to say they won't retain the biometrics long after you requested they remove the data? The standard HN trope is if it's out there it's never deleted. Trusting any corporate with data, given the last ten years, is never wise. Even Apple, busy marketing the privacy high ground.

No doubt someone would make a GDPR case against it though...
What are the current metrics?
Everything that exists on Earth such as oceans, jungles and all animals took millions of years to develop without having microplastics inside of them, to even suggest they are not harmful would requiere extremely strong evidence to prove such an external interference on such delicate equilibrium inside bodies does absolutely nothing. And by the way many articles do not cite each other and have original research on the subject:

https://www.ecowatch.com/microplastics-hurt-earthworms-too-2...
Care to explain us how a "real" witch hunt works, in your opinion? I'm genuinely curious.
Last time I checked take home pay was lower in NY than London for someone earning around 150k before tax. Not sure if that holds true in California...
It is implied by the minimalism of the red-green-refactor mantra.
Something I find unclear about your pricing. It says it is not a subscription, but then implies you pay once to get a single list. So it is not a subscription, but you pay each time you want the list? Or do you pay once and then receive each new list in the future?
Interesting. But contrary to how you sell it it's the big German state that again knows better what's good for people. With that said it's not an opposite vector to some foobar from the past. It's the same foobar as it was in the past. No kidding. The big state is a problem. State having less and less control over people liberties would be the right direction and the opposition to that foobar. And not state telling people what currency they should use. Definitely not. I have spent past few years in fintech, mostly in crowdfunding. The lesson learned is that state is the biggest problem in many countries. Free People should have an option to make mistakes. If people are naive enough to buy shaky crypto they should be allowed to do it. And most countries at least don't penalize crypto. Here the problem is not the good of German citizens but who controls value flow . With this huge consortium behind libra, not just Facebook, it would be the first time in the crypto world where crypto would have a real chance of being used for transaction and not for investments, which may go totally in the interest of most Germans. All but the people that benefit on the endless quantitative easing cycles that Germany controlled ECB keeps injecting. Average German folks will lose on this ban.
A Day in the Life of a Core Maintainer
I switched from freeotp when they dropped the ability to backup the secrets database.
Implicits allow for a kind of flexibility and power that is absent from pretty much every other language. Allowing functions to implicitly introspect their caller’s context is incredibly useful. The only languages that can even half way do this kind of things without crazy dynamic introspection/reflection are those that support dynamically scopped variables (such as Common Lisp). And even that isn’t as powerful.
what does facebook's libra have to offer that current cryptocurrencies don't already?
Monitoring Blockchain Oracle Transactions
I really hope they can figure out how to get camera record full day without recharge...
The docker containers are the least complicated bit in production deploys. Orchestrating all the up/down-scaling and releasing, binding of IP-numbers, DNSes etc.. that's where the potential "lock-in" comes (although I would say from my experience that the main problem with Fargate is it's several times more expensive than simply putting ECS on spot instances).
Maspeth High School’s secret to high pass rates is cheating: teachers
Yes, but: Texas weather. Unpleasant without constant A/C.
It's valid to have an opinion on something, another thing is having a well-founded opinion. I love vim and my opinion is that it's better than Emacs.

But I used VIM for a decade and Emacs for 6 months.

Is anyone going to take my opinion on Emacs seriously, knowing that these tools take time to master?
Space-tech startups growing in India
In some sort of technical sense, yes; it's made out of SRAM and one could have the cache be mapped exactly to a block of memory that is the same size as the cache.

In a practical sense, no, because it's structured as cache and accessing it is more convoluted than direct access to a bare block of memory. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_placement_policies for a description of the various types of cache structures.
Meetups depend largely on geographic location. If you are already in a large city this is good advice. If you are anywhere with a population of sub 500k then people looking for help is few and far between. Also for every one that does show up and has money to pay ten show up saying how they have a "great idea" but no money or skills and why won't anybody work for 2% equity?
FWIW ibm hosts a coding competition called master the mainframe to help students learn mainframe programming on the latest systems.
(Note: I'm not affiliated with ibm)

https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/master-the...
Yes, distributism has been a founding principle of post-war europe. Not just in Germany but in all of western europe.

That said, the governance of Libra is setup with distributism in mind. Facebook has set it up explicitly so they don't control the currency, a founding group of 100 corporations will control the reserve (one vote each) and they are explicit about accepting new qualifying members.

If it takes off, it will attract a lot more corporations/institutional investors leading to free market control.

However, I don't see the point why governments are afraid of it because the monetary policy mechanisms requires a fractional reserve banking system to enact its effects.

Libra is fully asset-backed and wouldn't have an impact on any monetary policy.

I think what most people don't understand is that monetary policy doesn't work by devaluing cash, it works by making debt cheaper leading to companies end individuals to take out more debt to invest and as a consequence push up aggregate demand.
Any speculation on what a bounty like this is worth?
A mainframe adds reliability and backward compatibility, and the knowledge that you don't have to rewrite your systems from the ground up.

How long is Linux on x86-64 going to stay a thing? What are you going to do about staging Linux updates on business-critical facilities?

Perhaps not so simple after all.

Which suggests an interesting contrarian career path - train on COBOL + mainframe you'll never lack well-paid work. You'll also avoid the usual fad tracking.
Gaussian Processes, not quite for dummies
More like debugging than security researching? Wonder how much he got! Congratulations
I feel that what is currently brewing is a form of social cults, or if you prefer softer phrasing, cultural tribes. With a very strong feedback control loop deriving from social networking.

Aspects we can see emerging (and mentioned in the article) include: submission to and no questioning of the leadership/apostles; there being only one absolute truth; a persecution complex; control of actions through indoctrination and isolation; group think; and cognitive dissonance.
So I can submit jobs to them and have them do arbitrary computations for me? I can’t even get easy unfettered access to the filesystem for christ’s sake.
> sometimes there is a place for speaking with moral clarity rather than utmost precision.

Accusing people imprecisely of horrible crimes doesn't seem a moral action at all. Let's start discussing the morality of those who do so.
All Intel-compatible and emulated Intel-compatible processors do this. You'd have to run ARM to avoid it.
I enjoyed this book review. Here is a passage,

'''

"The modernism Gabriel Josipovici advocates...a sort of artistic middle...way... One extreme his writing studiously avoids is...rote representation, or the notion that words correspond perfectly with numinous reality. [...] As Josipovici says of contemporary writers still laboring in the vein of nineteenth-century “naturalism,” they confuse the reality-effect for reality. The end result is usually a doubling down on grittiness, as if exchanging love for lust or a whisper for a curse in the novel allows some fuller entry into the depths of life. [...]

At the other end of the spectrum, modernism seeks to avoid the jouissance of pure abstraction, a language game that denies the existence of transcendent truth altogether. [...] As clichéd as it might be to point out, this really amounts to a kind of nihilism dressed up in garish academic lingo. And morally defunct as a complete denial of transcendent truth might be, it also makes for boring art."

'''

This passage summarizes nicely the author's modernist ethos. It reminds me why film is fundamentally modernist at it's core--Show don't tell. With this reading two quotes leap out as movie criticism: 'confuse the reality-effect for reality', 'complete denial of transcendent truth...makes for boring art.' Makes me think of action movies with lots of guns, and movies with rambling scenes without an evident plot.
You may believe Faceache broke electoral law in the UK; but they have neither been charged nor convicted. So your belief would be false.

Leave.UK was accused of violating electoral law. I believe the Electoral Commission has now dropped its investigation.

Incidentally, to break UK law, you usually have to perform the violating act in the UK (we have a few laws that involve extraterritoriality, but they are far and few).

Faceache barely does anything in the UK. They apparently make no money here; they don't sell stuff (not even advertising - that would be the Republic of Ireland). CA collected data on US citizens; that's legal here (and would have been of very little interest to Brexit campaigners). As far as I know, nothing CA did violated UK or EU law.

You say "the side they supported won (Brexit)". Do you mean that Faceache supported Brexit? I don't think they had a dog in the race at all. Or do you mean CA? It's been argued that CA took money to provide services to Leave.UK, but that's not the same as saying they supported Brexit.

Trying to "swing elections" is legal in the UK. In fact it is encouraged; people who successfully swing elections often get appointed to important positions such as Prime Minister. It's completely legal to hire polling companies to help you better understand the voters. It's completely legal to hire advertising companies to promote the electoral outcome you want promoted.

Now you are speaking of trust; of course, I trust neither CA (now defunct) nor Faceache. But Faceache did not drag my country into wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria. Faceache did not have that much power. The UK joined those wars largely because of diplomatic pressure from the USA - a much more powerful entity than this rather tedious online advertising company.

From what I have read, and despite their bragging, CA wasn't even helpful to the Leave.UK campaign. Their data wasn't relevant, and anyway Leave.UK didn't have the organisational capacity to make use of whatever data they could offer.
Thanks for the feedback! Regarding the first two, we collect Years of Experience along with Years at Company information. On the comp page if you click any of the rows, it will be shown. We have quite a bit of work to do on visualizations and will add this on the docket.
We had a mainframe class at university from two older IBM employees. Was very interesting.
The "explicit settling" of exceptions is IMHO an excellent idea. I wish more languages had this.

I do think it's interesting to compare Go-style green threading with JS-like async/await syntax. The main question is: are Z threads cooperative (as in JS) or preemptive (as in Go)?
I agree that writing tests before code is unrealistic, but love tdd. We have nice weekends because of tdd.
Should I sell my Cobalt futures then? Or is it one of those "battery-breakthroughs" that we are not going to hear again ever?
indeed, many things that we take as facts are really just theories that have been generally accepted. even for things like gravity, fact is only that masses somehow attract each other. how that actually works is a theory, and it's accepted until we find a better one.
More transparency does lead to improvements for every one and also exposes discrepancies that female and disabled workers face.

Ironically it also leads to an increase in C level compensations.
In which country are they public.
Leave.EU was found guilty, and fined at least once:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/may/11/leaveeu-fin...
I assume you mean for visualizations. I do want to add though that you can already filter the comp data by location using the search bar or clicking the filter button to the right of it. Ex. https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...
this also plays into memory and why we can have false memory about events that never happened. because we can't tell the difference.
Makes sense since for mainframe hardware you'll want to optimize for reliability and endurance, and extreme process shrinks are going to impact both in ways that are hard to figure out. It's just more sensible to stay on an older node that's quite well understood by now.
According to Wikipedia it seems like a lot of people use or used ITA: “This system has been and is used by travel companies such as Bing Travel, CheapTickets, Kayak.com, and Orbitz, and by airlines such as Alitalia, American, ANA, Cape Air, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, US Airways, and Virgin Atlantic.”
Is it really common for banks to run legacy applications without sources? How would they know or trust the behavior?
AWS is absolutely the new mainframe. The big difference is that when you rent from Amazon instead of IBM they provide the building the mainframe lives in.
The Palestinians have regular elections, not sure what you mean by no democratic representation.
Toptal is full of BS on their screening process. I am a freelancer on Upwork for 10+ years now (at that time they were oDesk) and a few years ago I applied at Toptal, out of curiosity. The experience of the screening process where they asked to do free work on a project, disguised as a throwaway test, except the specifics of the test was too much inline with those of a ongoing project made me decline it. Also I mentioned I was already a successful freelancer of Upwork and gave them my profile there to see for themselves meant nothing to them. My impression is they use their screening process to get projects done.

As for you, good for you that you made it there, but it's definitely not a freelancing platform.
> A mainframe adds reliability and backward compatibility

Citation needed, especially on that implication that x86-64 lacks reliability.

I’ve run reliable services on commodity hardware that literally processed over 5 billion transactions per day.

> How long is Linux on x86-64 going to stay a thing?

If something better comes along, why wouldn’t you want to move to it? But “better” in this context would imply popular support and plentiful access to developers, so you would have years of warning. It wouldn’t come as a surprise. As of now, it has been going for at least a decade, and shows no signs of stopping.

> What are you going to do about staging Linux updates on business-critical facilities?

This is not some huge, unsolved problem. It has been solved many times, in my opinion, so just learn how others do it and follow suit. I’m not here to teach sysadmin “tips and tricks.”

I would be completely clueless on how to stage updates for a mainframe. Turn it off and back on? And I’m betting all of the good training material there is locked behind expensive paywalls.

> Perhaps not so simple after all.

Disagree, especially since you can hire people to solve these problems for a lot less money than you can get just the hardware for a mainframe, let alone hire the extremely rare (read: expensive) personnel needed to maintain and develop applications for mainframe.

If IBM would focus on bringing the entry-level cost of mainframe down, they would probably be able to get more adoption, and more people would be able and motivated to learn their systems.
Electronically controlled motion by means of magnetic fields is a motor.
Actually, Muslim Israelis can and do vote. Non-citizens obviously can't, like anywhere else. The Palestinians have their own elections and government(s).

Putting aside the nuances of "Jewish state" and what that does or doesn't mean, if you go to Israel you will find a culture and a people far closer to American values than anywhere else in the region.
Living in the UK, I think AR for walking apps would be neat. Label all the routes, the interesting ruins, old settlements etc. Looking out to sea for wrecks, sea life, label ships and aircraft.

Then put pokemon GO into the mix and it'd be really fun.
Been using AndOTP for months and i love that it supports android's keystore and device credentials for authentication. I had switched to it from Authy, which was quite heavy.

Aegis' design looks a lot less dense than AndOTP on the screenshots, though it seems to be widely recommended. I'll have to check what that's all about
That's the shopping engine, which was successful, but only a small subset of what a TPF reservation system does...albeit one of the more complex pieces.

ITA did build the full thing, but only Cape Air used it. The "full thing" being shopping, schedules, inventory, booking, cancel, change, check-in, etc.
What OS typically run on these mainframes?
Is an extreme solution but definitely would work and valuable because can suggest a partial solution to reduce risk levels. Put a pool of water into a building dome in the middle of sahara and play and experiment with them all that you want. Land is cheap and your critters will remain in the area and can't go away. But in Brazil... come on... do it in some desert at least.
I think "cannot" is a bit too strong a claim. The brain literally invents faces when it interprets the signals from our eyes. Are you saying that it can't make up signals that don't exist? I don't see any reason to assume that it couldn't.

I think it is reasonable to expect that the brain will dream up faces based on what it has seen before, but it's not like you've never seen anything other than faces.
So this is pretty cool, as a GT alum. Caveats are:

- The article contrasts the price of iron and cobalt. It’s true, but fluoride is more expensive than iron. Still cheaper than cobalt, though!

- This is a very new chemistry, which means a lot of scale-up work will have to be done before it becomes commercial. Other technologies have stalled at this phase, like nanostructured Si anodes and S cathodes. In particular, polymer electrolytes can be easy to manufacture or not.

- Li-ion batteries typically perform better at higher temperatures. The tests in this article were performed at 50 C, which may not translate to practical performance in an environment which is often below 0 C. Also, 300 isn’t really that many cycles.
At the engineering departments of most large tech companies including Microsoft, people at the same pay grade are supposed to be making about the same amount of money. The idea is that if you deserve a raise, you deserve a promotion too. So your job title and your salary aren’t like two different things.

Differences arise for many reasons. The most common in my experience is people who negotiate a higher starting salary. You don’t want to just give them more money forever so every year they get their salary tweaked back a bit toward the average for their level. There are also some bonuses that operate outside the normal system.
z/OS
Are they allowed to host a MongoDB for you? Isn't there something in the license about that not being allowed?
attend one of several major Irish universities free of charge

Those days are long gone thanks to the neo-liberals.

Impressed by this guy's accomplishments. His parents and environment are doing something right.
I don’t want corporations controlling the reserve. I want democratic controls.
> narrative (not in the bad sense)

What is the "bad sense"?

Surely personal photo collections also have a narrative, albeit one focused on the life of the photographer?