skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Second, if someone in a big company generates 250 LoC/day reliably over years, it doesn't always mean that person is a great programmer; it could mean that, or it could mean that he's always taking the fun, "green field" projects and passing the legacy maintenance (on which 10 LoC/day is a typical clip) to others.

This is what I call the Dirty Little Secret of Corporate IT shops: The mediocre programmers spin a story and slag off others to get the jobs developing new systems or rewrites in new technology to pad their CV; the programmers with aptitude end up in maintenance roles digging deep through the said code to fix all the bugs afterwards and make that software usable, while the mediocre programmers who wrote it are already in their next jobs doing it again.
This is sort of the argument "Well yeah, women would be perfectly welcome around here, as long as they act and respond just like men!"
I don't think "3 britneyxxx spears" was misspelled! ;)
great post joseph, nice to get some perspective from the others side on the huge MVP trend.
TERMINAL TO TERMINAL AUTO TRANSPORT
I have never heard of this event until now. I would love to attend something like this. How/where was this event marketed?

Also, $99 sounds like a great price entry point. Defcon started out on the cheap, and a few years later spawned BlackHat. Sounds like a good model to follow.
Waste space much?
Price killed it for me too.

I felt like it was a no-brainer to go to the 1-day $99 DevDays in SF. When I saw the price and duration of this year's event I didn't event want to ask.
It isn't racist. China has poor copyright protection. Chinese don't give a shit because they don't have to.
If it were me, needing to be at every location would have been a major factor contributing to this change.

Part of Joel's shtick for DevDays was that he showed how proper project management and source control (via FogBugz and Kiln) could really help a small team. Kiln was brand-new at the time, and was a big part of the demo, so I thankfully had an excuse to do the European DevDays stops to answer questions and do demos.

And it...well, it starts awesome, if you do it right: you get to see a bunch of stuff you've never seen before, you get to fly first-class if you're lucky, and you meet a bunch of brilliant people. And I think Joel really likes speaking; if you feel comfortable talking in front of a crowd, it's awesome to see all those people wanting to hear what you have to say. So in that sense, doing a pile of small DevDays is absolutely wonderful, in my opinion.

But then there's dealing with the fact that almost no venue was properly set up properly. That supplies we badly needed didn't ever quite manage to get where they needed to be in a timely manner (or, in the case of Europe, clear customs at all). That a major prop we had was going to have to be driven around London in a truck by yours truly. That we had to have SSDs FedEx'd at tremendous cost because the laptops couldn't comfortably run VMware properly, and that sometimes, it didn't really matter anyway, because something would go wrong with the projector, and you'd end up being forced to use large televisions instead. Or a speaker would cancel and be replaced at the last second by someone else, or the WiFi would just not be there even though it was absolutely required for someone's demo, or half a dozen other things. And that's just the stuff that goes wrong at the time; you're leaving out all the stuff that had to be planned beforehand.

This wore on me, and I only had just a few stops. And Joel (and I) did it two years in a row: DevDays first, and the Fog Creek World Tour second. I have to imagine it wore on him, and I think that might go a long way toward explaining why he tried to consolidate the conferences.

But Joel does love travel, and I think DevDays were absolutely wonderful conferences, so that may have absolutely nothing to do with it. I think it may just be as simple as what he wrote in the post: that they tried to make it bigger and more conference-like...which in turn, made it Not Really DevDays, at which point it was competing with things like OSCON and Open Source Bridge. That's a tougher market.
Makes sense - you could also always add it as a feature, or allow for graceful degradation to the static thumbnail on the event certain feature checks fail or loading/decompression takes too long.

On a different topic; I saw you speak at General Assembly last month and didn't have a chance to thank you then. The topic (Continuous Deployment) was pretty interesting and it was nice to see how you guys are implementing that at canv.as.
This is slick, but be warned that you do pay a performance penalty for it last I checked. So keep your main work on the totally virtualized filesystem and just use /vagrant for stuff you need to share.
Clenbuterol- the wonderful drug
Clenbuterol is the name on everybody’s lips, these days. It got popular, when it was found in use by many public figures, model and actors, for its effect on the body. It reduces weight and works on musculature.
Consumers 'losing battle' against phone salesmen
Upvoted because I'm jealous of your joke/truth-y-statement and I'm man enough to say it.
Actually, I find using VMWare Fusion to be a great way to use all the good dev tools available on the Mac -- SourceTree git client, CSSEdit, BBEdit, etc -- while actually developing on the same Linux environment you'll use in production.

The key is to build and install the latest version of Netatalk on the Linux VM, and then mount its filesystem on the Mac via AFP. Netatalk has a config option (-admingroup) that lets members of an arbitrary group mount a volume with root privileges, which is very handy for development.

(Netatalk has plenty of bugs[1], but works well enough for development.)

I've tried to get this same setup with CIFS (Samba), as well as sshfs. However, apps like TextMate or CSSEdit freak out with permission errors (even if you set up ACLs or something so that you really have write permission, the Mac apps don't believe you do).

Netatalk is the only magic sauce I have found that lets you mount a Linux server's disks as volumes that your Mac sees as simple writable volumes, but where you actually have root privs as far as the Linux box is concerned.

Not something I'd use on a real server, but great for development.

--
[1]: the most insanely annoying one being that it currently can't serve the root volume; you have to configure it to make /etc, /var, etc available as separate shares
> We've provided enough information to entice the targeted audience into putting their email address.

It's probably not going to work like that. Customers won't sign up until you have deals. Merchants won't come to you until you have customers. You'll have to start by hustling together some good launch deals, and your pitch will probably need to include the line "we'll buy you traffic if you put a deal on our site". Until you launch (with real, awesome deals) your launch page is only there to avoid the total legitimacy fail of a potential merchant typing in your url and getting... nothing at all. Don't bother with adwords.

Hope that helps!
Deals on fleshlights for all!
in a computer lab between pepper canyon and warren college at UCSD in 1991 it was written to type 'man man' and maybe even 'apropos' was written up there on a chalk board. I taught myself unix from the manual. A few years later, I learned perl starting with 'perldoc perldoc'.
The problem of "overpriced" conferences is that conferences are really expensive to put on. Everything from from the location to the food costs a lot, and every place has it's particular rules about what you are allowed to bring in versus what they force you to use. And then you have to pay speakers...

We are just putting the finishing touches on ProductCamp Utah, and with no profit and no paid speakers, it is still extremely expensive.
It's for phones. They scroll well vertically and fingers are fat.
Jennifer Blom Spring/Summer 2012, Stockholm
1)First few (say 1k or as many one wants) will be done by manually tagging the tweets as +ve, -ve or neutral, through a web or command line interface.

2)Then, I will use Google Prediction API.

3)Based on this data we can get a graph depicting the rise and fall of overall sentiment for a particular stock over a period of time.
I've written stuff in shell over many years (I don't claim to be an expert, just average) but its not always smooth esp when I upgrade or change OS's. Most shell programs will make calls to other commands. These commands do not have standard arguments across unixes. Take the OSX (BSD) date and linux's date. On one machine I may have installed coreutils with default_names, on another without.

Sometimes, this forces us to make quick trips into perl or awk (to get yesterday or tomorrow). However, shell scripting has certainly made me more productive over the years. For most of my initial programming life (90's), I've generated boilerplate code using shell (often with awk).
OP is right. I am worked at yahoo till recently and I am an Indian and I don't think people in Bangalore or Beijing are bad. During my career in India and in US I met quite a few good engineers . In early days of Yahoo! India the quality of Indian engineers are pretty good. Off late they are just hiring whoever send in a resume. I know people who are interviewing these candidates even when they say no the manager is hiring because they have fill up the req. Its really sad state you hire these so called "programmers" who can't understand basic things and its frustrating deal with and explain every small details and the work that comes out is completely different from what you wanted and than some more delay.
No one complaining about American or Indian engineering quality I seen bad engineers on both sides. Its about getting quality engineer. If you remove pretty good engineers or team here and try to hire below average engineers from India only because they cost less than its really fucked up you are not really saving up anything in this only to realize your product is delayed for an year and it turned to piece of crap.
Don't be so defensive about these comparisons not everybody in India are great programmers nor they are fools
There's google groups posts about this dating from 24 months ago.

Also, python.org/downloads was also blocked (but not the rest of python.org). If you go to python.org now, there's a page labeled "Downloads" in Chinese for Chinese downloads which is not blocked. I guess it's easier to create a mirror than lobby to get a page removed from the banned list. It's weird though.

I think there was some Chinese version of android.com, but I don't know how close to the original it was.
The shell's name is derived from the fact that it was a wrapper around the kernel.
Database Of U.S. Internet Pirates Will Be Decentralized
See this: http://blog.mudynamics.com/2011/09/05/help-couchdb-break-the... for various server tuning (not really CouchDB-specific). You can change the net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range to "1024 65535" to increase this range.
Everyone has an opinion of what Yahoo should do, the union of which is the entire spectrum of possibilities. Perhaps this is even the cause of the downfall of Yahoo, as its vision seems to be to do most everything others have already done, but poorly. It takes a true visionary to see through the vast majority of these so-called potentials, say no to short-sighted revenue temptations, and make painful decisions. You simply can't crowd-source a Steve Jobs.
I don't think it is hate as such, it's more on the management of the outsourcing than their ability. As is said if there isn't a good chain of communication between them and the employees back in the states things that used to be quick can take far longer.

There are also cultural differences that need to be thought about before sending across a stack of work for them to do. Also you can imagine if the employees in the US working in the same offices as managers had a hard time getting things done the outsourced employees would have an almost impossible time getting approval to change things.
I'm not sure about tcsh, but csh still has (at least most) of these issues. The quoting is extremely braindead, to a degree barely suggested in that article.
There doesn't seem to be much discussion of the core of Pollak's argument.

Specifically, Pollak appears to be arguing that a key question in language adoption is the historical or recent win rate for projects. (Ratio of Scala projects that succeeded divided by total Scala projects.)

Pollak wants the average doofus Java developer ("COTM" as he terms them) not to use Scala so that Scala's win rate stays high, even if Scala's absolute number of wins remains low.

But having a multitude of doofus developers leads precisely to things that Scala kind of lacks right now, like quality IDE support, idiomatic libraries for every possible use case, and so on. Without the hoi polloi, why spend a massive number of man years developing IDE support that can efficiently parse incorrect source code in the language as correctly as possible? Why write idiomatic payment processor code?

Similarly, focusing on only the best developers has arguably led languages like Haskell and Lisp to be great languages for learning language constructs and new ways to think, but poor day-to-day languages. (Though I do recognize that Clojure is gaining ground, etc.)

In short, is Pollak right? Is win rate so critical to adoption of a new language that Scala should kick out the COTM programmers? Or is he proposing imposing an exclusiveness that will only slow the development of tools and libraries necessary to open up the language to a larger and larger community?
Stock is reportedly up ~6% on the news. Too bad the board couldn't have figured this out months ago. All she did was sell search to Microsoft. More or less the same as here modus operandi at Autodesk. At least that MS sellout gave ProEngineer a nice batch of customers. Her search sale helped nobody but did reduce the competition for Google's search monopoly.

IMO any Yahoo CEO who can't fix their flagship webmail within a year should be shown the door. Of course fixing webmail means fixing middle management, and that's a rather more difficult problem.
Ask HN: Kindle Dev Kit -  who do they choose as their devs?
I signed up a while ago, received a standard message:

We have received your request to participate in the KDK beta program. Space is limited. We are evaluating your request and will respond to you soon.Thank you for your interest in the KDK beta program.

And - not a word, not a peep out of them ... I signed up in May. Wonder how other folks got to work with their KDK, and how it's going to work once their tablet is out? :)
Oddly enough there is another way to go. Cheap and a different city. The Lindy Hop community set up a web site to have exchanges back before 2000.

http://lindyexchange.com/

It caught on and has been going ever since.

Every weekend of every month there is a city throwing an exchange. You can go and stay on the cheap as people volunteer to host, and there is always incredible dancing at exchanges.

It's closer to vacation/meetup. Of course ... Swing dancing is inherently a party.
Ah ha! Yes, I knew it must have been a residual memory and not my own idea.
Solaris is more BSD based than AT&T-UNIX based; csh is the historic choice for BSD, and most BSD-descendants honor this, as it is what BSD users expect.

For example, it is the default user shell on FreeBSD. But the system shell is a Bourne-like shell (ash, I believe?). So for serious usage, even the modern BSDs defer to a Bourne shell.
Affiliate Resurrection - Is it worth it?
When I forced myself to learn touch-typing with a qwerty keyboard i used gtypist. I found it to be sufficient for its purpose.

The only gripe i had with it was that it required typing two spaces after a period. I found this just plain weird, so I fixed it in the tutorial files.

I guess using a blank keyboard also helped quite a bit..
Odd, I could view the listing no problem. I'm not signed up with AirBnB at all.
Domain names : Most paid Ever
Youtube & Video Review TCL L32HDF11TA
Cheatsheet of forms.Form for django
I flubbed a job interview when asked how I'd implement a factorial. Of course I did the well-known recursive version, but then they asked how I could do it without recursion, and I blanked. I think they wanted me to talk about memoizing and the Y-combinator, but...I don't know, maybe they'd have settled for a naive for-loop.
Sorry that's my fault :( We deployed and tweeted about our 1st version an hour before the code freeze and some guy came on and trolled the server by changing instruments and effectively froze all the connected clients. After seeing that, I whipped up a rate limiter in the final minutes that disconnects people based on a crude warm up/cool down system, but set the limit a bit too strict.
Could this be the consequence of fewer updates to Joel on Software? Less pull with the community?
Defcon: single location, labor of love (staffed by volunteers), uncompensated speakers.

Black Hat: 4 locations?, 4-figure attendance fee, significant speaker compensation, significant full-time paid staff.

It took several years of Defcon before Jeff could start Black Hat and go full time to build it.
AirBnB, can you post how you did the Conan listing? I'm interested in how you executed this.
From a Product Management standpoint, this is good advice.

But what do you do when you're a software developer who sees these problems but have your hands tied by management?
HYP
HYP Sportswear was founded in 1991. Opening with the signature HYP spiral, there originators came up with a group of hats based on well-liked sayings and icons. From there HYP apparel branched out into other categories and the company now boasts more than a few divisions that design, manufacture and sells enormous products in an assortment of apparel and fashion accessory categories.
ClojureScript and Node.js
Same here. I hate Text Shadow. I basically go into developer tools and turn off the CSS for it when I'm reading anything long with text shadow. Sub pixel antialiasing works great on everything but certain text on websites.
What you learned is still true.

Most of the outright bugs in the article you reference have been fixed.

But the design problems are still there in both csh and tcsh.

In particular, the problems with manipulating file descriptors to separate stdout from stderr are still there, the signal catching is not as clean as sh/bash, and csh/tcsh quoting is a mess compared to sh/bash. I know of no good reason to prefer csh/tcsh.
Like Miguel de Icaza would ever recommend a KDE application. ;)
HP Releases The Updated DM1 Ultraportable Laptop
Covariance I was good with, but contravariance didn't click until I read that SO post. Thank you.
That is the opposite of true. csh does indeed have a more "programmery" syntax (it was designed to have a more C-like syntax), but for actual programming it is far less useful for actual scripting due to inconsistencies in the syntax, braindead quoting, half-assed IO redirection, and a number of other issues. There's a "Csh Programming Considered Harmful" article that jleader already linked to.

Csh may feel more programmery, but if you do actual programming use a Bourne shell (or Plan 9's rc).
Dossier on EU sound recording copyright extension
So am I supposed to treat them the same, or am I supposed to change my behavior?
I've had the not-uncommon US developer's experience of working with useless bottom-feeding con artist outsourcers, the kind who throw out deliverables and then drag their heels explaining why there are still syntax errors in code which had allegedly been tested. I've also had the privilege of working with some really sharp people in Hyderabad—the difference is that we had to open an office there and hire full-time to find them. Nobody good wants to be a code monkey implementing somebody else's finished design by rote, and they have alternatives, so outsourcing is going to continue causing trainwrecks as long as western management insists on doing design and project management separately and only offers the least interesting (yet not idiot-proof) work.
If what you are measuring doesn't give you data you can really make decisions with, it is worse than no data. You'll be tempted to make a decision because you have that data.

BTW, this is one of my startup rules: measure what's important. Decide what's important by how it would affect your decision-making.
I've always seen Yahoo as a "me too" company - the Carl's Jr of the online titans. If they've ever been the best at something they've never stayed there for long. The decline began when they decided search wasn't their core business and portals were the way to go. Who would want to work there? Even Microsoft are more innovative these days.

Having said all that, thanks for buying Viaweb off PG guys. At least some Yahoo cash went to good use...
Hardware Problems - Creating a Mobile Backup
There are problems, Yes I agree. Both cultural and communication problems.

But on a grand scheme of things when you interact with each other for something like 2-3 years. Those differences are negligible. When I started out, I faced similar problems. But I became friends with a lot of Americans, after our daily interactions.

You do get to hear about projects that fail. But they are small in number. There are so many successful projects here that running for more 5 years and some time even decades. To blanket say that you are never going to get good quality from there, is just not right.

This is a touchy issue, I understand as people are loosing jobs. I would be equally emotional if I lost my job. But self reflection is also important at the same time.
Ask HN:How hard are Hackathons? 
My friends and I were thinking about going to a hackathon that a university hosts. We don't know if we should waste our time, and money to travel down there. Our skills are average to above average, and seeing that this is at a ivy league university I don't know if we can hold our own. Just in general how hard are hackathons?
iPhone users tend to be heavy data users. So what Gruber implies is that the relative lower volume of data usage on Android phones means the phone company earns less on a per unit basis.
I always listen to new ideas - even if I think the idea sucks initially, it's great to get my own creative juices flowing.
Real Estate agents in Canada
Not even. To date, while I've learned about and understand contravariance and covariance, I haven't really needed to distinguish between the two in code I've written. I also haven't really needed to distinguish between them in code I'm writing.

The thing about type signatures is that if they're set up properly, you rarely have to think about them. Only when your assumption and the reality of a type system disagree do you have to look up why that's happening. And then you can look up covariance and contravariance is necessary.

But then, that's just the learning approach that works for me. Call it `Just In Time learning or `Agile learning'. `Learn learning', even...
Use Google Docs to Get Continuous User Feedback
Exactly. It's actually great that DevDays was able to charge only $99 AND compensate speakers and workers+! It actually means they one-upped Defcon in that regard.

BlackHat-caliber conferences, as you imply, will come over time as Defcon-caliber conferences explode in popularity.

Again, I know next to nothing about DevDays, and I could be totally off the mark. But it seems to me, like others pointed out, Joel tried to do too much too quickly. Jeff would have had a tough time getting BH off the ground after just two years of DC.

+My assumption here is that by stating Defcon was NOT able to do these things, DevDays was. Sorry if I misunderstood that.
Windows Phone Marketplace Statistics - 25K+ apps, diverse criteria