skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do you think that re-writeability matters? People who write code that is difficult to maintain should make more money by virtue of being harder to eliminate. I don't think effective programmers document everything either, but maybe this is an unpopular opinion.

What sets really productive people apart in my experience is architecture and domain vision. This is certainly the lesson in the Viaweb example. Without good architecture innovation consists of "feature creep". You've got a good thing when you find yourself with changes that simplify a code base or system while increasing its power.

I suspect this is why people who develop their own tools are often seen by others are great programmers, and why Eric Raymond's definition of a hacker is someone who builds their own tools. I'm a worse programmer than a lot of people, but am orders upon orders of magnitude faster than anyone else in my niche domain by virtue of knowing how to do things and leverage existing assets. I assume really good programmers are leveraging their expertise in other areas too.

If this is true, I'd argue that what keeps the good people from earning higher multiples is that architecture and vision don't matter in a lot of cases. Companies that innovate less have less need for development characterized by rapid innovation. Systems get developed by spec and implemented by indifferent teams. You budget for the features you want, not the flexibility you need. Innovation matters more to smaller companies, but even there non-technical individuals rarely see the architecture through the interface. Flexibility becomes conspicuous mostly by its absence, as development gets "over budget and behind schedule everywhere".
Also, Shift+Command+G in Finder is priceless.
I said same thing with different flavors. Literally, they are both represented by the same data structure in the kernel. The salient point of the discussion - cost of forking a process versus cost of spawning a thread - is the same. They require different styles of programming, but I was responding to your point on cost.

If you ever need to reason about scheduling in the Linux kernel, then you need to understand this concept. In the eyes of the scheduler, they're all the same.
"It's an interesting area of study, precisely because there are so many unknowns, sarcasm or not."

Actually, that's why I've become a AGW skeptic.

Remember, the AGW religion is not that "mankind has an effect on climate". Chaos theory guarantees that everything has an effect on climate. The AGW hysteria is that mankind's contribution dominates everything else and that we're looking at massive (2C+) warming on a relatively short timescale.

Admitting that mankind's signal can be masked by natural variations already means that mankind's signal, rather than dominating, is merely one of many other signals that have an effect, and that already logically means two things: It caps the effect our signal can be having, and it means that thanks to the fact that there are "so many unknowns", it means that the hypothesis that we're hardly having any effect at all remains at a significant probability of being true.

Even admitting that our signal can be masked takes out the worst-case hysteria. "Mankind has less effect on the climate than natural vulcanism by an order of magnitude" hardly says "spend trillions of dollars and break your economies to prevent that effect" to me.

"Watts up with That" earlier this year posted the predictions made by the IPCC from a few years ago, and showed that we're on the verge of falling off the bottom of their confidence interval this year, and if next year is even flat (let alone cooler) we will. If we do fall off the bottom next year, that doesn't mean that "natural variations are masking the global warming signal". It means "You guys didn't predict these variations, therefore your models are just plain wrong, and therefore your models may not be referenced for the purposes of extracting a putative 'global warming signal'."

Wrong models = wrong science. It does not equal "science that's still right if you just look hard enough". If climate scientists ten years ago couldn't predict a cooling event, then they are in absolutely no position to be predicting 100 years in advance, no matter how much they babble on. That's not just common sense, it's science too, no matter how many words they throw at you.

Truthfully, judging science from the outside isn't that hard if you stick to "Did your predictions come true?" "Predictions are hard!" isn't a defense when your predictions fail; they still failed.

Keep an eye out over the next couple of years. If they stay cold or get colder, write AGW off until they radically, radically improve their science. The uncertainty will simply be too low to worry about when we have plenty of real problems (like the Pacific dead zone or overfishing or...) to worry about. If AGW is false, it is actively harming the environment with opportunity cost.
There is a Rockstar Programmer Union already. It basically consists of the programmers who network, are excited about their craft, and start or join companies that do innovative things with software. Wages for programmers in that group are significantly higher than for those who just join any old software development group that they find through Monster.com, and then never talk to anyone outside the company.

I met someone at a fencing club that was a programmer for a health care software company. He was my age, graduated a year earlier, and his salary was half what mine was (we were both on our first jobs out of college). I didn't know programmer salaries could go so low, for college grads. And his skillset was completely ghettoized - the company used a proprietary programming language and involved lots of domain specific knowledge. I suspect the difference was that I got my job through a friend of a friend that I'd met on the C2 Wiki, while he took the first available job he could find upon graduation, probably through Craigslist or Monster.
i wish somebody would create an exchange where buyers and sellers of stock could synthetically place bets on these companies.

i'd love to shortsell facebook at its latest official valuation.
Xbox games by Xbox users: Not quite gaming's YouTube, but not bad
"Maybe things will be different a year from now, if the economy continues to get worse, but so far there is zero slackening of interest among potential founders."

(http://paulgraham.com/divergence.html)
I like the headline, and it did go live. I have to say I'm surprised - maybe he didn't read it, or maybe it won't stay. I'll check on it after the weekend.
Measuring developer quality is indeed a hard problem, but I predict it will be solved before too long. Good programmers are a massively undervalued resource. A company that could effectively measure developer value would be able to pay strong developers more while paying weaker developers less. This would allow them get much more value from their salary costs and would give them a huge advantage over the competition. I think a lot of people realize this, so it's only a matter of time before we start seeing solutions.
Balls and brains -- Smart men have better sperm
Sounds a bit like all the VB Classic guys moaning about VB.NET. I joined in a bit myself (mind .NET 1.0 was pretty bad) but now quite happily work in C#, VB.NET and VB6 - whatever makes the customer happy.

Many thousands of VB programmers (hundreds of thousands?) bridged the gap and a great many work in both versions just like me. It just is not a problem.
There's another explanation for the 40% rise in applications received by YCombinator. Much of YCombinator's seed-stage competition is moving up-market. All the VCs we've talked to on the east coast now target post-revenue companies, not seed-stage start-ups. If there are fewer VCs looking at early investments, you'd expect YCombinator's applications to go up.
Should Amazon EC2 follow Moore’s Law?
No, the main focus is on whatever the startup is building. Toward the end of each YC cycle we switch to talking about how to pitch to investors. But even there the way to be convincing is to be working on something genuinely great, and just tell the truth about it.
The article is interesting, but I can't help but think that large part of the guy's problem is that he's not using Unix.
Innuendo
> In my experience it's completely possible to spend 6 months writing version 1, and then completely rewrite it in a week.

I'll bet Netscape wished you worked for them in 1997.
Programmers have no power over the people who set pay rates while CEOs have a great deal of power.
Yup, I think that around about covers it. I would have phrased it a little differently though. Basically, in just about any endeavour, you only get the really big reward if you sell your product directly to the people that use your product. So, music artists sell directly to the people that listen to the music (well, they earn a percentage share of direct sales). Startup founders also sell their products directly to the end user.

But as soon as you become an employee, earning a salary, you aren't selling directly to the end user, you are selling your skills to your company, which then produces a product that is used by the end user. Or worse still, you are selling your skills to a company that produces a tool that is sold to another company that is finally used to do something deemed useful by the end user. The longer that chain is, the less likely you are to get paid what you are worth if you are above average. Why? Because the entity that is buying your product doesn't actually care about the product, so if you have made it three times better than it would have been without you, don't care - just as long as it meets the minimum specification necessary to be able to sell it to the next person in the chain. On the other hand, if you are selling directly to the end user, they certainly appreciate the product that goes above and beyond minimum spec - insert Apple/Ferrari story here...

I can think of only one special case exception to this rule, and that is sports stars - and they are a special case because they are the only market where you actually have to beat the competition to be considered as performing. That means that there is a massive advantage in having someone on your team's payroll that is just slightly better than the other guy - you only have to be slightly better to win, and winner takes all.
Apple allows an iPhone game about selling drugs, but doesn't like its name
Why the Moon?
Partly. "High-Res" and "Artists Ship" were both things I started during the summer and didn't have time to work on again till after interviews. This last one I wrote a month ago and then had to sit on because it was supposed to appear in a print report.

I actually forgot about "Artists Ship." Then a few days ago I was talking to Paul Buchheit and he mentioned how great it was to be able to release code instantly at Friendfeed, compared to the delays he had at GMail. As we talked about the question I had this weird sense of deja vu, so I went home and looked around my hard drive, and sure enough there was this nearly finished essay. The write date was Aug 11, so I must have started it just before Demo Day and then forgotten it during the ensuing bustle.
If you believe Al Gore, for $90MM you can build a giant New Mexico wind/solar farm that would supply enough electricity to power the entire US. (It's been a while since I saw the presentation so some details might be wrong but I am at least in the ballpark, especially regarding the price tag). Seems like 10 VC firms could easily get that sort of money together.
Ask PG: Increase in growth rate of YC applicants
In your latest essay you mention that

"We take applications for funding every 6 months. Applications for the current funding cycle closed on October 17, well after the markets tanked, and even so we got a record number, up 40% from the same cycle a year before."

to indicate that enthusiasm for starting new startups has not dried up. I think the absolute number will not tell us the true picture about new startups. The more interesting number might be the difference in the application growth rates. Did the number of applicants grow more between Winter 06 and Winter 07 or between Winter 07 and Winter 08.

Thanks
Great reply.

I don't know if you've played around with complex Cellular Automata models, like those used in climate modeling, but the default behavior most of the time is the runaway condition. I can't help but wonder if some really smart people aren't playing games with CA where they don't understand the nature of the beast they are working with. That would explain why every model predicts wildly increasing temps. It's an artifact of the modeling technique.
Good point. When code is too hard to understand, open source is an illusion.
Drupal: Making Life Easier with Installation Profiles
I really, really like this. I organize a fair number of small events with friends, and have been thinking for a while that I'd throw something like this together to make it easier to manage RSVPs while still enabling the actual invite to go out over real email. I agree with what's been said that it's a _little_ too simple, but not much. Event name would be nice for a descriptive url, etc, maybe host name. Keep cracking, I'm a user.
How Alex Payne Uses TextMate
I thought he was being quite unfair towards systems today - I certainly don't think a Rails app is any harder to get up and running than a VB6 app. The only downside is that making forms/reports isn't as simple - but honestly, is learning html really so hard?

He does have a point about the size of frameworks - I decided about 6 months back that I wanted to get onto the iPhone bandwagon, so I decided to write a Mac app to get my feet wet - I could use the RubyCocoa envrionment to continue using Ruby, whilst learning the Cocoa API. Like Windows, MacOSX has a huge API, and each time you want to do a different task - networking, multilanguage support, undo/redo, working with bitmaps, scrolling, file support, etc etc etc, you have to stop programming, and look it all up. Sometimes you may even be sucked into having to read a 300 page document, although that is thankfully quite rare once you are no longer a beginner on the system. But then, each time that I do one of these things, I'm always thankful for the framework's existance, because I can't help but be aware of the fact that it is saving me probably months of work to create my own system.

Maybe his problem is that he is underestimating the size of the problems that the different systems are solving under the hood. Like, he talks about VB6 apps, from memory those don't scale so well if you have more than a handful of users using the app at the same time (I may be wrong about this, it's just what I seem to remember from that time - I wasn't actively working on those types of app at the time). Much of the complexity of today's systems is designed to permit you to handle scaling to hundreds/thousands/millions of users, with correspondingly huge amounts of data being handled.
Does anyone have suggestions for a good place to host if you don't feel like doing it yourself?
Pyquery 0.2 : jQuery for Python
He even calls it "rare"... So I didn't get the ego angle. He's probably understating it if anything.
True. But the name Linus Torvalds helps the article pass through our "crap-filter". We invest more effort in looking for value because we have a reasonable assurance that value is there.
This reasoning doesn't explain why sports stars make so much money.
Many people use IQ when in fact they just mean I(ntelligence.)

(reminder)
IQ = 100 * mental age / chronological age
According to the Zen of Python (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/), and the whole idea upon which python is created:
"There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."

That right there sums up the whole point of Python 3, necessary evil (reverse incompatibility) for future good.
It wouldn't be nice to the startups to do that, because it would send an alarming signal to the series A investors that would drive down the valuation and maybe even prevent the round from closing.
"I have an ego the size of a small planet..."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds
Can you tell what kind of company commissioned or requested this essay? I'd speculate it was one of the top VC firms...
Thanks. This means a lot to me. I wrote this app over a month ago and I was too embarrassed to submit it to HN.

If you like simple apps, please checkout my http://smacklet.com/ too :-)
It's great. But please add more description about how users can use it and screenshots of how it will look to receivers. Then this will be a great tool.
I agree with almost everything in the article.

However if you're stuck in large organization that has been doing waterfall, almost any change is good news.

And you bet A LOT of very respected software companies, not IT departments of other companies, but actual pure software companies are stuck in waterfall.

So then this pseudo religious movement comes along with Scrum and stand up meetings and story points and blah blah blah, but along with the blah also comes test driven development, and iterative development.

Yes daily standups are a lot easier to adopt then TDD, but that's why the pseudo religious thing is useful.

It helps you drink ALL the kool-aid.

But game design on the other hand I'm not so sure about, how long does a game technology like a 3D engine last?
Is it long enough to justify 100% test coverage?
As much as I love TDD, I am not so sure about it in game dev.
Understanding Googles Strategy - PPT
VB6 didn't have to scale, you ran one instance of your app per user, and worried about scalability on the back end (i.e. the database). People talk about Rails scaling, that's the difference, notions of scalability have been shifted a tier up.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. Srsly.
Saying that Mac OS X is basically FreeBSD is inaccurate and I wish that people would stop repeating it. Darwin is built around XNU, a hybrid kernel that's based on Mach, FreeBSD, and 4.3/4.4BSD code. It's true that a lot of code came from BSD, but Mac OS X is not FreeBSD.

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch.html
Best PG essay this year.
Wages are negotiable. You don't like your pay rate? Work somewhere else.

Ditto for CEOs.
This just sounds like different market segments. I'm in the class that would hate Evite, but I bet their segment is bigger.
Thanks. I'll do that tonight.
The article implies that in spite of poor performance reviews, the university did not take action until the photo containing criticism directed at the author of those reviews was discovered.

Assuming for a moment that this is the case, that should be troubling, in that it suggests a student with equally poor performance who was more vigilant about concealing their criticism or extracurricular activities would be given the green light. This would explain much about what is wrong with public education, and the great rewards reaped by the diligently dishonest, but it can hardly be called a positive thing.

That's why, even if this particular story is light on details that might clarify its importance, the subject itself is worth keeping an eye on. To ignore it may allow employers, educational institutions, and the government to move further into invasive and moralistic roles in our lives.
Why does this require a solution though? Why is it a problem? If as the manager you're focused on productivity and not time spent, there's nothing wrong with him working 1/5th the time so long as his productivity rivals his colleagues. Maybe he doesn't want to work 5 days a week? Maybe his priorities aren't 40 hour work weeks. If you are unable to replace him with someone who'll perform better, then why make it in an issue?

And why should his colleagues be any more jealous of him then they are of the CEO who makes tons more, or anyone else who gets paid more or works less for that matter?

There are 2 problems:
1) Having a clear way to measure productivity.
2) Stodgy ideas most manager's have about time spent, instead of production.
Not sure why there's so much complaining going on here. This is brilliant. You're Doing It Right.

Yes, it's too simple. But you're erring on the right side of complexity. Well done. Be careful to not lose that vision as you iterate on this idea.

Some ideas for features:

1. Let me specify the time/date/location/description of the event when I create it. Then let users view a map, download an ics, add it to their yahoo/google calendar, etc.

2. It's clean and simple, but it kind of looks like ass. Get a designer to give it some visual love.

3. Let me enter a list of email addresses, and email them. Or let me enter a list of phone numbers, and you send SMSes.

4. Post to twitter/facebook/etc. It would be cool to be able to broadcast an event to all my friends. But if you're going to let it post to twitter, you'll need to make those urls much shorter.
Quality difference with this is astounding, though I wonder how much more this is going to cost them for bandwidth.
Why can't I just send an email to all, why creating a link, copy and paste in email then send? seems like a lot of work here.
I was referring to "the fate of the galaxy may depend on it."
Which means if you dedicate yourself to starting two businesses you have a 57% chance of succeeding at least once.
How Supersizing Seduces
I'd watch that. Like an Iron Chef show, but with programmers. Iron Programmer.
Today's secret ingredient is... REGULAR EXPRESSIONS! Go!
Nerdery
Don't get your hopes up too much -- PG has said in the past that he doesn't like to publish numbers because it leads to comparisons against YC clones.
The purpose is to not get a bunch of replies back from your friends that you have to read through and interpret each as 'yes' and 'no' and keep count.
Excellent assessment, and a definite possibility - though hardly foregone at this point.

I especially enjoyed the comparison between startups and dogs.
That seems like a really fun idea for a book. After reading a great deal about BP, it seems to fit your idea perfectly. Good luck with the book!
I am not looking for exact numbers. An indication of the change in growth rates even whether the growth rate increased or decreased would be enough
"Which means the ambitious can now do arbitrage on them. It will be very valuable to understand precisely which ideas to keep and which can now be discarded."

Do you mean "arbitrage" or do you mean "triage"?
Because of Supply and Demand.
Sorry, I don't understand what this is. There's no ability to add info to the invite page (like event info) so what are you inviting your friends to?
What is Sexting?
A sad example of technology being used pervertedly.