skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm pretty sure this is false. Hackers such as Guido van Rossum or Linus Torvalds or Bill Joy are many orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. Some of the old IBM studies cited in Peopleware show the average programmer writing 3 lines of code a day! PG mentioned that Trevor Blackwell rewrote their entire system in smalltalk in two weeks, which was everything that he and rtm wrote in 6 weeks. That's like an order of magnitude difference.. He and RTM were themselves probably an order of magnitude more productive than their competitors, with fourteen times the number of programmers and a worse product. And since those competitors were actually shipping products, they were probably an order of magnitude more productive than the average programmer working on internal tools at some BigCo, ekeing out 3 lines of buggy, ineffective code per day.
Cases like these make me wonder where Psychology is going to get a new round of groundbreaking case studies. All the major ones were done decades ago when ethical guidelines were far looser.
Thats good number and good amount of time in a day you spend for reading. But how useful those 30+ posts blogs are? I unsubscribed mashable because of the same reason and I don't think I am missing anything.
You can define your market however you like, but as long as you fight over the same customers in the same context, you compete with each other.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with that.
USA as a Restart
Either managers can tell who is better or not. He says both:

It is not that the managers don't know that good developers are 10 times more productive than a bad one. Managers do know; some of them are developers or former developers.

and

It's not that good developers can churn out 10 times as many features as the bad ones. It's rather that good developers write code that have less bugs, more extensible and more maintainable. These are the things that you can't measure by statistics or figures.
I can help you with #1 at least. I maintain DNS for my employer for 128 domains and I use BIND. It is the reference standard for DNS, however I don't think you need to run it yourself. I recommend using DNS Made Easy.com (http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/). Their cost is very low and they provide a web-based interface for creating DNS records that will be hosted on their servers. They have a robust network of server redundancy (both for servers and networks) that you cannot match with a home-based DNS server. I use them for hosting secondary servers for about half of my domains, and the few times that I've needed their tech support, they've been prompt, courteous, and helpful. All in all, they provide excellent value for the modest cost. I have no connection with this company other than being a satisfied customer.
trac is more a source code manager..not really a good customer service tool ;)

I assumed the OP meant support ticketing software
Lampard and Gerrard paid £10,000 a week? They wouldn't get out of bed for that, closer to £150,000.
It's hard to say, because those 30 vary in topic by the day. I should note that some end up being web comics, or straight up photos and things. Others end up being on topics like Emacs (you can always use more emacs tips, right?), Programming Languages, Usability, Security, new sites/utilities, Photography.

I learn a lot of new things, or at least get pointed to things that I might need to know about some day. I guess I sort of try to be a swiss army knife of knowledge. If you ask me a question, I may have a small tool to help answer, but you'll need a workshop if it's extensive (I normally know where the closest one is though).
Looking at the poll on that site I'm obviously pissing against the wind, but if you have a decent web-framework exposing your services standarized using SOAP involves absolutely no extra effort. None.

I can see lots of people disagree and I might even be in the minority here on HN, but I think REST is to SOA what PHP is to the web: Quick to learn, simple to get up and running, but half-assed and non-standardized and thus bound to get messy.
How about FogBugz from Fog Creek software (Joel Spolsky)at http://fogcreek.com/FogBugz/ You can set this up to run on your servers or use the "cloud" version. The bug tracking covers the bases nicely and you can also use it to manage your projects.

There is even a free online trial.
Phishing, l'illecito sguazza nella Rete. Natura penale e civile della truffa.
http://www.userscape.com - Not open source, but might be worth a look.
totally depends on the domain, where it is registered and so forth.

Can your friend not just hand over the username/password with access to the domain?
He has a many domains registered in the same account.
How to execute the deal - change the ownership from him to me.
Sort of. We rely on how many providers we have, but even that has its limits once you have all the big ones (which we do). TicketStumbler is just as useful for one person as it is for 1,000.

You'd be right if you applied your statement to Stubhub or Ebay. We're more of an aggregator than a market place.
He registered it with net4.in
Indeed, we are looking for support ticket software moreover.

We are an online travel agency so for each customer sale there are a fair few steps; ticketing / supplier payment filtering / confirmation notifications plus customer contact issues also.

We therefore requires a ticketing solution so we can attribute different actions and notes to each customer until completion.
Cheers, Ill go check out RT
I notice the same attitude developing among myself becoming a recent founder
With compliments like that, who needs insults?
Even people that think they are good are still usually just playing by intuition, like me. I'd love to play. We should set up a network of startup poker games across the country. Poker is the new incubator.

Given this fundraising environment, it might be a good financing strategy too.
I guess I have also developed this kind of ability (swiss army knife) after couple of years of reading habit. Google reader has changed everything :)
I'm not sure that's a valid measure of productivity. In a commercial setting most of the code is actually pretty straightforward, but it might take a day of meetings to agree with everyone that (for example) this is how interest should be calculated on this particular financial instrument. Been there, done that.

Also 3 lines of APL are a very different beast to 3 (or even 300) lines of COBOL...
> not having to write getter and setter methods seems like a really big deal

I agree. I've not used Objective C but if a language forces you to write the same boilerplate code again and again, it's badly designed.
I had not heard of John Robb. Many thanks for the suggestion.
I guess we'll see how that plays out. One of our competitors has taken $1 million in funding, the other has taken $10.5 million in VC funding.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/fansnap

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/tickex
I don't think so. What I meant was, if everything else is equal, perception plays a significant role.
Although I'd agree with the second part (that PG and RTM were exceptionally more productive than the Joe Schmoe the programmer), I don't think the Trevor Blackwell example is a good one.

I think it's routine for me, and most anyone, to write a first version of a system over a week or two and keep noticing ways the design could be improved. Over time cruft accumulates--and you continue to notice new problems you didn't anticipate when you first designed--and almost always it is much quicker to rewrite a second version than the first.

The 3 lines of code per day metric seems fishy to me, but it seems to be based on systems level projects (lets build a new operating system) rather than making a new PHP photoalbum for Grandma. It would be very interesting to see numbers which broke down LOC/day for different subsets of programming jobs.
More on the Nature of Computer Science
The article seemed a bit weak, since depending on the problem set the choice is either apples and oranges or completely moot. Saying that HTTP + JSON is going to throw your developers for a loop is a bit embarrassing. The "hard" part is always in the data model itself, inside the container, which isn't magically solved by a given transport or serialization approach.

I've been the client to a few SOAP services which were "standard" but which contained object representations implemented by people who probably learned XML while severely inebriated and chose their tags vs. attributes using some Post-Its and a dart board.
I agree. The first write of anything is working things out. Feeling your way, experimenting, designing and iterating.

A "Complete rewrite" sounds hard, and like a big task, but usually it's a simple operation of copying existing functionality.

In my experience it's completely possible to spend 6 months writing version 1, and then completely rewrite it in a week.
I've found that with freelancing you can at least get closer to something resembling an efficient market value much more quickly, you just need to build up a reputation of being awesome. ("This guy is expensive but he's totally worth the money." style referrals)
A life of great importance to science. It wasn't just the idea of specialized memory, it was the idea of a specialized brain.
> if a language forces you to write the same boilerplate code again and again, it's badly designed.

It's not that ObjC was badly designed, it's that it was designed before modern OOP principles were popularized. ObjC 1.0 dates back to the mid-80's, if not sooner, if you count some of the work done with SmallTalk as a predecessor. Most of what people think is part of ObjC is really "convention" from the NeXTStep/Cocoa APIs, not something actually designed in to the language in the first place.
this is a startup focused news site. we're all aiming to be one of the fat-cats one day.
That was a session at BarCamp Atlanta: Startup funding via poker.
> When people are suffering physically from the effects of lack of iodine, isn't it rather Western to consider raised intelligence the most talkworthy improvement!? Iodized water should be used to make people's lives better and reduce their pain - not to increase their intelligence by some token amount

If it was just a "token amount" I'd agree with you. But it isn't. Half a billion people in India suffer from Iodine deficiency (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency#Local_impact )

If half a country's population have reduced intelligence of about 10 IQ points because of this, then obviously that country's economy will suffer. If India had had no iodine deficiency since independence in 1948 it might be as rich as South Korea today -- it would certainly be richer than it is.

People in poor countries have IQ scores (as callibrated using Western norms) of 70 or so. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_race#Worldwide )

Partly this is due to social differences, i.e. growing up in an environment where there are less problems like IQ tests.

But partly also it is genuinely due to lower intelligence. If in those countries you ended chronic undernutrition, ended lack of micronutrients, ended cousin marriages, improved sewers, hygeine and basic healthcare, these people would grow up with IQs similar to those in the western world. This would lead to their economies becoming richer.

So it isn't just a "token amount" it's a big fucking deal.
Of course any economic process, when you look at it closely, can appear complicated. To use an old example, think of all that is necessary to make an ordinary wood and graphite pencil. A depth-first investigation of the process shows that wood must be obtained, which requires access to forests, which requires permission to enter land, which implies that land boundaries exist and are recorded, which requires surveyors to determine boundaries, which require surveying schools, which require learning supplies, which among other things require ordinary pencils, so we're back at the start... My point is that it's not a requirement that one fully understands something before one can make suggestions. I don't have to be an expert in surveying school materials to be able to criticize the performance of a pencil. It's enough to have a general understanding.

Similarly, it's not necessary to understand exactly how government makes money or through which agency (be it the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the US Mint, Bureau of Engraving, etc.) to criticize that fact that the money is under exclusive government control.
"IE 8, currently in beta, makes it hard to view millions of existing web pages because it's the first version of Microsoft's browser that claims to be fully standards-compliant."

That is, of course, quite an ironic statement, but good for MSoft for biting the bullet and sticking with it in spite of the hurt it is going to cause.
hold down ctrl & scroll your middle mouse button upwards
Private companies can issue dividends too - it's what we plan on doing if we're fortunate enough to get that far (1). M&A is for suckers (2) and IPOs aren't worth the trouble anymore unless you desperately need liquidity (e.g. Google) or you're not profitable.

1 - Assuming the capital gains tax remains similar to what it is currently.

2 - http://is.gd/2Fla

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304790
Gmail - Welcome to Tabblo - hawoca@gmail.com
Race, genes, and sports.
ok well YOU need someone to register the domain through, set up the domain (and tell them it is already registered and you own it) - then it depends on what the domain name is for what happens next.

For .co.uk you need to get the original registrar to change the IPS tag on the domain to the new registrars value. For .com I think it has to send an email to the admin email address on the domains DNS settings.

Just register the domain with your prefferred company and follow their advice / help.
Reading this, I acknowledge that there's some measure of good that comes out of being able to advance our understanding of how the brain works.

At the same time, the whole enterprise, a failed surgery leading to a life spent as a guinea pig, strikes me as very sad. How many of these scientists secretly thanked the heavens that this guy lost out on a normal life so they could further their own work?

How was he able to give consent to all this research without the ability to form new memories?

I think we need to keep studying the world and pushing along our understanding of it, I just hope we never stop asking these sorts of questions along the way to keep ourselves human.
that sounds like rather than a generic piece of software you either need to look for a specific travel agency software or have something built to your requirements (which are very specific).

(does the client need access to the tickets - or is it internal only??)
> The goal is to prevent mental retardation, not create Einsteins.

I think it will do both, because iodine deficiency probably works across the board: Someone who would otherwise be a genius may be reduced, by iodine deficiency, to being merely quite bright. Someone who would be quite bright is reduced to merely average. And someone who would be a bit thick is reduced to being retarded.

So by preventing mental retardation, they're also creating Einsteins. A win-win situation.
I think his point is that while managers know that good developers do "exist", it's difficult to be able to label a specific individual as a good programmer.
In the UK (and the rest of Europe I expect) such practices are normally regarded as illegal price collusion (the retailers are colluding to fix the price of the good so the price remains high).
11 Days in the Life of John Carmack - November 1997
Small is Beautiful
I used to read Carmack's .plan file updates as obsessively as I now read Hacker News, so I was happy to discover that someone "blogified" them. I came across this work log entry from November 1997, which is relevant to the current HN thread about the discrepancy in productivity among different developers. Although he is regarded by many as a genius possessing mythical powers, I suspect that Carmack, a self-taught programmer, achieved his legendary status not through any special genius but rather through an amazing capacity for hard work.
Quantum biosensors
Save Bletchley Park
A really secret ballot
One of those great stories about patients who had a profound effect on an area of medical science. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
A cyber-attack alarms the Pentagon
A crap developer doing say inhouse software for a non-tech company might make £20k/year. A top-tier contractor developing for an investment bank or hedge fund could be making £250k+/year.
Gadgets - Thinking inside the box
New Adobe PDF password protection is weaker
News quiz: The week in tech
Stop The Fear Epidemic
I'm sure there is at least one imam who read that article and thought, "If the Muslims of the Third World didn't have such nutritional deficiencies, then they could learn more of the Quran."
This was the spirit in which I used the word:

Hacking might be characterized as ‘an appropriate application of ingenuity’. Whether the result is a quick-
and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it.
From: http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html
There is a big difference in capital required for an online internet, service or software company and most other types of start-up businesses. VC will absolutely play a major role because money is needed for equipment, teams of people and global operations. The effort required to raise $1M is way more than 1/10 of raising $10M - so raising small amounts of capital is probably very inefficient in general.
Yes, but his key skill isn't his C++ but his knowledge of financial instruments. Even tho' a Quant spends most of his time programming he's not considered a member of the IT staff.
Thanks, I'll work on posting them after we're done cooking this weekend.
Bletchley Park is one of the 128 places in my travel book for geeks and an absolute must see for anyone who's interested in computer science or code breaking.

It would be tragic if it was allowed to fall into disuse or disrepair because of a lack of funding.

I've started a simple campaign to help Bletchley Park by donating a power of 2 in the currency of your choice: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387007
15 or 16 points, depending on what IQ test you are using, is one standard deviation of whatever the "raw" test score is.
"If I were motivated only by self-interest, I should want later stage investors to drop out. That would leave seed stage investors like YC as the only game in town."

But isn't the entire YC experience designed to get angels and VCs at demo day to make an investment in each company?
It's impossible to be too careful.
Donate a Power of 2 to Save Bletchley Park
Would that take care of contact details and lawful ownership of the domain
my issue isn't with the side projects done on company time. It's in doing the side projects on company time and then trying to unambiguously own them.

I don't think that there's much of a difference. The company doesn't know that the side projects exist, so there's no foul. That said, destroying code built for work purposes (e.g. sabotage) would be extremely unethical, highly illegal, and very very stupid, not to mention petty and pathetic.

Ownership can be a knotty issue. I have a friend who wrote a short story while in a dead-end corporate job, and published it around the time that he was laid off. The company found a draft on his work computer and, although they had no real use for the story and it wasn't relevant to his work (he was in accounting) they claimed ownership and managed to take royalties for the story (which were small; this was a symbolic pwnage). To twist the knife even further, they put a clause in the settlement wherein he'd have to get permission from them in order to publish it. He might have won if he went to court instead of settling, but a struggling, laid-off writer doesn't have the resources to fight a large company in the courts.

But I threw away the code and started fresh when I left my day job and turned it into a full-time startup. Granted, part of this was for technical reasons (I found the code I'd done on nights & weekends basically sucked)

You make a great point. In that sort of situation, a second write of the code is an excellent idea in any case. Besides, an intelligently chosen side project is one whose value is primarily education/skill development, since that can never be taken away or owned by anyone else.

For me, the appeal of programming is in having my code get used. Making it incomprehensible seems a good way of ensuring it won't be used in the future.

I fully agree. It's always a lot more satisfying to write great code, and I've always tried to do the best job possible. I'm just arguing that there are very rare, dire situations in which perverse incentives arise, and it might actually be wise to be "perverse".
A lot of our recipes tend to involve making marinades for meat, and then the meat in the marinade. Some marinades work better than others; it seems that acidic marinades that have lemon or vinegar in them tend to cook the meat while they're frozen, however.

Other times, we package the sauce, meat and vegetables separately. For instance, one of my wife's recipes is for a stir fry. For that one, we freeze the sauce, meat and frozen vegetables separately. We also buy flash frozen vegetables for that one. We combine them while cooking, and they hold up better.

There's a whole art and science to freezing and preserving food which my wife, my mother and mother-in-law are much better at than I am. There is a orchard in Morgan Hill that has the most amazing heirloom peaches. So, we’ll buy a couple of flats when they are at peak and freeze them. We also do the same for strawberries, blueberries, cherries and raspberries. Peaches need a preservative; strawberries don't do great unless they're sugared. Raspberries, blueberries and cherries do well when frozen whole on a cookie sheet and then vacuum packed after they’re frozen. It’s a couple hours of work a piece, but eating frozen heirloom peaches on Dutch oven pancakes at Christmastime makes it worthwhile.
Presumably, the studies will be done -- and the rewards reaped -- by people who don't care so much about ethics.
Isn't it sort of like virtual memory? Each process (consumer) has the illusion that all of its memory pages (dollars) are in RAM (backed by specie), but since it isn't actually using all of those pages at once, the OS (Federal Reserve) can swap some of them out to disk (print more money).
I really liked your article, actually. We're getting to the point where we'd like to do all the planning and buying, and then hire someone off of Craigslist to help prep the food. We're not quite at that point yet, but hopefully in a couple of months we'll be able to.
Musicians tap new revenue model - Music in Games
Productivity. As simple as that.
Italian is not a spoken language on HN, not many people can discuss this article. You may want to post a translated version.
yes - once you have secured the registration via that method you will have ownership of the domain and will be able to update the DNS information wit hthe relevant info.

Again the exact rules are TLD dependant :)
I mean, I agree this idea is great and very helpful. its definitely practical and useful but personally I just don't think its a 'hack'.
I might be able to help you out (I wouldn't be doing the translating, but I know a couple of hispanic college students who are just starting their winter break and might be interested). Send me an email at grosales at gmu dot edu
LinkedIn Got Rid of a Clone in Russia