skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was an automotive engineer the industry instituted a Japanese "check" called Design Failure Mode Effects Analysis. For every component the engineers would have to predict the ways the design could fail in testing and what steps would have to be taken to fix them. Time spent doing DFMA's added significantly to the cost of producing a new part and worked counter to weight optimization. Do you think, twenty years of DFMA's later, that automotive design is more efficient?
Microsoft’s Google Envy (Part 396)
Web startups, 60% of the time they work every time!
'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?'

The Lord works in mysterious ways. Yes, from our limited human perspective, this is a very sad situation. But perhaps this was indeed a blessing from God to future generations?

This man will be known in honor for generations because of his (perhaps unwilling?) sacrifice!
For some definitions of "are" maybe. Fact is that processes don't share address spaces and thus pointers, which means that all data structures have to be serialised in some shape or form before they can be accessed by multiple processes. This makes some use cases infeasible in Python and other GIL based languages.

This is important and I'm concerned that so many advocates of Python (and Ruby and PHP) try to talk this huge issue away. I do use and love Python myself and I'd like to do more with it, so this is not pointless language war fighting.
I think there's scaling issues to consider, and, for a change, good ones rather than bad ones. A small currency with only a few tens of thousands of dollars of US$ equivalence in it can afford to be purely ethereal. A little less secure, too (though not egregiously poorly secured, which is the usual case for a new system of any kind).

After all, in the end, money is simply confidence. I don't believe in the gold standard because I believe it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of money (and of gold, but that's another story). Money simply is the confidence that the next person will also accept it, and the fact that the confidence chain can be broken is not fixable, it is fundamental to the nature of money. US Dollars, even gold-backed, can have the same problem, and note that the reason we're talking about this at all boils down to fear that the US dollar won't be as useful as it was before, that the US dollar won't be good enough to keep the local economy going.

A smaller system, especially if it is truly geographically local, can engender confidence in ways that the larger system can not; "I know everybody using this", or if you prefer, more ominously, "I know and have easy access to where everybody using this lives".

You can grow this like you could grow any other enterprise, I think; the system you get out of the gate that works in Small Town doesn't need to be the same one that works in New York. The only tricky thing is that I have no idea how to monetize this; who will want to buy a currency that you're taking a profit from? And it will need to be monetized; there's some risk here that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole without an LLC minimum, and that LLC sure wouldn't take it on for free.
I'm not talking quants, I'm talking senior architects & technical specialists. Domain knowledge is important in those roles - but domain knowledge is an integral part of being a developer. The standard contract rate for senior front office devs seems to be between 500-800/day, specialized knowledge/skills can easily push that upto 1000-1300/day.
Ask: Voicemail-to-text for Voip landlines?
I know people have voicemail-to-text for cell phones. Is there something like that for my Voip landline? Our office has 9 such lines. Any suggestions?
Core Linux tools, such as echo.
It looks like you’re writing a framework [pic]
I believe the studies you are referring to measured 3 lines of shipping code produced per programmer-day. This doesn't mean that Joe the Hacker went to his terminal and only typed three lines; it means that other people re-wrote code, or he spent a lot of time debugging something that was a short fix, or that a lot of programmer time was devoted to projects that were never shipped.

I'm not trying to defend mediocre programmers here, but I think you've misinterpreted a study that intentionally combines individual productivity with organizational productivity.

* Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the actual study report. If someone can locate it I'd appreciate it.
Communities in the enterprise world
I agree with you that the title is pure bait. It's obvious that the combination of her poor performance reviews and Myspace photo caused her to lose her teaching position, with the photo pushing everything over the edge. But I think the real controversy here is our online privacy. This is yet another example of how social network profiles (when people are not careful) come back to bite them in the ass. Although I know almost everyone on HN is smart enough to make photos like that private, it's a good reminder from this lesson learned.

And this story always cracks me up :) - http://valleywag.com/tech/your-privacy-is-an-illusion/bank-i...
Firefox Users Beware of New Malware | TechJaws
You could describe YCombinator as a means for rectifying this imbalance.

I think the author glances over too lightly the idea of good developers working for equity. A core part of the YC philosophy is that it is much easier to take a great hacker and teach them the business skills they need to succeed, than to take someone with business skills and make them a great hacker. (I'm basing this on something from one of pg's essays, sorry, can't remember which one at the moment.)

Based on the kind of output that the average YC team puts out during the program, a 10x multiple over the average corporate programmer's output during the same time is a reasonable estimate. Part of this is because, even if you have a corporate programmer capable of 10x more productivity than his peers, the processes surrounding him likely make it impossible for him to get that much work deployed in that amount of time.

And I think that is another important thing to consider. Corporations do not pay developers who are 10x as productive 10x as much because the way they develop and deploy software makes it impossible for them to realize a 10x productivity improvement, in any case.

EDIT: Just thought of a possible rebuttal I would like to address. You might compare this to the sports star, and point out that the star is not taking on the risk associated with getting paid in equity. However, an athlete's career is also an extremely high risk endeavor. Just as most startups fail, obviously the vast majority of athletes fail to make a lucrative career out of their athletic prowess. I would venture that the selectivity for an athlete looking for a lucrative contract is much higher than the selectivity for a hacker managing to start a lucrative business.
An exceptionally brilliant programmer I know was working at a telecom. Since he was so good, he could complete his week's assignments in one day, so he'd go home until the weekly status meeting. His boss was dead set against him -- it was "only fair" that he should suffer as much as everyone else.
I'd guess that, as percentiles go, programmers make much more money than soccer players. Sure, there are stars like Ronaldo that make more than almost anyone here, but he's up against Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
> Why trust money printed by the same government that just looted your private pension?

You have to get some government money for you have to pay taxes in government money.
"I'd rather be lucky than good." -Lefty Gomez, NY Yankees and MLB All-Star 1933 - 1939
I think there are two reasons for the lack of a 10X pay gap:

1) Large companies don't yield the flexibility for top developers to produce 10X the value of the average.

2) Startups don't have the cash to pay 10X. However, I'll bet there are 10X equity differences.
Climate scientists say 2008 will be coolest year of decade
MooTools and Sizzle
A consulting company that only hired good programmers, and billed exorbitant rates perhaps?
Or better: Actually he borrowed a bunch of your money promising you pay it back.
Classic, and the main reason we tell our daughter that Facebook won't be AROUND when she's 13. All I see are the acai ads (no, I never click on them) and the occasional Pages ad. I'm sure that I need to become a fan of FriendFeed night crew. Useless, useless app, and it's tragic, because they have an amazing userbase that they just fritter away because of clueless management.
I still don't understand how this article got over 20 up mod points, let alone 2. Did the people upvoting it even read it?
Web Workers: Tweaked and out in Firefox 3.1b2
Have you ever just stood back and watched a programmer work? You can't sell tickets or ads for that! Therefore programmers don't make as much as soccer stars...
"Programmers have to work in a team if they really want to do anything of moderately large scale"

I would disagree with that statement.
And it's the lack of this "metric" that keeps the great programmers from making 10x.
NASA Awards $38B in Contracts to Smaller Tech Firms
Misleading title. From the very first sentence:

"All else equal, a venture-capital-backed entrepreneur who starts a company that goes public has a 30 percent chance of succeeding in his or her next venture. First-time entrepreneurs, on the other hand, have only an 18 percent chance of succeeding, and entrepreneurs who previously failed have a 20 percent chance of succeeding"
Socialize your site with Google Friend Connect
Official Google Blog: Pirates vs. Ninjas: Who would win?
Still blathering on about human induced climate change though - sigh. Climate change is surely inevitable and has always been with us.
Yes, Jihadi is better -- "terrorist" has too many negative connotations.
There was a paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research from back in 2006 that had a similar study and findings. I dug through it and brought out the relevant parts (relevant to me at least) here:

http://www.sanjayparekh.com/skill-versus-luck-in-entrepreneu...
Yet another great solution to the oversupply of high school teachers.
So much for the Googley Treats
Yes, programming history has a few star programmers that implemented operating systems, editors, web sites, etc. The problem is that, in the end, they all had to work with a team to take that creation to the next level.
I was going to go with 99% of the time they never generate enough revenue to cover their costs, but each to their own I suppose.
This is one of the best responses I've seen to this debate here or otherwise. As someone involved in that value chain, but who is not a musician or record label, I can say with confidence that illegal downloading has devastated the lives of many people I know- engineers, session musicians, composers, persons who work at labels, publishers, distributors, etc. And the worst part of it is that the small indie type artist and labels, that people claim to support instead of the majors, are the ones who suffer the most. WEA, EMI, etc. can scale down and adapt, but look at Pinnacle in the UK, who went under yesterday, taking a huge amount of indie labels with them effectively.
Iterators get some of the benefits of lazy evaluation.
It would probably only work as a partnership.
Pay is not proportional to personal performance. For a sporting example, try sprinting: the fastest runners are only 2 or 3 times faster than I am, but might be paid millions.

Musicians are not paid proportionately to some independent measure of ability, but to sales.

So neither of those example support the contention.

The article says the difference is not that good devs produce 10 times as many features. But that contradicts the original research reference, ie. productivity.
Wow, there's an enormous ego on that guy. Well deserved, but still...
Despite the risk of being voted down by the fanboys, I have to ask: how could this receive 12 votes within 40 minutes?

What's so newsworthy about Linus being frustrated about debugging?
Only, when all processes try to use their RAM all at once the system used to crash.
InviteUp : Easiest Invite Ever
A Programmer's Dilemma
The average pay of all soccer players is probably less than the average pay of all programmers. I can tell you that the median soccer pay is zero.
I'd bet money the conversation went a lot closer to, "Uhm, no. You're paid to work 40 hours a week."

Any line of reasoning that begins with "since I'm so good" and ends with "being here is suffering" sounds like there's probably some jackassery going on.

Honestly, a manager who was ok with him going home after one day would be stupid. Then he's giving them no additional benefit for his fabled skills, and their best developer wouldn't be there most of the time and the rest of the team would probably resent it.
"Yeah, the essay needed s/startup/internet startup/"

I think if you read pg's essays for a while, you mentally do that substitution automatically.
I can't upvote mechanical_fish enough because he's very right on both counts. And you're right to ask these questions.

Still, by all accounts he enjoyed the sessions. He had "some" degree of consent in that he could stop a session at any time. That's one critical part of informed consent regulations. The other is that you understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. Obviously he had trouble there and needed a legal representative to approve.
I found it somewhat interesting to learn that on a modern architecture you can isolate the cpu from its peripherals to the extent that debugging is impossible.
Ego? Sounds like a simple statement of fact. If someone else can debug the issue, can he say what he did and not get called out?

Also, it is funny that people who succeed in the first place due to what you call as ego, are expected to magically lose it and become "nice" once they are above a certain level of success.

[edit: +1. Downvote is not from me.]
Skype: BitTorrent Protocol Change Might Kill Service
The 2 peso bills are so worn out you can barely recognize them.
I think you meant to paste this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387045
...And 2008 would have been a scorcher in Charles Dickens's time...

Somehow I don't think .6 degrees more qualifies as a "scorcher" For an article that attacks possible future over interpretation of the data, it seems hyperbole is okay as long as its politically correct hyperbole.
My understanding of the standards around SOAP, the ws-* ones, is that the don't promise standardization of the payload. The aim is to provide standards for integration, and those are useful, because tooling and infrastructure around the services can be reused. SOAP standards are there to simplify integration, they say nothing about the payload (other then maybe it having to be xml)
Obviously not, but that wasn't the point.
"What limits demand for cars is that people can't afford them, not that they don't want them."

Or that they already have them? In the U.S., isn't the ratio of eligible driving population to drivable autos approaching 1? So, twice as many cars would likely not find buyers and drive down prices a lot.

Sorry if I'm missing the bigger picture stuck on this specific detail.
Valerio Proietti of MooTools regarding Sizzle
Sure they do (if they want to), by starting their own companies.
You guys are comparing a single saturated market to the economy as a whole. That's a category error. New markets are always emerging.
Quite right about doctors and lawyers. In fact I was going to mention their professional organizations as an example. Requiring certifications, all for the public good of course, is one of the best ways to inflate wages.
Programmers have no power over the people who set pay rates while CEOs have a great deal of power.

Actually they do: they can turn down an offer to work at any existing company and start their own instead. And many do.
(That's how capitalism really works.)
Digg (front page for bug.gd )
Assuming the final figure is close to 14.3C then 2008 will be the tenth hottest year on record. The hottest was 1998 - which included a very strong El Niño event - followed by 2005, 2003 and 2002.

Doesn't this mean that we actually have a multi-year cooling trend since 1998? And more importantly, how is this cooling trend explained by the man-made Co2 theory of increasing global warming?
Ask HN: How often should you redesign your site?
Every year? Every 2 years? What do you think is the best combination of not being stale and not throwing money down the drain?
The guy who wrote this is a telecom lobbyist.

He's got an agenda: making money for big telcos, and tus himself. He pushes it with posts like this one on public fora.

Google "Scott Cleland" and you'll see what I mean.
More info on him here:

http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6550495.html
Because, thanks to our society's investment in stadium, television, and sports-bar infrastructure, the work of a soccer star scales really well? The best of them have an audience in the billions.

Meanwhile, the game of soccer -- like all major spectator sports -- has been deliberately designed for... spectators. It is designed to give the scant handful of brilliant outlier talents a stage on which to shine. If soccer became too boring to watch, eventually they would tinker with the rules until it became exciting again -- that is how soccer itself was invented, after all. Hence, soccer makes money because it was designed to be popular. Programming, on the other hand, was designed for various other purposes, ranging from personal pleasure to scientific exploration to actually getting things done.

High school soccer players don't make money, because high-school soccer doesn't consistently produce the highest caliber of play. The world's best fencers, or chess players, don't make much money because their talent is difficult for the average spectator to appreciate. And the world's best dancers and acrobats only make money if they are good at self-promotion, or if they plug themselves into a system that was built to create stars, work really hard, and then get some lucky breaks. (See: Jackie Chan. For whom the term "lucky breaks" is well chosen.)

It might be possible to design a programming sport that showcased the talent of the best programmers at the highest level. (In a sense, that's what YC is trying to do, although a startup is a test of more than just raw programming skill. But, then, team sports are a test of more than just hand-eye coordination...) But it's probably pretty hard to make programming as exciting as soccer. So what? Programming is a different game.
You'd better prepare for a once-in-a-lifetime event.
If he really wants to play Santa, he can follow up with a bunch of improvements in a new Arc release. :)
there's one big problem with this site that's not obvious.

my (non-techie) friends actually got mad at me for not using evite. The reason: they felt that the other site's themes/look didn't look as nice; they didnt' care so much about evite's problems as much as how it looked
The Agile Disease
Same in Britain. And everybody gives you funny looks when you pay with a fistful of coins. Sigh.
Wanted: People to give up kitchsy names altogether.
NOKIA 2760 RED UNLOCKED
Nokia 2760 a multifunction phone supporting GSM 900 and 1800 and also with great dimension. Its 3GPP MPEG-4 video player is splendorous as never experienced before. Listening its music is creating a different feeling of music with its stereo sound.
Trump Sees Act of God in Recession
Here's what I don't like about apt-get install on Debian. There is NO DOCUMENTATION. At least, not as far as I can tell.

For example, "apt-get install phpmyadmin"... and then what? It took me HOURS to figure out what to do next. There was no message saying, "Congrats, phpmyadmin has been installed in the following directory. Navigate to the following URL to start using it." Nothing. Or what about "apt-get install rails"? I have absolutely NO IDEA what that does. I would never build an application on that rails installation.

Rubygems, on the other hand, is unbelievably easy. "gem install whatever" and then in your application "require whatever". What could be simpler?
Apple blows past Microsoft to become #3 smartphone OS
I redesign my blog once a year.

I need to redesign my commercial sites, but I'm not sure what the goals of the redesign would be. Seems like if you have something that works (like Drudge) what's the point in redesigning? I guess having new goals -- changing market demographic, desire to keep it fresh, improving click-through or sales, etc -- is the most important driver.
there is, sadly, such a thing as too simple.

A nice form with:

Event: <name here>
Description: <description>
Host: <you>

To create your 2 URLS would probably prove a lot more popular...
Replay CEO shares advice on VC funding (they just raised $2M in this economy)
Yes. The satellite data shows a global cooling trend since 1998.
Most of the wacky interest rate stuff happened after the tech bubble. It took ~8 years to fail after the bubble.

PS: I know you want to forget about the last 9 years as much as I do but they happened. ;-)
China 'faces mass social unrest'
During this same time, the amount of CO2 production increased as never before.

But there's a link between CO2 and temperature. At least that's what they say.
'Thankfully', I'd like to add, at the risk of looking like a ...
I find the amount of attention that a single ordinary mail provider receives in this forum disturbing. On a forum for hackers and startup founders, I'd expect that people use and promote small providers instead of huge corporations.
The problem isn't the word "hack", it's the word "food"; he's not "food hacking", he's "meal hacking". In a book of "meal hacks", this would be a keystone chapter.
JavaFX 1.0
I lived in Buenos Aires for four months at the beginning of the year and developed the exact same strategies. And the same thing often happened to me at the subway stations. I often resorted to buying some cheap piece of candy at a corner store to get coins.

It's amazing how you find yourself thinking, "okay this is $2.50 so if I pay with a five I'll get a 2 peso bill back and .50 in coins but if I pay with two 2 peso bills I'll get 1.50 back in coins."

P.S. check out 'Juana M.' definitely the best steak I had in the city. (Plus a real salad)
For a long time VCs have prided themselves on "adding value" beyond the capital invested. I wonder if part of the phenomenon you describe is a realization, at last, that there is no value-add. Which is not necessarily a comment on VCs, but also on the increased sophistication of entrepreneurs.
Good point. I'll add that. It was an experiment to see how simple I can get. Perhaps I went too far :)
I don't know that I've got the fortitude to look into it just now. I once almost feinted at the wheel while listening to a truly horrifying NPR piece called "my lobotomy." http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5014080

And yes, by all accounts this was a case of people making the best of a bizarre situation. And I truly do hope that tangible good comes out this research if it has not already, beyond simply "we got a little smarter" which I find unsatisfying personally.
For a lot of people --- maybe most people in America, and almost certainly most hackers, the alternative to a strategy like this is simply eating out every night. There are certainly a lot of ways to engineer variability into planned, pre-prepped meals, but be that as it may, the "hack" here is to allow yourself to cook at all when you have a lifestyle that almost demands nightly Thai takeout.
Image Optimization, Part 4: Progressive JPEG…Hot or Not?
Am I the only one who is EXTREMELY skeptical that anyone is going to actually give out money using these applications?