skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've read this a bunch of times, and I'm starting to think that the "10x more productive" meme may be damaging the reputation of top programmers. Not because it's bad to be ten, twenty, or a hundred times more productive, but because it shifts focus away from the real value a top developer can bring, which is creativity. The 10X thing implies that top developers produce the same thing as crappy developers, just faster and to a higher quality standard.

Imagine a writer is contracted by Rolling Stone for 2,000 words on a rock band (ie., the plot for Almost Famous, vaguely autobiographical for Cameron Crowe). By the "10x more productive" argument, we'd be most impressed with a young journalist who comes back with a high quality story in less time and at a lower cost.

The real issue here, though, isn't the productivity - it's that if you give this assignment to 100 different writers, you'll end up with 100 different stories. Some will be great, some will be fine, some will be boring, some will be incomplete. But while deadlines are important, that's more of a baseline: you need to finish in time, and you need to write competently. Beyond that, as a publisher I'd worry a lot less about the writer's "productivity" and a lot more about the product itself.

So a top developer can be someone who gets a well defined project done much more quickly to a high standard, or a top developer can be someone who takes vague notions and emerges with incredible software within a reasonable timeframe and budget. While there's probably some overlap, one isn't necessarily good at the other (in fact, I'd guess there's a negative correlation, mainly because people who would be happy working under one set of circumstances would generally be very unhappy in the other).
Someone please tell me what is wrong with American's youth.
As I said, I wasn't sure about the details :-) But as you seem to know a bit about it, what was the standard database that was being used as the backend? SQLServer? And were the db requests being generated by the app efficient? And most importantly, considering the thrust of the article, was efficiency easy to achieve? I'm thinking about this in terms of the skills needed by a single programmer to be able to do anything useful - if you needed to be a full on DB wonk to produce an effective VB6 app, then it wasn't really as simple as the author was making out.
Fun video!
please checkout my http://smacklet.com/ too

Nice.

Although ...

http://smacklet.com/del-note?id=264

Please only use POST for modifications to data. You probably want to obscure that id counter as well.

:)
The Bill Gates and Larry/Sergeys of the world are rich because they are business owners, not because they are programmers. The sports equivalent would be if Michael Jordan started his own basketball league, grew it to many teams/cities, got TV and merchandising contracts, etc.

Sports stars are some of the highest payed employees in the world because they, like musicians and movie stars, can use the infrastructure that mechanical_fish mentioned. But they are nowhere near as wealthy as the team owners, just like great programmers that aren't also business owners aren't nearly as wealthy as the companies that employ them.
Scroll down to nostrademons' comment. I think that it answers your point.
Choosing a service because it fits your needs is fine, but in the case of Gmail every trivial detail is posted as a new story.

I'm running my own innovative, superior, competitive, streamlined combination of qmail+mutt, so forgive me if I find posts about free Gmail stickers slightly obtuse.
Great link. Paul is right on. I was wondering when someone was going to figure this out.
Like I said, "I'll take one example". The study is utterly flawed even conceptually (1), but that flaw might just be a result of some law prof not understanding basic statistics.

The example I provided is merely the simplest and most egregious misrepresentation she makes.

(1) To estimate the number of bankruptcies caused by "medical reasons", you need to compare Pm = P(bankrupt | medical cause) to Pnm = P(bankrupt | no medical cause). The number of medically caused bankruptcies is then (Pm-Pnm) x (number of people with medical cause). She only measures Pm x (number of bankruptcies with medical cause).
SQLServer or FoxPro or Oracle, you wrote the db requests yourself (probably just hooking up to stored procs, as he says) and you're totally missing the point here.

Efficiency in a small business app just doesn't matter. What bugs him, AFAICT, is that it's harder to throw together an app for a few users that solves some pain they have. VB6 is possibly the best environment for doing this ever, so I see where he's coming from.

So rails is more efficient, written in a vastly superior language, more conveniently hooked to the DB, and more scalable than VB6. But! Designing a UI is still basically manual labor with it, labor he used to be able to toss off with ease in VB6.

(Also, you don't need to be a "full-on db wonk" to write a simple stored procedure.)
I think some of us are simply scanning through the new section, tagging things we'd like to read at a later time. :)
Values of N acquired by Twitter
I get what you're saying, but thras's point still stands. You're just using the word "programmer" in two slightly different senses.

thras was using it to refer to a role - a non-management role - and in that sense a programmer does have a lot less ability to influence the people who set pay rates.

You're using it to refer to an actual person who can try to change the role he occupies, in your example by starting a company.
YouTube Offically Turns on HD
Yes, you're right. Perhaps Postini does not scan, in which case it would be ok to keep psmtp.com.
Yeah, that is indeed on my to-do list. :-)

Web crawlers can't go there and you can undo the delete... so POST-only is more of a "best practices" thing than a necessity. But I'll do that and yes, not obfuscating post count is bad.
Too bad they're shutting down their services, they were really cool although I never really used them consistently.
You have to send the link to your friends using email / sms etc. When you do that, you'll mention what the invite is for.
In the ensuing arms race to show off and get a mate it has been exaggerated in the way that a peacock’s tail is. This process of sexual selection, Dr Miller and his followers believe, is the reason people have become so brainy.

I hope this isn't true, because if sexual selection is the cause of human intelligence, this means that American men are slowly turning into illiterate redneck bikers with excellent "game".

Foreign ladies FTW.
I've tried to use plain html for some of my apps at work, but it really gets pretty cumbersome.

A lot of biz apps like mine have forms with upwards of a 100 fields ( ya i know, but those are the requirements ), creating and maintaining that is just a whole lot easier using the drag and drop method instead of handcoding html ( at least for me ).
A corollary to the move toward smallness, if I might:

http://h3h.net/2008/12/economy-of-software-maintenance/
Tried to join the meetup, waiting for approval
I think, though, a number of programmers did leave Visual Basic for other things over those changes. Is that not correct?
Introduction to Erlang Features (Slides & Demo Screencast)
I think quite often, rewrites are best done by 1 or maybe 2 people. I'm not sure they scale well to more.
...seven pages later, they’re saying 'I strongly recommend these practices be strictly adhered to until you understand why and how Scrum works.' Sound familiar?

That doesn't mean that Scrum is just a "cookbook." A book that's "just a cookbook" would only have recipes. A book about learning how to cook a certain cuisine would have recipes included as examples and exercises, but would also go into generally applicable principles.

Of course there is a spectrum. Lots of cookbooks have some instructional material. There are even books that are 1/2 instructional, 1/2 straight recipes.
I submitted this a day ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=384801
Not "could" - "will". It's not the same thing.
Inside Intuit: A review
Nope, thousands at best.

Most abandoned Microsoft. Or better said, Microsoft abandoned them. Choosing to release an incompatible set of new languages with no upgrade path was hint enough that Microsoft had purely it's own interests at heart and not that of the lowly VB and ASP developers who made their OS and web server successful. Most took the hint and are now happily supporting Java, Ruby, PHP, Python and Perl web apps (with a side-business supporting VB6 legacy apps and ASP - apparently still alive and kicking after all these years) -in short, anything non-proprietary.

"Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me." For Microsoft, no second chance.
For pedantry's sake, this sounds like enabling wealth rather than creating it. The wealth doesn't originate with the law, so isn't created by it.
Is anyone else sick of Smashing Magazine? All of their posts are just lists and there doesn't seem to be any real content behind them. This one made some good points at the beginning about usability but then a bunch of their examples contradicted those points!

No offense to the submitter of this article. This was popular all over the net today.
Open Source is an 'illusion' most of the time. What open source gives you, is the possibility that someone could understand and take over the source if it's needed badly enough.
A typical app for me starts with some set of conditions, runs for a bit doing data access and computation, and produces some result. The middle bits would be about the same amount of work in any reasonable language. But take the input, if I use getopt() and the command line, I could do that bit of it in say 15 minutes, an hour at most. Using Tcl/Tk, which is broadly analogous to VB6, a couple of hours. In J2EE is could take days or longer, just to plumb it all together, longer if I had to sort out a J2EE environment from scratch. And I don't care about that bit of my program! I just want to crunch my numbers. And the output step, it's trivial to write some numbers to a file and also a PS file if I want a graph too. Or I could spend a few more days doing AJAX graphs in front of my J2EE...

Fortunately getopt and so on haven't gone anywhere, they're still just as usable as they were.
The only downside is that making forms/reports isn't as simple - but honestly, is learning html really so hard?

In many domains, creating reports is the primary purpose of the app. And it really is painful in html, even for someone who knows it well. Trying to fit these apps into a dumb-client browser really is nontrivial with today's web frameworks.
and if you dedicate yourself to starting 4 businesses you have a 114% chance of suceeding.

Check your statistics ;-)
Coding Horror - Blu-Ray: Is It Time?
No: http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=9221
This is cool and it isn't too simple. I agree though that it needs some optional text boxes to enter a title, location, date, and time. Maybe keep the current simplicity but:

-Make a logo for the top right corner with your branding

-Allow users to edit the Title at the top of the page to whatever the event title is

-Make the subtitle editable so people can add extra info like their name or phone number

-Add a calendar to the right side so people can optionally add a date and time

-Add a google map to the right side so people can optionally add an address

-Clarify that those are both options and if they aren't configured then hide them from the invite page

-Add an optional email box to the generation page so you can receive a secret admin link in order to change the details later

-Add an email box to the invite page (also optional) so people can sign up to be notified in case of a change in time or cancellation

-Ajaxify these options so they're quick to edit. See: Google Notebook for how you should make the titles and other things editable

Okay that turned out to be a lot more changes than I anticipated.
How to produce great Web video in a whole lot less time
Thanks. Good points.

> turned out to be a lot more

More is great :-) Thanks for your time.
the inflation tom foolery I'm referring to is in regard to greenspan in 1994. a policy change at the tie led to a pretty rapid change in the markets.

I'm searching for the paper on it but I can't find it. anyone know of a pdf search of some sort?
"a venture-capital-backed entrepreneur who starts a company that goes public"

There's, like, four total people in the world who match that description in web-based companies over the past few years.
Things like this always remind me of the movie Idiocracy of which the first 10min or so is best part:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
It is the only time that violating the prime directive is good because raising intelligence is a universal good. there is no way for raising intelligence to backfire that I can think of....I guess the atomic bomb would be one argument, but we already have those.
The woods are peaceful, and have a way of changing your perspective. I recommend them.

(Seriously: I am not a pessimist, but compared to some of the wild-eyed optimism that gets thrown around here, I may sometimes seem like one. My world view is that, given a choice, you should live life in a way that maximizes health, happiness and satisfaction, not money. Start a company because you want to work for yourself, not because you want to get rich -- because you probably won't.

If your whole goal when starting a project is to achieve fame and fortune, you will go through life in an almost perpetual state of disappointment. If, instead, you make choices that allow you to live a good life now, you'll be happier by definition.)
Survive to Make Money or Make Money to Survive?
I think the fact that we need to step back when processor technology changes shows that we (the software community) lack a truly pervasive concurrent programming model. Does Clojure really offer a truly orthogonal solution to this problem?

And when I say "problem" I'm really talking about the scalability of fine-grained concurrency techniques formalized by Dikjstra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_(programming)).

I agree that programmers will eventually have to be relieved of concerns such as critical section but we will never escape questions like "what are the parallel aspects of this algorithm (or library or application)". A compiler will never "discover" large-scale concurrency patterns in any mainstream language (at least to my reckoning). Maybe interpreted languages will ultimately lead the way.
Anyone have any insight on the comment about Python 3 being 10% slower?
A Credit Card Loses Its High-Tech Cred
...they are manifestations of a business model that embodies the effective shift from command and control (tell people what to do, removed from the gemba, and seek compliance) to the directed engagement of each individual pursuing answers to questions that they own.

Taken together, that all represents the difference in developing the organizational capabilities that enable dynamic adaptation to changes in the environment. And that all stems from a different sense of purpose -- the difference between surviving to make money and making money to survive.

Toyota's approach seems to answer the question of how a large organization can adapt and compete. PG has made a compelling case on the downfall of the command and control approach, such as at GM, but the new lean management approach may make big business make sense again.
People here may disagree with your form factor but the name and setup is brilliant. I've learned to stop asking "Why would anyone use this?" because that often leads to the incorrect conclusion that "No one would use this". If you described Twitter to any tech pundit 10 years ago they would surely doubt its usefulness. Despite all the suggestions here I would urge you not to complicate what you have already.
In all ways except his memory, he was a healthy man of sound mind. I'm no expert on medical ethics, but I would argue that he was capable of informed consent. Remember that his working memory and other cognitive abilities were unaffected, which is part of the reason his case was so interesting.

Obviously, he would not be able to consent to the long-term study they performed on him. For a particular study, however, if you explained the situation to him he would be able to understand it.
I think issuing dividends on a consistent basis (applies to public & private companies) & total profitability is a better measure of success than going public or getting acquired. The latter two rely too much on someone else.
How about removing some clicking steps, why not offer the reply links (optionally) straight in the email? Like:

===
Click here if you are attending
http://inviteup.com/i/abc123/YES

Click here if you are NOT attending
http://inviteup.com/i/abc123/HELLNO

Click here if you MIGHT attend
http://inviteup.com/i/abc123/PERHAPS
===

Also, I agree that you are on the right side of complexity. Start clean and add what is lacking.
As a FriendFeed user I'll echo, it is great that Paul and others can release code quickly.
Really cool idea. Thanks.
Portable Social Graphs - Imagining their Potential
10 Tips To Get Your Startup Noticed.
Hardware (driver- or OS-level) debug sucks.

Commodity hardware debug sucks more.

When working at this level, access to hardware probes and external monitoring and manufacturing taps can be invaluable.

Boundary and edge conditions and timing races and part steppings and errata rule. For those cases where the errata was written down, or where the vendor deigned to describe what changed between the steppings.

There are a number of device-level drivers and operating systems in use where only a very few folks really know the code sufficient to debug this level, too.
Play Funtasy Football For Free For A Chance To Win An Applie I POd Nano Every Week
Containers are sealed.
It is interesting how the trade-offs between the following two desires come into play:

[1] "more extensible and more maintainable" (long term)
[2] "meets a date with sufficient functionality" (short term)

In either case, intolererable bugs make the contribution invalid.
The stuff has to "work" for the cheque-writer's definition of "work".

A manager setting pay rates has less latitude than people might think.
The perception of bean-counters and other upper-management is that programming talent is a commodity that does not vary as much as it truly does.
Even if they were to pay a superstar (defined however you like) what they were worth (in term of the bottom line), then they get nervous about having too many of their eggs in one basket.
e.g. "Uhhhmm ... how about you get me 4 mediocre programmers instead of that superstar so that if one leaves or gets sick I am still covered".

I can tell you that most managers are driven by item [2] above with mostly just lip-service being paid to [1].

The peers of developers are much more slanted to [1].
This is why open source can kick so much butt. Developers actually get to do the right long-term thing.

So, in practice, a superstar "date meeter" trumps a "extensibility maven" in a managers (i.e. his bosses) eyes nearly every time.
for me it was nice to see that even the world's most famous hackers deal with the same aggravating nonsense i do.
Saw a bunch of Hackernews posts from startup entrepreneurs asking how to get their product noticed, so I thought I'd throw this list together. Sure, it's a lot of "duh" stuff, but if you go through the list and submit your site and use each of the items, I guarantee you'll be off to a good start. Also, am I missing a "forgot password" link? I tried to login but my password was wrong, so I had to create a new account.
"Get thee to the Nerdery!"

The idea is more of whimsical as opposed to intellectual interest.
This post reminds me of a post I made a while ago called Don't Raise Venture Capital.
http://www.startable.com/2008/09/26/dont-raise-venture-capit...
This may seem a bit odd, as I am a VC. My point was not 100% aligned with Paul's, as he's suggesting something a bit more extreme, but there is a similar point - these days you can build a good business without significant funding. And you are potentially better off not raising any venture capital. Although I hope the venture business hasn’t become totally obsolete, as I really enjoy spending time with entrepreneurs!!
Suggestions...Facebook Connect..Google Friend connect....Ping.FM(push it out to all my networks at once) integration.

Remain simple but spice up the design some and provide a UI example of what my friends would see upon receiving my invite.
Where "potentially compromising" is defined in precise terms by whom? Even if it were worth aiming for, moral fashion is a moving target.

It's also impractical, as you have an ever-decreasing amount of control over what information is recorded about you and put online, and how much attention it gets. Even if you're confident in your definition of "potentially compromising" means, the only way to be sure is to not do anything potentially compromising or say anything potentially compromising, which will eventually render it impossible for you to think anything potentially compromising.

Fuck that shit.

see also: http://xkcd.com/137/
see also: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Ask YC: Free-ish stock ticker information?
What is the best way to get real time (or close) stock ticker information for the american markets (NASDAQ, DOW)?
It's because they left out a lot of the old optimization hacks when they reworked the interpreter. They'll either be reinserted or better solutions will be found now that the language is stable.
The highest paid soccer stars are usually celebrities too. That is, people will go to the game to just watch that person play.

Although there are software franchises that people will follow (think games), people in general don't care who programmed the software.
This sounds good but I am not able to evaluate since I have not done any Facebook or other social network apps. Can you please explain a bit more? If you don't want to do it here, my email is (gmail kirubakaran).
Don't aim for simplicity so much as for elegance.

When you look at the best minimalists in any category - movies, poetry, music - the ones who are best aren't necessarily the simplest. Minimalism is about stripping away unnecessary elements: that implies that you've got to keep the necessary ones there.
How real time? Yahoo provides a CSV feed (20 min delay)

http://www.gummy-stuff.org/Yahoo-data.htm
MYFI XM RADIO SKINTIGHT 3 PACK CASE BY SPECK
Speck Skin-Tight Case - for Delphi MyFi XM Satellite Radio (3 Pack) The Speck SkinTight 3 Pack for MyFi is a rubberized skin for a Delphi MyFi XM Satellite radio. It provides protection against daily wear and tear including bumps, scratches and the occasional drop.
How Will the Semantic Web “Think”?
Were you trying to be funny (if so, a smiley would help a lot), or do you not get that evolution works on a different time scale? Cultural evolution has dramatically outpaced biological evolution in humans in the last millenium, making the latter irrelevant.

In the realm of intelligence, cultural progress (which encompasses better education, nutrition, technology, and everything else) has led to the Flynn effect, a gain of 3-5 IQ points per decade. Biological evolution in Homo sapiens has given us at most 100 IQ points (but probably closer to 50) in the last 74,000 years. The former is three orders of magnitude faster!
UNICODE support would be reason enough to answer "what's the point".

Also, some operations in Python 3, particularly those that are relevant to me as a web application developer, are as fast as 2.6 and in fact significantly faster than 2.5.x.

If for no other reason than the much better support for Unicode - an advantage that will pay off dividends across all products built on 3 in the future - that would be reason enough.

As it is when you look at third party packages that claim to support Unicode you'll frequently find all sorts of cruft that doesn't play well with other packages.

With respect to Unicode and Python, what was once less than intuitive, is now easy. It just works.
JSOS: jQuery based desktop