skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not arguing that anyone should be screwing anyone over. Taking revenge for the sake of revenge is a monumental waste of time and energy, and can lead to disastrous career and legal consequences.

In the situation I outlined-- of a person being outsourced, and told to train his cheap-hire replacements before being let go-- the reason he does a poor job of training them is not revenge. It's not an emotional decision, but a rational one: he wants leverage for the negotiation of severance and references, e.g. "Sure, I'll train my replacement, in exchange for [X]." It's neither ethical nor unethical; just business the way it's been done for centuries.
> Marketing is often what developers brush off as "the other stuff" without really understanding it.

Agreed. Trying to convince programmers to not write it off entirely (such as in the presentation) is a step in the right direction.

FWIW, I think a few languages (Python, for one) have actually been marketed reasonably well.
Because there's a disconnect between the value created by good developers and where the value gets realized. It's the same reason why people don't invest in energy efficiency. Without a holistic view, you can't see all of the benefits that get created so you can't weigh it correctly against the costs (which are clear).
Zynga does that, but plays the role of the house.
Here's a quick rundown:

1) You need to have an account at some domain registrar (the same as his, or anyone else).

2) Look through the help/FAQ section on your registrar on how to transfer a domain to their service

3) Initiate the process, where you may need an "authorization code", which your friend can get from his registrar, to approve the process

4) If the domain (at his registrar) is not set as "locked" (or some other restriction), the domain name has been at his registrar for at least 60 days, if it's not just about to expire, and maybe some other rules), then he should receive an email that someone wants to transfer the domain away from him.

5) He just has to follow whatever process his registrar requests and shortly the domain will be in your hands
It's really very simple:
- Bad developers won't work for less than a certain amount.
- Good developers cost about the same.
- Distinguishing one from the other before hiring is nearly impossible.

If you were one of these magical 10x producitity guys, would YOU hold out for the job offer with 10x the normal salary? Are you sitting at home, right now, by the phone?
The author doesn't get it. It's not about measuring results. Great programmers don't get compensated in proportion to their contributions for the same reason that mediocre CEOs are far over-compensated for theirs.

Programmers have no power over the people who set pay rates while CEOs have a great deal of power.

Being in management gives you leverage. Being in a union gives you leverage. Being a replaceable widget -- even a gold-plated widget that is x10 better than the other widgets -- gives you no leverage.

I hope I've cleared things up for you. Now go out, throw away any Ayn Rand books that you own, and download something by Machiavelli. You'll learn a lot more about the way that capitalism really works.
In fact, good developers sometimes make an infinite multiple of the pay of bad ones.
Alas, so long as there are strokes, falling objects, cyclists (particularly the helmetless ones), football players, chronic drunkards, Alzheimer's patients, and wars -- i.e. most likely forever -- there will be brain damage. Many of the world's accident victims do not make such convenient test subjects as H.M., but there are more than enough of them for psychologists to get by.

The situation is much improved by the existence of modern brain imaging. It's no longer necessary to cut out a hippocampus to demonstrate that it's required for long-term memory formation.

Then there are other amazing tricks enabled by superior real-time imaging technology. I recall a study in which catheters were used to deliver anesthetics directly to individual hemispheres of people's brains.
Yes, but the question the essay is setting out to answer is: what happens when the VCs recover?

I think one of the last points I need to buy into the essay is that it isn't just the starting up costs which have gone down. The commoditization of computing in the cloud means that as long as you're profitable on a per-user basis the cost of scaling is also way down (although the amortized cost might be up).

The other danger is not being able to hire enough of the right people, but the number of people necessary does seem to be going down as the tools get better. The startup I'm working for has just decided to stop looking for funding and do our hiring more slowly over the next year, so I suppose we're a part of that trend.
A robot rights revolution
Can you suggest some resources that provide guidelines for choosing tags/attributes?
One of our writers http://www.twitter.com/annatarkov decided to get on twitter about 2 months ago. She's now got almost 1000 followers, including just about anyone who's anyone in the media in Chicago. She's been promoting the heck out of our little meetup. I'm pretty stoked. Motivate the right people and they'll spread the word about your project!
BitTorrent net meltdown delayed
Where else is on your list of 128 places?
Would somebody be able to explain in slightly less technical words what the issues are to doing something like this? In general, what needs to be done before any computer literate person (A+ knowledge level) can buy hardware like N810, throw android or ubuntu mobile on the device, and use it seemlessly. I've just started to toy with linux and have no knowledge of kernel/driver tweaking or coding, but have wished for something like this, but user friendly, for the last 6 years. Is something like this not far off?
Yes, I'm afraid you are. SOAP is out of control. You can tell how bad it is getting since it was originally named "Simple" which even back in the day was a misnomer. The fact that all mention or pretence of it being simple has gone out the window is symptom.

Here's a particularly egregious example of a SOAP structure I'm familiar with but I must stress I did not design:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
<SOAP-ENV:Body>
<MarkLastPhotoInRollResponse xmlns="http://localhost/api/soap/eyefilm" />
</SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

That's what? More than a hundred bytes of data to encode what can only be described as one byte of payload? Insanity.

REST has some good points to make. There's a lot of importance in not trying to impose excess state in applications that are primarily going to be used over HTTP talking to traditional web servers. However, the best thing about REST is that it doesn't say _anything_ about how the data ought to be encoded.

Of course people can abuse this by using pointless and stupid formats like JSON, but hey if you don't want your application to have reasonable performance, it isn't my problem.

Those of us who still have to worry about CPU cycles and RAM and the cost bandwidth realise that you can define data formats that have useful properties like streamability, that is to say you can define parsers with the semantics /Either read this structure now if you have enough data, or call me back when you do have enough so I can parse it then./ A property I consider paramount in any asynchronous application that uses the network, but is completely lacking in XML. That also gives you the option to skip structures without parsing them, which is helpful. Then there are issues like widths of integers, which people are inclined to forget about when using modern scripting languages. Of course, this all comes back to bite people when they try to use a horrid language like PHP which secretly actually has a fixed width for its integers, but neglects to tell you what it is and has no syntax that lets you choose to be signed or unsigned. sigh
Well, who put themselves in that situation?

Variable. My first job out of school was at an MDC (medium-sized dumb company) where, 3 months in, there was a management change. The new middle-manager began sabotaging the best people-- taking them off their coding projects and putting them on non-coding office work-- in order to bore them out of the company, thus eliminating the people he saw as threats to his position in the future.

The 3 best new hires were laid off within 6 months of this happening, myself for the "crime" of seeking employment elsewhere, one for refusing a "promotion" into an ethically dubious role, and one for reasons too complicated to get into, and all of this was through no fault of their own. Luckily, this was during a great economy, and all 3 of us got better jobs within a few weeks.

No one is required to remain in such a humiliating position.

What if the company says they will give negative references if he doesn't train the replacements? Is this not coercion? This is an unusual case, but it's not entirely uncommon. In the pharmaceutical industry, there've been M&A cases where people kept on at the acquired company were forbidden from giving references for their laid-off colleagues. In BDCs, this sort of political sleaze occurs more often than you'd think. Again, I'm assuming that you're "spoiled" by startups and technology companies, where one's career progress has a high correlation to the quality of one's work, and wherein internal political sleaze is exceedingly rare.

You've missed the point. Ethics that fluctuate with one's career situation aren't ethics to begin with either.

I don't know why "situational ethics" get such a negative review, when all ethics are situational, the situation including the consequences of each option. For example, it's unethical to steal, right? On the other hand, some people must steal in order to avoid starvation, and it's arguably much worse, from an ethical standpoint, to submit oneself to pointless and preventable death. Ethics is about pursuing the morally best option among those that are actually available, and which choice is best depends on the consequences (to oneself, and to others) of each, i.e. the situation.
The biggest threat to those that implement this functionality is twitter itself. If Twitter chooses to do their own payments, I doubt any efforts from Tipjoy or Twitpay could change behavior.
What you wrote does not disagree with the author. He comes to the same conclusion: some developers are much more, even an order of magnitude more, productive than others.

He doesn't get to his real question until the last few paragraphs, which is why don't we see the same pay disparity with developers that we do with other professions? His answer is that measuring who's better is difficult and unreliable.

I admit I was confused, too; since he spends so much time on the issue of are some programmers orders of magnitude better than others, I thought that's what he was questioning. He doesn't get to his real question until the end, and then his answer is weak.
See http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596523206/ and monitor it for updates.
Why men find it difficult to choose their shoes?
Just like women, men often tend to have a particular favorite pair of mens dress shoes that they would often wear no matter what the occasion may be. Unlike women, however, some of the selection of men’s dress shoes can tend to be extremely surprising ranging from sneakers to cowboy boots. While many of them would often get away with this, people are often left scratching their heads as to why they would consider such dress shoes.
The trailer park is the computer
If you're running on Linux, then all threads are processes.
Why great programmers don’t make as much money as soccer stars?
A free forum that just happened to have features that made it a good ad-hoc barter network would be popular.
I'd check out HelpSpot: http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/
Being a Brazilian, I have some ideas for a fair comparison between soccer stars and software engineers. I just submitted the article here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=386910
How was he able to give consent to all this research without the ability to form new memories?

The same way any mentally-incapacitated patient consents to treatment: They or the courts appoint a relative or a guardian to hold medical power-of-attorney, and that person as well as the patient must consent to treatment.

Meanwhile, I'm not about to defend the ethical standards of mid-20th-century brain surgeons, but I will point out that H.M.'s surgeon was hardly operating outside the norms of his time: H.M. had epilepsy, which is a pretty scary disease; understanding of the brain was really poor, and psychosurgery was all the rage. Far more awful things were done in the 1950s and earlier. If you ever want to experience the real-history equivalent of a vampire film, google up the wikipedia entry on Rosemary Kennedy (or, related: Walter Freeman and/or transorbital lobotomy). Warning: I had nightmares for a couple of weeks. Seriously.
Better yet, just have multiple independent parties verifying each other, maintaining servers overseas, and make all transactions electronic.
It's kind of hard to produce a calm response to this article but i will try my best.

For one thing, SOAP (an envelope) cannot be compared to an architectural style. A better correspondence might be:

Architectural Styles: REST vs. RPC

Protocol Stacks: RESTful HTTP, ATOM etc. vs. WS-*

Envelopes: HTTP headers(?) vs. SOAP

For another thing, claiming that ws-* is standards based while REST is not is plainly false. Whereas ws-* includes 50+ not wholy compatible specs, REST is based on few but well corelated specs (XML, HTML, URI, HTTP). The number of spec-pages produced is completely irrelevant. In fact, like lines of code, may be counter-productive. A better measurement may be 'interoperability produced'. On this test, the benefits of REST shine in large distributed systems such as, say, the web.
That's rather a clever solution.. i'm rather annoyed M$ came up with it first :D
Sounds like a great project. You might want to ping the debian team, and see where things currently stand;

If they don't want to accept your auto-packaged debs, you could set up your own repository, and auto-push them there.. That way people could pull in the Ruby Gems from there on a regular basis, as soon as they are auto-updated, without waiting for them to be released officially.

Debian team policy:
http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html

How to create packages:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-debpkg.htm...

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Debian-Binary-Package-Buil...

http://quietsche-entchen.de/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi/CreatingDebianP...

They're basically just tarballs with a pre and postscript, questions via debconf, and the dependencies mapped out in a manifest.
Happiness is Contagious
First time entrepreneurs have 18% chance of success; 2nd time entrepreneurs: 30%
California May Pay With IOUs for Second Time Since Depression
Social Network Profile Costs Woman College Degree
One explanation for extremely large pay packages is that they are the result of a bidding war. If programmers don't get the oversized pay they feel they deserve it's because they haven't manipulated the job market properly or they don't really have the power to manipulate the market. The "top-rank" developers sabotage each other by working for lower pay than they collectively deserve. How could programmers construct a bidding war for their services? One way that borrows from the sports analogy is to work in an industry where there is a winner-take-all payoff structure. While one 10x programmer may be only slightly better than any other 10x programmer, in a winner-take-all business it's worth the trouble to bid higher than one's competitors for such people.
I'm glad to say I've been there and was able to have a conversation with some of the maintainers of the antique computer systems. Amazing experience, wholy recommended for people in Britain.
Programmers have no power over the people who set pay rates while CEOs have a great deal of power.

Being in management gives you leverage. Being in a union gives you leverage.

I hadn't thought of this. Personally, I see programmers as workers that should be in small, elite groups, like surgeon wards. OTOH, surgeons have a cartel that programmers do not.
Shhh! Ixnay on the awyerslay! If you name them they might be empowered to arrive, like demons, or Kibo!
Would somebody be able to explain in slightly less technical words what the issues are to doing something like this?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: the trend is for people to start thinking of cell-phone hardware just as a regular personal-computer, but with a different form factor. However, the architecture of the hardware is not yet standardized like the IBM-PC is/was.

Think of Android as being DOS. What we need now is to have more manufacturers developing devices that are "DOS compatible". That will mean that they are producing hardware and have the drivers for the system.

Once you get that critical mass, you'll see "distributions" of Android much like we see distributions of Linux. These distributions will contain a compilation of drivers for the most common hardware, and will load what's appropriate on boot time.
Ad losses send news industry into a tailspin
I think complexity is a necessary part of the equation, but you can push it into different places. The key is to keep the APIs and libraries simple. Unix got it right. Lots of small utilities that are designed to be chained together.

It seems to me that we will loose to software in this respect ultimately. We just can't fit everything we need in our short term memory sometimes.
What if it rains?
The 10:1 ratio is an oversimplification. In some problem domains and with some languages, it's 25+:1 (or infinity:1); for others, it's only 1.5-2:1. Also, though a project can be accomplished 10x faster and better if given to the right person, it's not the same people who are 10x more productive on every project. Finally, one's position on the scale improves (at least within a given field) with experience, so that the first 3 months in a new area are often less than 25% as useful as the next 3.

Mediocre developers are short-term money losers, but some of them (the ones with curiosity and intelligence, whose mediocrity is a result of inexperience) will become great hackers, and thus, money-makers who, if treated well, will stick around for a salary much less than their value to their operation. Mediocre programmers are "overpaid" because this "call option" exists.
Why great programmers don’t make as much money as soccer stars?

because most of us think abs is a numerical function not a muscle group.
That was a great interview.

Biotech, unlike web apps, does require A LOT of capitol.

But in the last part of the interview Alan guesses that the future of biotech is smarter and more narrowly targeted products.

And imho, that's a great guess.

What's so interesting about that is, that smarter and more targeted in my mind goes right along with smaller.

And smaller walks hand in hand with cheaper i.e. less capitol.

And if you lower the barriers of entry for biotech that means we could see an explosion in innovation from startups and small companies.
The title is pure bait. The woman did not lose her college degree, she lost her teaching assistant position. Even that happened because of poor performance reviews, not because of the photo. It sounds like the university did her a favor in re-classifying her B.A. from Education to English, hardly a surprise since she could not teach. Honestly, the only controversy in this whole story is the misleading title.
Although: these cycles are fragmented, and overlap a lot, and it is only really possible to see what happened in retrospect.
Linus Torvalds: Debugging hell
This whole social-network photo/video thing will be biting my generation in the ass for many, many years to come --especially as we get older and seek higher positions that involve more public scrutiny.

I'm pretty sure the de-facto way of addressing it will be along the lines of "They say your college years are the best years of your life...". Or at least that's how I'm planning on dealing with it =)
As do actors, where the productivity varies even more widely.
> (No word on whether employees at the new centers will be required to wear wifebeaters or carry around 30-packs of Busch Light.)

oh jesus I lol'd at that
Hm. I've never used any. The issues I ran into were along the lines of SOAP output with XML structures that alternated within the same document using attributes or child nodes for properties of the object (likely, the overall response was a result of two different programmers' output and they didn't compare notes).

There were also some instances of things like a parent having a child node and the child having a name sub-node instead of a name attribute on the child, where the parent had a name attribute. I realize there are no inviolable rules about when to use an attribute versus a tag, but what I ran into was inconsistency within a single response object. My point above was that the envelope is a standard, but the contents can be poorly designed and is domain-specific--the same is also true for REST.
While mid-October was well after the "crash" there would have been no impact on founder's and their dreams. The types of founders that YC encourages are recent college grads who have not learned anything about economic cycles. They do not look at what is happening to housing, the stock market, the bond market, and decide to hunker down and get a job or go on to grad school.

Drawing conclusions from a single data point, proposals received in October, is as faulty as deciding the world is careening into climatic disaster based on drops in temperature measured in fractions of a degree C over the last few years.
5 Bay Area firms named 2009 Technology Pioneers
Ask HN:Is Google Reader broken on the iPhone for you.
Google pushed out a google reader update, but now text does not wrap on the iphone. This makes it impossible to read feeds
I get nervous every time I use Math.sin().

At least it's not Math.sin!(), which seems more unrepentant.
What also has to be taken into consideration is the HR department, and their company policies that do not allow for any deviation from the policy. Set pay ranges for a title, inability to promote a person more than once per year, inability to provide an increase in pay greater than 15%, so on and so forth.
I went there, maybe 5 years ago, and had a tour from someone who actually worked there during WW2. Absolutely fascinating - I cannot recommend it highly enough.
The Saudi Arabia of Lithium
What would the union be, though? 99% of programmers would not be overly ecstatic at 10x payments for stars. Are you suggesting a Rockstar Programmer Union, MENSA qualification required to join?

Perhaps what Rockstar Programmers need are Agents.
hacked by security team
mihansat
A weakened economy needs strengthened training in the humanities
Measuring things this way is completely wrong. All lines are not created equal. Finding a bug in 10 million lines of legacy code might take me a week to do a 2 line fix, whereas I have days where I can bang out 2-3k of mindless interface code. Sometimes I spend 2 weeks doing research to write a few hundred lines of code.

I find this sort of rhetoric honestly reeks of inexperience. Lines is a horrible metric for measuring productivity. Speed for finishing something isn't a particularly good metric either, since I've met a lot of hackers that can go on a coding binge (myself included) and accomplish as much in a weekend as they could in a couple of normal reasonably productive weeks.
You too can be a Management Consultant
Lies, damn lies, and Harvard Business School statistics.