skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. "Litigation".
Developers is one thing, but how about sysadmin work? I think I've seen it there, too. I looked at the tickets worked by a group of people from June 1 to December 15 of a year far in the past. The counts looked like this:

119 348 353 409 515 559 572 634 722 779 830 1004 1029 1169 1345 1487 2096

That's a total of 13970 tickets closed by 17 techs. If you split it evenly, that's 821 each, or about 5.8%. The lowest tech only handled 0.85% of the load. The highest tech handled 15%! If you use the extremes, that's a 17x difference. It also means the top tech did almost 2.5x the "fair share" load of 5.8%.

Now, to be clear, tickets are not fungible. One ticket may be simple and another might take days to finish. Still, when there's that much of a difference, odds are the person at the top is doing all of them regardless of the complexity. That's the only way to find enough things to do.
Lady Gaga Turned Down $1 Million To Perform During RNC
Real-Time In Place Editing For Rails
Meanwhile the the dems have advanced strategy and computer programs and the Republs are trying these wasteful stunts.
Personally I think emailing Tim Cook will give you nothing more than emotional satisfaction.
Very very cool. First feature request: Support for Objective-C syntax highlighting :)
So? Why do you even need the Internet? You could just SMS them? or why do you even need SMS? Why not just send them snail mail letters or see them in person?

There are certain pros and cons -- differeing levels of convenience being one of them -- of every communications medium and your response completely ignores that.
Good analogy. I still don't think they "get social" - they watch numbers and react to those - which misses far too many nuances.
They'd be useless without a hard-copy block chain to back them up.
Frommer buys brand back from Google to keep it in print
>something like 90% of them were found to be bogus

Reference?
I'm all in favor of fighting groundless patent infringement claims, but a bit surprised to see so much commentary from Rackspace about a pending legal matter. The normal lawyer response would be "we don't comment on pending litigation."
My wife worked with a guy who closed a ticket about closing tickets. If you're measured purely on the basis of number of tickets closed, you can game the system. Replaced users mouse, ticket closed. Or, upgraded network software on 300 machines, ticket closed. If someone is doing twice as many tickets as the next guy, I'd assume he is doing a lot of BS work, not that he's twice as fast.
>"If you were web-savvy in the late 90s and early 00s you could have created online payment systems, web stores, a search engine, or a social network."

Brin/Page, Bezos (or Graham/Morris), Musk...these weren't just people with web saavy. They all had advanced degrees or for Bezos "just" a Princeton degree and eight years on Wall Street.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay, 1971
Maybe b/c they do not believe that such an agreement is enforceable. The majority of States have "anti-slapp" laws that in limited circumstances protect the Freedom of speech over agreements/contracts (generally one has the right to contract confidentiality which is enforceable).

For example I had a case where I represented a plaintiff suing over breach of a confidential settlement, b/c I attached the confidential settlement as an exhibit the defendant counter-sued for disclosing the confidential settlement. I got their counter-suit dismissed as a matter of law b/c the anti-slapp protected the freedom of speech to disclose the confidential agreement to the court for the purpose of enforcement.

At this time the Federal Government does not have a anti-slapp equivalent, and most IP cases are federal; therefore, it might be actionable to disclose confidential information in Federal Court for enforcement, maybe under seal...if a Federal practitioner happens to have experience with this issue, please shed some light.
Bingo, that's exactly what I was looking for!
I feel like I should say something in-jokey here.

I'm pretty keen on dry needling of trigger points, given how many things it's fixing for me. But I'm wary of seeming like a new convert -- I think people should consider it as one possible cause of pain, often undiagnosed because it's not a commonly taught concept.
On mobile at least, Safari is already effectively its own browser family. Even though it's webkit-based, it has a huge range of quirks and caveats that don't apply to its desktop brother. Nothing really new here. What we will hopefully get is greater parity between desktop and mobile Chrome versions (which is already quite good), which I think will end up being an overall win.
Ideally, screen sharing will be nice, but we will have to wait for the proposed spec to evolve for that.
It doesn't take much time wasted on Twitter, HN, or chatting up co-workers of the opposite sex to turn into a 1/10x developer
Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 available now
Of course there are developers that are vastly more productive and effective than others, this is true of every industry, not just developing. Consider two different developers. One designs and implements a highly useful feature which gives their product a key competitive edge in the market and does so in a way which is elegant, efficient, and robust. The other implements a poorly thought out feature that is a borderline bug even if implemented to spec, takes a long time implementing it, and eventually produces code that is hard to understand and full of defects, sucking up tons of developer time and slowing down development velocity as it soaks up resources every time it needs to be fixed.

The difference is not merely one of a 10x productivity imbalance, it's a huge effectiveness difference on the scale of thousands or even millions of times.

Looking for "10x productivity" developers is a side-show, it's treating software like factory work. Look for developers who can work more effectively. Developers who you can rely on to deliver a product that is absolutely better along every axis than the competition. Developers who won't just pump lines of code into the repo but who will actively work to improve the quality of the code base over time and increase the total development velocity of the company. Developers who will take the time to look at the internal processes and tools that the company uses and seek to improve them when necessary. Developers that will serve as strong mentors to other developers on the team, and improve their quality as well. And too developers who will be looked up to and admired and will serve as a reason for why other developers enjoy working at the company.
Interesting. On the one hand, brief quotes are fair use. Using someone's ideas isn't even covered by copyright law. So I think it's the author that's being a bit heavy-handed, but on the other hand, I probably wouldn't retain the services of a lawyer to keep Appendix 5 of some brochure nobody reads -- it's definitely possible that the consortium copied a bit too much of the work, turning it from fair use to copyright infringement.

One thing's for sure: there will be two winners in this case. And it won't be the author or the consortium.
Agile is the current day water fall model. I mean in spirit on in factual procedures.

>>I could have easily been 10x more productive if I didn't have to endure four hour sprint planning meetings

I completely understand this feeling. The problem is so plain and simple. There are teams that win because of heroics, they achieve something big. Those management types who lack the chops to be heroes simply try to turn heroics in a process.

So what they basically do is, watch a team win. Instead of realizing its the interesting/challenging nature of work combined with things like lesser distractions, strong deadlines and well aligned monetary incentives that count, they rater look into common set of patterns that they would do. The net result is they end with a really boring process.

If you think to be successful you have to do X, Y and Z steps you are doing it wrong. X, Y and Z are catalysts, enablers or at most methods to keep you sane while you pursue a higher purpose.

My latest irritation is manager types getting too obsessed with Unit testing, it reminds of XML and the way it was abused.
This specific project is html/js development, and I have a potential android or ios (or both) project in the future.

Do you have any experience with any of those?
Facebook does not sell user data regardless of what you may have heard.

See: https://www.facebook.com/help/152637448140583/
Do you even Bitcoin? One of the main features of Bitcoin is that it can't be manipulated by a central authority like a bank or government (ie: they can't steal from the people by printing money).
He also goes further in this explanation in another work (whose name eludes me), in so far as some races deliberately seed the galaxy with humans so that when a race such as ours breaks free of their solar system, they don't get all hegemonic because there are already humans everywhere.

This saves many nasty wars.
It's actually double hashed - sha256(sha256(x)). So any asic they already have wont be optimized for bitcoin.
Well it might not be possible for a decentralized crypto currency to have a non-fluctuating value; at least at the beginning. Since it is decentralized it cannot be declared "worth something" by fiat; and therefore needs to garner its value organically. It makes sense you want to stay away, but bitcoin is still super early stages and growing.. if ti plataeus or at least becomes more or less predictable over time due to "finding its price" then those with your concerns will be more apt to adopt.

This isn't really a flaw of bitcoin but rather of markets/people.

Once bitcoin gets near some sort of saturation point in terms of adoption, you are likely to see a much more stable valuation. Now though, it's the wild west and its neigh impossible to separate the speculation from the fundamentals.

I will say though that I don't see wild fluctuations in bitcoins price as a flaw in bitcoin. I see it as inevitable for any currency bootstrapping itself from nothing to something. The path from zero to any valuation is bound to riddled with crazy swings as people get hopeful and then scared.

Consider: if bitcoin had instead had demurrage or increasing rates of inflation, how much less likely would the early adopters have stayed around? It's all well and good to consider ideals, but creating a tradeable, limited commodity out of thin air that people actually want is no small task and it has not been proven that there is another way to do it. If there is no incentive to be an early adopter, there is no reason to take the risk; you might as well just wait until it is widely accepted to start accepting inflato-coin; but with the possibility of dizzying-gains there is a strong incentive for people to use bitcoin before it is proven (which is only slightly less true today than 2 years ago); and this incentive is -- while not part of the technical appeal of bitcoin --inseparable from its success.
They create a more efficient market. Ensuring, for example, that the future price of a commodity matches the spot price when the future expires.

They provide an anonymous financial service.
I feel I am in the same boat as you. I belive myself to be a very average (possibly less so) developer.

Even believing that I cannot understand the amount of crap I have been forced to rewrite because it simply does not work.

Just recently a expensive contractor was brought in to write a series of simple CRUD screens using .NET MVC and KendoUI. It appeared to work, but if you even scratched the surface you quickly discovered it was almost totally broken. Further down it consisted of one big class as a service layer, raw SQL rather then LINQ, and a jumble of interdependent hell. I spat the dummy after 5 days of fixing bugs (trying to avoid changing too much) and scrubbed each page one after the over and ended up with something modular which I could actually support. It took me 2 weeks to scrub (80% of the codebase was touched or rewitten) what took this contractor 3 months to write.

I am with you. If that's normal (its not the first time this has happened to me) then what sort of dev am I if I know I am not a rockstar?
A Freelancers Journey–Building a Sustainable Web Development Business
Have you got links to those? I'd be interested to see them since I'm in that group. For me personally weight lifting seems to have prevented a lot of injuries that I used to get.
Yes, a film reviewer establishes the merit of a film based on his own subjective opinion (though he did review relatively, taking the movie's intended audience into account). What, do you think review isn't subjective? He enjoyed the film and found it deserving of merit, in his opinion. His biases showed on rare occasion, but on the whole his opinion was a fairly trustworthy bellwether.

Your continued thwapping on his score of the film that you oh-so-despise betrays your obvious fault in that you only cared about his reviews when they weren't to your liking, because anybody who's read Ebert for any length of time knows that he hated the scoring and added it against his will. All of his scores must be taken in the context of the review, and he always said (nay, demanded) as much. In the context of the review, you know, the words he wrote describing his experience, we find this:

[...] the characters in "The Phantom Menace" inhabit a plot that is little more complex than the stories I grew up on in science-fiction magazines. The whole series sometimes feel like a cover from Thrilling Wonder Stories, come to life. The dialogue is pretty flat and straightforward, although seasoned with a little quasi-classical formality, as if the characters had read but not retained "Julius Caesar." I wish the "Star Wars" characters spoke with more elegance and wit (as Gore Vidal's Greeks and Romans do), but dialogue isn't the point, anyway: These movies are about new things to look at.

It's almost as if he understands the film's flaws or something! It's a completely different perspective when you consume his opinion as it's meant to be consumed. He spoke out very strongly, all his life, against people like you who walked away with the score as a conclusion (for good reason, obviously).

I originally said all that and replaced it with "Your comment sucks.", because I knew you'd fight with me on this, even though it's entirely pointless. I am aware this is Hacker News, but thank you for the patronizing reminder. Your comment still sucks. Your followup sucks, too, particularly the "go back to Reddit" tone (the irony of a person describing Roger Ebert as "useless" on Hacker News, then pulling the Hacker News card to criticize my comment is not lost on me).
I think you missed the meat of my point.
I find this a challenging read. If the guy isn't cutting it in the position he is in, then its reasonable to ask him to move on, but I like to believe that everyone can improve, just as I believe not everyone wants to improve.

In my career I've seen developers who were 'average' become way above average after their boss left. This was due to the weird psychological box their manager had managed to get them pinned into.

A friend of mine who is now a VC told me about dogs which were put into a box where anything they did caused the floor to shock them. Eventually they just lay on the floor quivering. This sounds horrible and cruel (and it is) and sadly I've seen managers do the same things to their people. Every time they try to do something they get yelled at, and never with any guidance just a "don't do that again!" sort of shock from the floor. Eventually they can't do anything.

It is hard to rehabilitate those people but it is possible. It takes a bit of patience to get their confidence back up that they can in fact be excellent contributors. But boy is it painful. Both for them and their new manager.

The bottom line for me is that people work at different speeds and different levels. When their tasks are well matched to their strengths they do well. I once characterized two folks I knew as a 'bubble sort' kinda guy and an 'insertion sort' kinda guy. Strangely the bubble sort guy could write code really really quickly, and that was good because he took a long time to arrive at a solid solution. The insertion sort kinda guy worked more slowly and methodically but still got to the solution in about the same amount of time. If you looked at their commit histories you might thing the insertion sort kinda guy was a 1/10th developer but if you look at the milestone delivery rate you'd see he was just as productive as the bubble sort kinda guy. Not a particularly deep insight that people are different I know.
Shortsighted assumption. Rackspace is bit bigger than one guy answering phone calls, replying to tickets, administering racks, configuring new ones, procuring bills and mopping the floor.
Don't forget: open 300 tickets, one for each machine.
__import__("os").execv("/usr/bin/env", ["env"])

Gives you a few clues as well
(b0ttler0cket):

What's the next big thing? It may not be all that hard to perceive. You're on Hacker News so you may be biased immediately to think it has something directly to do with programming and computers. Take a step back from that first, and you can immediately think of a couple.

1. Privacy/advertisements. (how are people going to sell things to us?)

2. Press/print materials. (print? it's gonna be old news right? save the trees?)

3. Security (everything's in the open now. how do we adjust? how do we protect information?)

4. Health (we shouldn't have as many problems as we do)

5. Transportation (our cities are getting bigger and "rural" is a word that basically means "hard to transport to.")

6. Environment (our environment is imminently approaching toxic and uninhabitable levels of pollution)

7. Energy (our resources are rapidly and imminently depleting)

8. Economics (crypto-what?)

9. Architecture (these buildings need to get way higher and more sophisticated. we're going to hit 9B ppl soon. rural chinese farmers are swarming to the cities (read that in an article). it's the worldwide trend. the buildings of the future:the buildings of today::the buildings of today:17th century colonial houses)

10. Engineering (okay, so a transatlantic underwater tunnel would be the single highest costing thing humankind would have ever attempted. even still, what more can we do? is the San-Francisco bridge et al. the best we got?)

11. Education (this is covered by every politician and so should be self-explanatory. more wide-spread systems of education. online is a start, but I read in an article (I think posted on HN) that the drop out rate is too high.)

12. Food (more people, more crops. more crops, more transportation, more oil, more livestock, more energy expended. Not to mention, bio-engineered food that produces more vitamins/essential nutrients - depending on who you ask, this is either a blessing or a curse)

I feel like categorization is helpful here. You ask for the next big thing, but that question is so enormous. One person could say one thing, but how could another person argue against it being the next biggest? Is there a metric with which we can compare impact? And impact on what? Society? Businesses? Individual people? Microorganisms? I think if you categorize like this you'll have a much easier time thinking and ranking ideas. Comparing the next ideas in architecture and the next ideas in food development is quintessential apples and oranges. Here we're making it so that we can make better subjective judgments about what's a more important idea.
How many do you get? Isn't it just one?
this is really well stated.

i've noticed the exact same thing. most programmers at the baseline level of proficiency take about the same amount of time to perform any particular, well specified task. its the stuff that isn't well specified where the huge differences come into effect.
This approach also lets you move the big thing (or hard thing) to a time when you are at your best and have few interruptions. I personally like to do the hard or more unknown bits sooner, and sometimes I even save up the easy stuff for those after-lunch hours when my brain feels mushier.
Forgive me if this is a joke that I'm not getting, but they wouldn't be useless at all:

1) Bitcoin is a p2p distributed network with nodes all over the world. Even if a nuclear attack took out the entire US, the network would continue to work as long as segments of the Internet did (and recall that the Internet was originally designed to protect US data networks from nuclear attack).

2) It's quite simple to spend Bitcoins as long as you have access to a Bitcoin node (see above) and a copy of the 32-byte private key string corresponding to the public Bitcoin address the coins were sent to. This short string of characters can be written on paper, etched into stone, whatever.
Dell taking feedback for next XPS developer edition
WordPress 3.6 beta available
I like what this allows for daily tracking. It makes it really easy to see if you got through everything you wanted to on a daily basis.
Apple don't seem to have done anything particularly innovative in a while.
I've worked at Facebook for four years. No, no we don't, no matter what the "guy you know" says. Harrison already provided you with our very strongly worded, official claims to that effect.

Since you're the one claiming otherwise, how about an actual, verifiable example? "Company X paid Facebook $Y for user data Z" doesn't sound like an unreasonably specific request.
Do you actually know what you pretend to know, or are you holding a grudge against Apple for an old transgression with KHTML that they've since done did a great deal of work to put right?
I'm rather tired of this, "developer productivity," rhetoric. It places software developers on a scale that allows micro-managers to perceive people as cogs in a machine. And I don't think that is fair given that we are all capable people. Each one of us will experience times when we are very productive and deeply inspired while other times we will struggle with completing trivial and meaningless tasks. To put ourselves in such absolute figures is disingenuous.