skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd in no way claim I'm a 10x developer. Hell I question whether I am a 1x developer, but it's not really as simple as that.

First of all the notion that 10x doesn't exist is sorta crap. This may come across as pretty shocking but I don't dedicate every waking moment to development. There is an expectation from many people that being a developer is a 24/7 job and a lot of kids buy into that. If someone spends 10x the effort of me because they honestly feel their career is more important than the rest of their life, then I wouldn't be suprised if they were considerably more productive.

I like to think effort correlates to intelligence and skill but I guess it isn't that simple either. Many people learn certian things, while I choose to focus on others. In the end we may emerge somewhere in the middle but everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. Thus whether you're 10x more productive than me depends on the domain of knowledge which we're utilising.

Folks judge productivity differently. Sadly this often comes from a managment perspective which relates directly to the speed the thing they wanted first appears to them as usable. That's fairly logical from their point of view, but we all know it's folly. Personally I live in a world of duracell bunnies coding up a mess without any thought of security of maintainability. More often than not management tend to believe they're more productive but in reality they just make everyones life harder in the long run.

Finally it comes down to motivation. I'm working a crud app for day rates, I'm in no rush. That's not to say I draw it out longer than it should take but I work my hours at a reasonable pace then I go home. Give me an interesting problem and maybe a vested interesting in completing it and I'll work harder and work on it at home. Suddenly I may be that 10x developer you were talking about afterall, though I'm probably not going to spend my entire life like that.

Personally I think it's pretty silly to propagate the myth that people are useless if they aren't as quick as others. Sure the scale is huge, but the real problem is people aren't rewarded based on their value but based on crappy metrics like "market rates". Next up is even if management were willing to reward based on value, it's actually very difficult for them to do in the vast majority of cases.
When you delete your account, the data is actually removed. As part of the recent privacy audit, the Irish DPC reviewed the account deletion framework and verified that it does indeed work:

http://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/21-09-12--Facebook-Ireland... (section 2.10 - page 41)
These discussions are worse than useless. People with made-up numbers confront people with unreliable anecdotes. Productivity means, very simply, an average of X widgets per hour. Does such a measure even exist for developers? The discussion can apply to such varied situations as:

- how fast can a developer add new features to a system they built themselves

- how fast can they add features to a system designed by somebody else

- how fast do they fix simple bugs

- how fast do they find horribly complicated bugs

- how fast can they architect a reliable, multithreaded backend

- how fast can they work with program management to design a good UI

etc. etc. etc.

These are often conflicting requirements. People who develop a very elaborate personal coding style will be fast on single projects, but slow to work with other people's code. Those who are methodical and question all assumptions will find hard bugs much sooner, but waste time on simple bugs. Those who can construct elaborate systems in their head often have trouble tweaking hundreds of little CSS details for a single ticket. So I would venture that, for any pair of moderately experienced developers, it's almost always possible to find a pair of tasks such that one of them is twice (or even ten times) as fast as the other. Let's not even bring up how much the incentive structure can vary, even among people in the same department.

The example that the article brings is terribly vague and uninstructive. Is that guy, for his whole life, going to be a "1/10 developer"? We never get an idea why he was slow in the first place. Was he lazy? incompetent? concentrating on his studies instead? not motivated by the incentive structure? risk averse because breaking the system carried harsher personal consequences than developing it excruciatingly slowly? The author doesn't even figure out the roots of the problem in the one case he's familiar with, and purports to give advice to everyone else based on it...
This is such an excellent point. Media Queries have been bugging the hell out of me lately for a reason I couldn't put my finger on, and I think you just nailed it
This redesign is a disaster. The contrast is horrible and the listing pages look like a blurry cloud of pastels.

They would have been better off adding useful UI changes such as a checkbox at the top that can select all issues, advanced filtering options by label, a built-in UI for converting issues to pull requests, or even a way to add/remove a label on an issue without having to re-select every single label from scratch.

Instead they push out a muddy, unreadable theme with no option to switch back. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who enjoys this new theme.
Bitcoins are just a right to participate in a digital crypto economy. They don't have any value in themselves. Its like holding passes to a show in the big theater. If the show doesn't start you passes are worthless. If there is any meaningful possibility of a show in the theater, you might get lucky for holding those passes. The main problem is that people who will participate in the show also need to get the passes to actually act out the show but if everyone just keep holding their passes for no good reason, well then there may not be a show.

From many bitcoins forums, people are hoping that its USD rate climb to $1000 or even $1 million, which is pretty ridiculous. People who have thousands of bitcoins, can probably keep holding on to them after selling 50% of them. But people who gonna buy it for more than $100 , they gonna panic at a first sign of decline. I suspect its not that far off.
Plagiarism isn't necessarily a copyright violation. "Borrowing" ideas in academic publications can become plagiarism at some point. Commercial "copying" has different rules than in academia.

In the post, it looks like CPBR copied large blocks of text, then accused the original author of copying them.
Weil es ein bisschen lustiger ist. :)
> Every data structure inside the system is handled by reading and slicing around the contents of the text files.

This is quite common for mainframe systems, only because many mainframe applications are written in COBOL and that is the file format COBOL prefers.
Not knowing the exact firm I would still debate that its purly mathmatical. _Every_ professional I have talked to has pretty much said that no matter how good your math there is still additional information required other then the raw data about the security.

Also I am talking about trading not market making which can be done automatically, market making only works when you can beat the other guys at making deals and yes you can do that with pure numbers, but again that's not really what were discussing here.
Isn't that the same as a dollar bill?
I can't find a source for your quote, but he seems to consider quite a bit of debate in this article: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_neve...

He also clarifies that he thinks video games can in principle be art, but that no video game yet made could hold its own among the great works of art.
Well, yeah, that's why I said tickets aren't fungible.

Still, when you have someone hopping on them as quickly as they're opened while someone else just grabs one every hour or two, something is wrong. What if I told you the "one every hour or two" person was doing the dumbest, simplest ones, while the top tech was doing the hardest ones (in addition to everything else)? It happened.
I don't think it will be that bad. WebKit is already pretty well established, when they're this far along I doubt they'll diverge much. For the most part, even Firefox and WebKit render the same, even though they have no common lineage. This isn't going to be like IE6 vs Firefox.
Yeah, that changes everything.
Fundraising in the Series A Crunch – ROBGO.ORG
And the most important aspect was that their product wasn't bullshit: It was actually really great, self hosted web analytics.
Bitcoin adoption analyzed in terms of Austrian Theory
I think many of us have misconceptions about what drives someone to commit suicide, and thus it becomes a taboo mental health topic which isn't healthy. Often it can be a behavior that could be triggered by anything from drugs to mental disorders, and there's even a feeling that genetics may play a role.

I had a wonderful friend who passed away because of this and the one thing that it taught me was to talk about it. I'd urge everyone reading this to at least read up on the wikipedia page on the topic to educate yourself and get an overview:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide
Yes, but dollar bill is running a successful show for the last 2 hundred years without any blackouts, while BitCoin need to START the show in the first place. It needs to sort of start a sustainable chain reaction.
EDIT: But the bitcoin deflation has introduced so much resistance to this reaction. Each digital wallet is like an atom, there has to be some force to break the atom and keep the chain reaction going, but due to the deflation, each atom is requiring more and more energy to break (spend bitcoins).
What about the current mantras of "fire fast", and "culture fit" as the most important quality of an employee. It seems like that doesn't lend itself to working through problems in a deliberate way or taking much responsibilty for the hiring process. To me, honestly, it sounds like throw a bunch of shit at the wall as fast you can as see what sticks.

Trendy bullshit advice or truth to it?
Thanks, this is exactly what I wanted to know. You make a good point about the social rules. The biggest hole in the entire system is the network is still dictated entirely by these rules and the main client is the vessel in which all these rules are set.

But its not set in stone and the lead developers do have a huge amount of control.

Also many disagreements in the forum about the max block size and blocking Satoshi Dice do worry me.
Ah, I assumed CPBR replied with a DMCA counternotice. Claiming they wrote the text is probably not going to end well for them.

(I just realized: isn't this article guilty of exactly what the author thinks is wrong? That should be fun to watch.)
Again you make a good point. It seems the 51% attack problem is glossed over a lot in the forums. I guess everyone is hoping that after a couple of years there will be millions of ASIC devices and this will be enough to ensure the 51% issues. But of course it can never be fully solved.
I once had a professor who remarked that if you have a large enough population, the distribution of their skills will form a normal distribution. The difference is that, in some fields, the difference between a genius and a dud is much smaller than others.
When the broad market is rising by over 10% annually, it is very difficult to come up with a trading strategy that looses money.

For example, buying SPY and holding it for the same period would have outperformed your algorithm.
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.

This was a study done by Seligman et al and is known as a psychological phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

Scarily, even mentioning this brings flashbacks of when I was part of an entire team that was ruined by it. The pattern that emerged was that a particular senior architect who had the ear of management was perceived as the 10X contributor, even though the misdirection and hostility from him reduced the rest of the team to 1/10 productivity. Most of the other developers were entirely capable but realized the complete futility of their efforts in the face of this kind of management.
I feel the same way. It's as much to do with our getting old as it is with theirs.
It's very difficult when someone you know in real life becomes a news story. People that have never met them will pass judgement, including the journalists who write about them. But the inarguable fact is that people are interested in this story, and there is probably much to be gained from being more open about the stresses of running your own company.

I can see how seeing his name again would be very unwelcome, and I absolutely sympathise. But I think it is an unfortunate fact of life. If you knew him well, nothing you will ever see written on the web about him will match the person you knew.
25 at the moment.
I doubt getting "300 people" to spam Tim Cook is the best way to approach this.
Sorry, but saying that "it is very difficult to come up with a trading strategy that loses money" means you really have no credible experience with running trading algorithms that use real money.
This is really amazing. Thanks for this.
Exactly OPs point. I think they meant that in the event of a crash, you won't be left with much. Same as for the case of hyper-inflation of a currency, or a devaluation in precious metals.
Do your care to address his point? If the S&P 500 genuinely outperforms "your" (his? someone's) algorithm, said algorithm is a priori unimpressive.
Show HN: Simple hack to let Pinterest users get followers
>This is a big difference, one that hasn't been examined too well, and what has been written on it is not encouraging[0].

Random numbers is just about as close as you can get to true anonymity. In fact, I'd say that it is as close as you can reasonably expect to get no matter how you try to achieve it.

It's also trivial to dis-associate your Bitcoins from a particular cryptographic identity, through the use of mixing services.
where double spending a coin reveled the user's identity and allowed for prosecution.

because identities are a secure system? This also allows for malicious attacks where an innocent third party is made to look like a double spender and have their identity revealed.
If I'm understanding kpumuk's comment elsewhere in the thread[1], if you got notified/test positive on their check page[2], then you are at risk if you've reused those credentials, since they were grandfathered hashes with weak protection.

> [...] but small amount of account records have had passwords encrypted with outdated algorithm (basically SHA1 + salt), so we preemptively reset their passwords and sent out emails to all affected users.

> This is how we define "compromised" - people which had their passwords hash with old algorithm, which is relatively easy to crack.

I came up positive on the check, which does make sense since i signed up a long time ago and don't often/ever sign in generally, so they wouldn't have had the opportunity to upgrade my hash after moving to better schemes.

Happily it was a 1-tiem/throwaway password though, but bit scary that it's the first list (that I'm aware of) I'm actually on.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5493536

[2] http://www.scribd.com/password/check
Facebook phone keynote
Absolutely. The parts that really bugs me is when I take on bi challenges. My biggest challenge so far has been building Nuuton. It took me months of thinking and reasoning the data flow and structures. On top of that, I had to pick which language fit the problem, rather which problem fit the language. My original choice was Lisp, because it allowed me to create DSLs. Something that would have really helped in building each individual sub-system. But at the same time, Lisp is not as simple to pick as it should. It has libraries, and an amazing amount of data ready to be researched. Yet, it does not seem (to me) as complete, in terms of libraries and community, as Python. Which was my second choice. Python has all of the libraries I needed. Sure, I had to play by Python's rules, but libraries and frameworks like Django really do save development time.

Them, I had to research the options available within Python that would allow for the architecture I had designed. Every sub-system is simply a black box that reads/returns data in a standard format. From the crawlers, to the data store, to the actual web app, everything is simply an API. Ultimately, I chose the Django rest-framework, because it had a lot of features built into it. Thing like authentication, a permissions system, throttling, and so on. Those were things I did not have to write. A simple set of Models/Views and I was off. With Lisp, I would have had to write that, and end up with a code base that would not have been as good as that one.

Nuuton is huge, in terms of sub-systems. But small at the same time. Everything is divided neatly, and is very simple to follow. The queue sub-system that handles requests/responses from the crawlers is very simple to follow. Plus you can actually see how the data is collected, cleaned, formatted, analyzed, stored, served, and modified.

But I'm not a rockstar, cowboy, or even great. I'm average.But worse is that I have this inherent thought that I will never become any better. Even though years ago I was writing Visual Basic apps (you know the type). This due to how much I struggle. Every day I have to research some class, or some method. Can it do that? What's parameters does it take? Does it fit the design? And sometimes I just write the damn thing and end up throwing it out because I realize it is too complicated. I also understand that I will always struggle. But I will never quit. Do rockstars struggle? Do the people that graduate MIT and go on to work on Google struggle? I don't know. Maybe if they do, they dont struggle as much as me. Guess thats the difference. Average struggles a lot, rockstars not so much. Yet I know thats bullshit. Who am I to question my own insecurities?
IANAL, but, doesn't this at one point border on extortion? There's an implied threat to cause harm by force unless you do x. Again, not a lawyer. Maybe there are much finer points to consider before it becomes extortion.
What makes gold intrinsically valuable?
I like this idea in the sense of an experiment. I'm not sure where it will end up, but it could be interesting.

As others have pointed out, some kind of conventions must be established around the semantics, and something must be done to avoid redundancy (which leads to inconsistency) and ambiguity.

I agree with those criticisms, but if the community also helps develop the schema, it will be interesting to see. What collisions will happen? What will be the result of queries that reach far across disciplines?
Hell, at least when you emailed Steve Jobs you'd get the satisfaction of a glib, dismissive response and a story to tell your grandkids.
I personally believe the same thing is necessary in a similar area; I've been discussing it with friends recently. In games in particular (but I'm sure other fields as well), big actors often violate contracts with impunity, safe in the knowledge that the small companies they deal with cannot possibly afford to challenge them in court. Milestone payments delayed indefinitely (to empty out a smaller partner's coffers), contracts outright violated, etc.

It definitely feels like there are a lot of problems facing software developers in general that could be addressed if collectively the industry would take a stand for civilized, rational behavior and pool their resources. In some cases, you could possibly turn a profit doing it!
Cool project, man. And, way to show class in handling the "detractors" here. I firmly believe that constructive debate is a good thing.
I used to think this too. The only difference between bitcoin and gold is gold has uses aside from being a currency. Gold is however largely only worth what it is because of its use as a currency.

Interesting collection of information here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths
I think the rigidity of this system is its biggest drawback, as is the case with most productivity systems. For example, if I have two large projects that I need to get done and I only write down one, the other is going to keep nagging at me in the back of my head while I'm working and distract my focus. If I write both of them down, then I've deviated from the system, which in my experience means that by the end of the week, it'll just devolve into a vanilla to-do list grouped by the 'size' of tasks.

That's mainly why I switched to GTD for all of my to-do lists and projects. Because my inbox holds literally every task or to-do item that pops into my head during the day, I never have that distracting "am I forgetting something?" feeling during the day. I can process and sort my inbox whenever I have free time, and the flexibility in deciding which tasks should be made into projects, next actions, etc... means that the system always fits my schedule no matter how unpredictable or crazy it is, instead of me having to fit my schedule into the system.
Slowdown boon: Buy a car and get another free
Age Rises for Some Tech-Firm Founders
This one is much better and on the mark. Fitzgerald's quote needs a corollary, which appeals to intelectual honesty. If reason definitively tells you x, but you want to believe y, then you might be tempted to abuse Fitzgerald's quote.
The max block size, and consequently the transaction fees, are the most urgent problems to solve IMO.

There's still time, but it really is something you don't want to mess up.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=157141.0
I would pay money for a learn golang the hard way book.
Irrespective of languages (verbose vs non verbose), I have found that the rate at which I code on a normal 8 hour day is 500 LOC of medium complexity code including testing effort - and it has not changed for a long time.
forking is by nature for taking control. not sure why I'm even replying. that like saying the fire burns.

the difference is the leverage over people, programmers, website, and other companies google has by having this control - due to the marketshare of chrome.
From what I understand, RDP is fast because it can send vectors as well as just bitmaps. So if you want to display a button on the screen you can simply send the vectors for the 4 corners over the wire and say "this is a button, render it as such". RDP on Windows is implemented as a special video driver which can hook things like Win32 API calls to help with this process.

Compare that to something like VNC which IIRC simply sends the screen data over as a raw bitmap and must rely on (potentially lossy) compression in order to get reasonable speed. This of course has the advantage that the client software needs to be much less intelligent to understand it and means that it needs much less deep OS integration.
This is why VNC clients and servers are available and can work easily between pretty much any platform.

The GP claims that X11 is capable of doing the same optimisations that RDP can do but this is not utilised well because the windowing toolkits such as GTK render their output to some other area of memory and X only gets to see the bitmapped result.

Not sure how teamviewer works, but I know some of these paid services use intermediaries to trasmit data over faster internet links to reduce latency but of course this costs them money so they have to charge you.

SO discussion here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9498877/how-is-teamviewer...
Why can't both be true? If you actually had some objective measure of programmer skill, wouldn't you expect there to be some kind of bell curve of skilled programmers, with 10x and 0.1x people somewhere at the tails?