skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I reeealy hate giving you an upvote.
Should You Subcontract Through Agencies And Consultancies?
http://www.sfusd.edu/en/assets/sfusd-staff/contract%20and%20...

http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/local/talks-between-bart-union...

Since she's an ex-googler, I would hope it wasn't broad speculation, those are her sources.

My stand on BART though is that they provide a very critical service to the Bay Area. So they have a lot leverage in their hands since the strike is being felt throughout the entire bay and all professional classes. I disagree that it should be happening if their pay is that high.
> But for me all this seems quite biased towards small Frameworks/Platforms.

If one framework does less than another while still fulfilling the requirements of the test, then it ought to outperform that other framework, right? I don't see that as a bias; it's the expected result.

I said "does less" rather than "is smaller" there. I think that's an important distinction. It's theoretically possible for a framework to provide a feature at zero cost to users who don't use that feature (in responding to a given request). Some frameworks don't do that.
The company name "Moz" is confusing and benefits from incidental association with Mozilla, especially considering that the "moz" in "SEOmoz" referenced Mozilla's DMOZ site.
Clearly you have never used a BART washroom, my friend. Though, the confusion is understandable, since BART stations tend to smell like washrooms outside the washrooms too.

Tell me more about what a good job BART employees do.
"Pair programming is a new method", I could only get so far...

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=913816...
How does the presence of personal gain impugn anything?
I'll see your 'German' qualification, and raise your decade of experience as a Firefighter/EMT.

The car didn't blow up, it caught fire. That's not common, but it does happen. Same with the engine getting tossed... Not common, but it happens.

I've seen both scenarios a handful of times (and surprisingly enough, they have a high correlation with fatalities).
Watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy82ntr8HYI
'God Particle': evidence mounts one year on
Line of code per hour...wow.

I am actually a fan of pair programming, I have seen and experienced it work - in an environment where you are designing and developing new things day in, day out - pair programming or as I like to call it...collective collaboration - is invaluable - it prevents following rabbit holes and single point of failures - and solutions get developed, much, much faster.

Of course for this to work you need a smart team of engineers and scientists who respect each other, who are confident in their ability but also recognize that two heads are better than one.

Anecdote time: I was working on a project where for a while I was the sole scientist/engineer - I spent a fair bit of my time bouncing ideas off a system architect who worked closely with my team. In a few months I was assigned an engineer who's knowledge of hardware absolutely flawed me, together we were able to knock down feature requests so fast it we became quite renowned in our little org...we hardly ever stopped talking during the day (this pissed off a couple of people to no end...but "you can't argue with working code and happy users" as my manager used to say)...I left that job a few months ago to explore the world a bit more but when I left the team was much bigger but the philosophy remained the same - talk, argue, yell, laugh, cover whiteboards and interrupt and genius happens.

YMMV, I've met developers who's ego could not adjust to that model or who "couldn't work in noisy environments" and it wasn't for them..but I always tr to seek out a noisy, dynamic team, because they are usually doing awesome things and having fun :)
Automation will not decrease the value that BART brings to the bay area and it will not eliminate all positions, it will simply concentrate that value in fewer individuals who could also demand high pay.
Date of Conference: 2001
Did you not actually read the article? He also compares quality in terms of defects.
Hmm I find that a bit... different to my expectations. I'd always thought that e-paper absolutely required to be bistable, like paper.
*>"I'm an outsider to west coast city politics, but I suspect it's the same all over: the details of why the public workers are striking won't matter."

Yep.

I can personally confirm that things of this sort play out precisely the same way among east coast equivalents.
The mental gymnastics between perceived value of what these individuals do and the actual value (and damage the strike is doing to the local economy) do not match. It doesn't matter if you think these people are just pushing buttons. BART isn't running, and that immense value is not being provided. It also doesn't matter what people think these people should earn. It's what BART is willing to pay, and what employees are willing to accept to work there.
I sure hope not, but have seen plenty of managers use it. I would guess refactoring would be really bad for those people. The author would probably think this guy is a horrible employee http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

Is there an engineering profession where using more raw material to get some function is actually a good thing?
What's your source for this claim against Monsanto? Usually when a farmer claims something like this, it turns out they're as guilty as a 3 dollar bill.
So much of any comparison like this is about performance, but I really don't think that's as important as it used to be, and that's coming from someone who generally uses slow computers and optimizes software until they run fast.

I'm typing this on a bit of an exceptional example, a 2.6 GHz Northwood Pentium 4 with 1 GB of single-channel DDR-400 RAM. The one saving grace is that it has an SSD, but I put the swap file on the spinning drive (which is modern). It's running Linux Mint 14, Xfce edition, with a handful of minor OS-level optimizations. Firefox 21, with a fairly standard configuration, flawlessly handles a dozen or more tabs on a daily basis. It's even pretty snappy, more limited by my internet connection (1.5 Mb DSL) than by the hardware it's running on.

If this sorry excuse for a computer does that well, are the relatively minor differences in performance between browsers going to be a big deal on modern hardware? There will be edge cases, such as the people who have hundreds of tabs open at a time, but for the average user I'm having trouble envisioning that.

The things that make a difference anymore are very tough to quantify in tests like Tom's Hardware did. I will always have Firefox around because I think Mozilla actually cares about privacy. I use Presto on my phone because it's the only one I've found that renders things how I want. Many people are tied to a browser because of extensions. Standards support doesn't matter until you find a page where a browser doesn't work, and those pages will be different for different people. Browsers can be rock solid on one computer and worthlessly crashy on another.

I don't think a round of benchmarks has meant anything to me in browser selection for a long time, and when it did I did them myself so as to account for the computer they were running on. I choose by trying to use a variety of them for a while, and a winner always emerges quite quickly.
Clearly a lot of HNers aren't very proficient at reading.
I read this and it's still unclear to me whether the author conducted any experiments involving pair programming. If he did, why hasn't he described them in detail? If he didn't, where did his data come from?

I guess he didn't, and where the data comes from is "a pair-programming calculator developed by the author"—in other words, software he wrote that gives whatever he decided the answers should be, and whose code he isn't (at least in this piece) publishing.
I think the writer presumes that BitCoin can't be audited. Which, I think, is a very false presumption. It isn't currently, and it should be. The best outcome for BitCoin is that it becomes second legal tender (with all the auditing and rules that go with it). This will increase competition with other currencies (and their systems) which is a good thing, IMO.
Illegitimate as in outside the bounds of polite society's discourse, not as in something you abhor.
"We gave up over $100 million in concessions in our last
contract negotiations, and we haven’t had a raise in 5
years, yet the cost of living in the Bay Area has spiked
by over 18%."

What I don't get is why they don't try to peg their salaries to something tangible in the local economy. I know that is already done with the pricing of Below Market Rate (BMR) housing.

"A BMR unit will be resold at a restricted affordable
price to a household that meets the first-time homebuyer
and income qualifications for the program and for the
particular unit. New BMR units will be repriced according
to change in the median income from the time of the
current owner’s purchase to the time of sale."

In exchange for such a concession, the city cannot be blocked from improving cost saving measures associated with automation, including the dismissal of any employer whose job is no longer necessary. Any employee that loses his job due to automation would first consideration first for any new jobs they qualify for that are created as the system progresses.

These two concessions on both sides take care of the employees and let the system progress.

The other concessions the employees are asking for such as increased lighting to improve safety are completely reasonable and shouldn't even require negotiations to implement.
A analysis done on based on LOC is purely laughable. I have done pair programming lot of times and some benefits are

1) For building a complex system in a short time you have to take lot of critical decisions under pressure implication of which will be felt even after the product is shipped. During pair programming your partner can stop you from making many such decision which actually saves LOT of lines of bad code. That is why this study is totally worthless

2) Pair programming is perhaps the best way to give training to someone new to the system. It is much more beneficial than the best of documents. It is like roaming around the city with a experienced guide than reading from a book

3) if you do pair programming with lots of experienced programmer you will actually learn to see things in s different perspective. You will start doing things in a different way.
The two comments by Gerald Weinberg (at the very bottom of the page) make a good case for the advantages of pair programming.
Isn't it more efficient to actually do the design before you start coding?
... not exactly. he also examines the number of defects turned in by different pairs of programmers compared with single ones, and examines some of the financial cost of pair programming. Its a better read than you make it out to be.
We're trying an approach with http://parley.co that involves storing a symmetrically encrypted OpenPGP keyring on the server for our users. That, combined with a UI that automatically takes care of key sharing and discovery, results in a system that's easy for the average user, integrates with the existing PGP ecosystem, and is at least as secure as a symmetric scheme (like symmetric systems, the strength is limited by the passphrase, but at least users can each have their own).
If my team has low skill, should I lower the skill of my code?
cost of living does have something to do with salaries.
theres a symbiosis between the salary and the prices of houses in a supply and demand model: what people are willing to pay.
I don't buy all the outraged posts here or the facebook comments on the article. I expect everyone to negotiate hard on their behalf to put themselves and their families in the very best position they are able.

Don't come crying to me because in your mind you value a BART employees contribution more or less than a teachers or your own contribution to society and you don't think it's fair. It's not about your subjective value of x or y or anyone's idea of fairness. It's about each parties leverage and negating position and nothing else.
What is necessary to automate the closing of the doors? I imagine that a timer coupled with computer vision software would be more than adequate to solve this problem. Furthermore, you could have the timer duration set automatically via machine learning tied to many dimensions, such as:

(1) Number of humans or Volume of humans plus accessories waiting at the platform.
(2) Duration until next train
(3) Historical business for that station at that time of day on that day of the week
(4) Historical figures of the number/volume of humans that enter and exit the train at that time of day on that day of the week.
That’s not how public key cryptography works.

You don’t go and buy an SSL certificate from a CA. You pay for them to /sign/ your public key, presumably after verifying your identity. You generate the public/private key pair, and then you keep the private key private.

The CA could in theory sign Eve's private key along with metadata saying that private key belongs to you, but that just gives someone the ability to impersonate you. It doesn’t give Eve the ability to read emails that Bob sent to you with a key wrapped with your public key.
While there's not much wrong with collective bargaining, there's nothing wrong with people wanting a more efficient system which delivers better service more effectively with less waste.

"Pay is what employers are willing or need to pay to maintain skilled expertise."

People with said expertise would work for less than current rates but cannot work for BaRT due to the protectionism offered by the unions.

Also, the reason BaRT can "afford" ('willing to pay') this added cost, is that BaRT service is somewhat economically inelastic so they can pass on the cost to the end user --who has to swallow that pill, like it or not.

BaRT fares account only account for a percentage of operating revenue, albeit comparatively high compared to other systems.

As an aside, I think If IT workers had become unionized, I think I'm not far off in thinking that we'd still be using DOS and system7 or System V. Good/bad, debatable, I suppose, but certainly some progress would have been stifled.
>He's just one journalist, there are many like him.

Uh, name a few?
> ...But ofcource if you went to web sites with malicious HTML you could get ownzored because of bugs in the rendering engine.

It's funny, when the Windows source code was leaked (opened?) in 2004[1], folks soon discovered a vulnerability in the BMP renderer[2].

[1] http://slashdot.org/story/04/02/12/2114228/windows-2000-wind...

[2] http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1009067
Furthermore, it seems difficult to examine the situation at all without considering how much the workers are paid, and how much the company or government service earns or loses, and in the case of the government, how effectively it provides its service to the community.

How can we really intelligently discuss the issue without knowing it?
I feel like the only reason we hear so much about Google Reader is because the main users were either journalists or bloggers, which creates an extremely disproportionate noise / (former) user ratio.
Movie made by animating individual atoms
Clients. None of these are remotely models for other countries to follow, alternative paradigms of government like Imperial Germany or Japan, or the totalitarian regimes that are now dust except for North Korea. The closest thing to an alternate respectable paradigm of government now is managed democracy, like in Singapore or Russia, which appears to be unstable, one more variety of anocracy.

The key is legitimate. Are there any dictatorships that don't even make a nod towards the idea of popular sovereignty? Any states where someone could say "L'etat, cest moi."?

As far as Panama goes, the US's Warsaw Pact.
As with any non-standard tethering solution, make sure you have a firewall somewhere along the way that blocks ports that your phone doesn't normally access. Your provider will detect these outgoing connections and send you a warning/threat.
> Einstein was only American for the last 15 years of his life

And hence, he was an American. You should also add 7 years as he migrated to the US in 1933.
*>"Why does unskilled transit work deserve so much pay?"

You can certainly argue about the overall cost and efficiency of the system and specific rates, but it's pretty silly to suggest that a 104 mile rail system which moves 370,000 passengers per day is entirely operated and maintained by "unskilled" workers.
> I never said the Go runtime will crash, but your programs will, because of unsafe nullability, mutability in the concurrently shared state, and various other problems in Go.

Personally, these problems are not what are a time-sink for me. The problems that I spend a vast majority of my time on tend to fall into two categories.

First, there are design problems. i.e. how do you model your data to be queryable, how do you architect services to make them resilient to machine failure, how do you monitor services, how do you route logs, etc. With these problems, Haskell doesn't help here. Go doesn't help here either.

Second, there are operational problems. i.e. your FS might randomly corrupt some data you stored previously (remember to checksum), your caches might get out of sync (fun problem if you ever go multi-DC), your service has shoddy backoff and DDOS's a failing downstream service, etc. With these problems, Haskell doesn't help here. Go doesn't help here either.

Am I saying that there's no value to the fact that Haskell solves these at compile time? Of course not. Just that the relative amount of time that would save for me is not my deciding factor when picking a programming language.

Another way to think about it is that people have (I include myself in this category) written large-scale projects in dynamic languages which have all the problems you mentioned plus a few more. And yet, the developers at Twitter, or Facebook, or Reddit don't spend the vast majority of their time face-palming at type-errors or NPEs, or ConcurrentModificationExceptions. They have other concerns.
When would statistics support a suspicion of foul play? The scarcity of some occurrence isn't proof against it.
the only thing that sucks more than pair programming is bullshit research papers penned by condescending egotists.
BART has public washrooms? I thought they were all closed to the public. (I've only been in a handful of stations, and don't usually check out the washrooms, but I believe the montgomery street one has a sign on the door to that effect.)
They can't. You can hire a full-time person whose sole job is to stand by the elevator and clean it every five minutes and it still won't be clean.

The state of San Francisco's transportation system, whether it's BART or MUNI, is a reflection of the city and its problems, not just of the transit system itself. I sincerely hope you noticed the homeless and mentally-ill that are everywhere in the city before you noticed the elevators they shit in.

Just like human shit clogging up and breaking down escalators (true story, I wish I jest), it is BART's problem, but BART and its employees are more or less powerless against it. When you have a veritable army of homeless and addicts inhabiting your city, there is not much you can do besides stay in that booth.

If you would like functional elevators that aren't biohazard zones, I'd suggest becoming involved locally and solving the problem at its root. I am confident you will get nowhere with clean elevators until you get somewhere with reducing the homeless and mentally-ill population.
A "defect", I'm gathering from the context of the article, has little to do with forward maintainability and seems only to relate to the results of some QA testing heuristic.

I think the coding environment being analyzed is already well-defined and the projects being coded are one-offs being sold to clients where maintenance is done through a lucrative support contract. In this setting, a "defect" would be anything keeping the product from shipping. Anything else is overlooked and untracked.

It's the software equivalent of shoveling whatever crap you can find into a sausage casing, pricing it like fine steak, then selling your own medicine when it makes them sick.
Something about the article doesn't sit right with me. It doesn't match with the way I feel my own thought processes working. My brain is not constantly considering all possible binary options. (Is my phone ringing in my left pocket? My right pocket? In each of the bajillion possible positions it might sit within that pocket?) My brain is just receiving sensory data, not constantly making such high-level judgements on it. If it passes a certain threshold, it goes to some higher thought process and I consciously take note of it. When I feel a phantom phone vibration, it's as if I'm actually experiencing the sensation, not as if some low-level part of my brain reached out into my frontal lobe and started sounding the "phone is vibrating" alarm.
I do too, but... this is a good reason not to bug allies. You make everyone paranoid if it's discovered.
It's very, very hard to do objective research on this topic. There are tons of reasons that LoC isn't a great way to measure productivity, including the times when you refactor existing code such that you delete thousands of lines of code, and your "LoC output" is negative for a time period. The Tale of Two Programmers is the epitome of such tales, IMO. [1]

That said, most of the time developers with roughly equal skill levels end up writing new code to implement new features. And LoC is about the best metric you can use. If you factor in expert developers writing fewer LoC to achieve the same goals, then the results of the paper are magnified, because if an expert's 1000 LoC is good for 2x the number of features as an average developer's 1000 LoC, but the number of bugs is comparable, then it's an even greater advantage to use the expert.

>No space given to future maintainability or bugs, only on raw productivity.

They do talk about bugs; they say in the summary:

"There are no significant quality benefits compared to a single programmer who uses static analysis and inspections."

And later on in the paper they compare delivered defects.

I'm easily in the "expert" end of the spectrum as a programmer; I've never seen a benefit in pair programming that would justify two salaries. I'm sorry, and I'm sure I'll be slammed for this, but pair programming is a crutch to boost programmer productivity of average or below average developers. "Average" developers would have to make 1/3 or less of my salary to make it worthwhile, economically.

In my opinion pair programming's only valid use is in training a junior developer (or allowing two junior developers to support each other, though in the paper the bugs delivered were far worse from two junior developers than from a single expert developer -- but you can't always hire an expert developer).

Otherwise it's a waste of money. If you can pull it off as a developer in some big company that has lots of money, by all means, have a blast. I thought HN was more about bootstrapping and getting code working as quickly as possible, and pair programming is not the way to accomplish that.

[1] http://mail.linux.ie/pipermail/social/1999-October/000483.ht...
That's happening right now at http://parley.co :) Beta will be ready August 1.
I have to say in light of all this PRISM stuff, iWatch takes on a whole new meaning for me.
How the algorithm for coloring the iTunes song list works
Is this racism?