skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's difficult to speak about BART staff without using broad strokes. I think station agents are too adversarial and should have a performance measure based on that. I don't know how to do that in any way that is sane. I'm a programmer, and I don't want to ride to work on an automatic train.

I don't much like BART police, and in fact I think the decision to have a private police force for BART should be revisited. These officers are often rejected based on psychological exams from departments like SFPD, OPD, and UCPD. They have higher entry salaries than workers who aren't armed, and while people on Facebook groups seem constantly to want them around with greater presence to admonish cyclists breaking silly rules or chasing naked acrobats, in fact the only thing they seem capable of doing is accidentally murdering people.

You want upgrades? The maintenance team at BART wants safer working conditions to install the equipment you propose to purchase. With no raise during a period with 18% average cost of living increase - a low average all of us on HN know - I'm sure many of these hard working folks are concerned about having to move their families to neighborhoods with worse schools and crime while being asked to work longer hours, and called greedy for clocking overtime.

Just to be clear I have no affiliation except that I have had some drinking buddies who are SEIU organizers. They're serious people who are very good at taking care of the lower wage employees around the world, and esp in places like the bay area with huge income disparity.

http://www.keepbartrunning.com/an_open_letter_to_the_communi...
Odd how they find find it this late during runtime. I mean, how long has the building been standing there?
To me, that Snowden has basically sacrificed his life to release information that he thought the public should know is key to whether or not he is a whistleblower,and thus deserve some form of protection. If you are agree with the Patriot Act and what the NSA is doing, then I respect your opinion but I don't agree with you.
This is very nitpicky and I apologize for it, but any non-American here a bit miffed by the fact that this is from a book named "Letters of great Americans to their children"?

Einstein was only American for the last 15 years of his life, and it was forced by the politics of the time more than anything else. Unnecessary patriotism (wherever it comes from) is irritating.

Sorry, this is petty :(
How easy is a Morozov-style takedown of Evgeny Morozov?
How would increasing the salaries of $100,000+ union workers improve safety conditions?
European governments certainly have not known for very long about their diplomats being spied upon. That story, in my opinion, could really have some legs.
"<blank> or something" is an english idiom/phrase that is dismissive of the blank and of the something else. The reader probably jumped to conclusions about your meaning/intention from your unintentional use of a phrase which is often used in a dismissive and derisive manner.

It would have been interesting to read the discussion of you two getting to the root of why you hold such different beliefs about unions.
Last crysis is not an accedential event in the financial system
The fact that employers can't permanently replace striking workers puts the power in the Union's hands. Perhaps it's not extortion (since no laws are broken), but I would call it coercion.
Think about it from the employers' views. Employees says they're not happy with work, they don't show-up for work (unexcused absence). Employer can't fire them, and have to employ them should they return. So they hire some temporary workers, but can't keep them long term. The ones willing to work (temps) get the boot, and those that complained that their job is so bad (union workers) get to return anytime.
I wouldn't think this is anything new...Cold War anyone?
"Google Reader founder Chris Wetherell said that if the idea came to him in today’s Google, he would leave the company and build it on his own rather than put it at the mercy of Google leadership."

Guess what dude?! If I were in that position and I were primarily worried about my project "being at the mercy of Google" (or any company that I don't have sufficient control over, for that matter), I would have left _anytime_. It should not be something you realize _today_. This is just whining over a "wrong" (presumably; assuming you would have pulled it off well) tradeoff you, yourself, made back in the day. It's not "today's Google vs. back then's Google". This is the tradeoff that you make anytime you decide to work for someone else; this is obvious and was obvious back in the day. If you had not seen it, the blame is wholly on you.

Google Reader would not have been a guaranteed success that it was without Google's resources. If one does not have the balls to take the risk of working at his or her own startup, he or she is not entitled to the benefits either. In hindsight, it's too easy to say "I would have gone and pulled it off independently".

I personally think Larry overall has been focusing on what matters and under his awesome leadership, Google is performing far better than Eric's time and this whole situation is not dissimilar to what happened at WWDC1997 and Steve's response to the random questioner in the audience:

"...the hardest thing is how does that fit in to a cohesive larger vision that's gonna allow you to sell 8 billion dollars... 10 billion dollars... a product a year."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE
>If Reader was ultimately unmonetizable, I'll cry when its gone, but I don't think anyone should feel entitled to a free service.

I don't think that it was not monetizable, any less than GMail is. Perhaps there were high, hidden costs in maintaining such a large feed database that would mean that a comparable revenue stream from Reader would not pay for itself nearly as much as GMail does.

I think that in the end it's just that Google did not care about the Reader users. They didn't need them, there wasn't enough of a stink when they said they were going to get rid of Reader, either internally or externally.
But when the beating is instead performed by a large gang of weak men, it's legitimate?
I looked into S/MIME when researching email crypto options. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but with S/MIME, you have to get a cert issued from a "trusted" provider--i.e. your employer, or Verisign, or Comodo, etc. If you don't, then a lot of apps either issue scary warnings or even just refuse to work with your self-signed cert. But if someone like Verisign or Comodo issues your cert, how can you be sure the cert they issued you hasn't been stored and shared with (for example) the NSA?

S/MIME seems to have the same problem as SSL, which is that to be really usable you have to trust a big company to provide you with encryption, and that company can be hacked, coerced, etc. But whereas SSL traffic is typically transitory in nature which makes it tougher to meaningfully capture and store, your emails are not transitory and can be accessed much more easily.
I don't think pair programming can be quantified. This article doesn't take into account the learning that happens while pair programming. The examples given of when pair programming does and doesn't work are irrelevant.
>The NSA/US government probably has lots of dirt on politicians in these countries, and are applying it.

"Those who tell us to trust the US's secret, privatised surveillance schemes should recall the criminality of J Edgar Hoover's FBI."

-Barret Brown

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/01/cyber-in...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/surveill...
I would add a corollary: the lack of future reward is the root cause of the outright failure of socialism/communism. No matter what you do, in an utopian communism you'd get only what you need. The wealth you could create has no return.

Obviously, in the end everyone will be equal, equally improductive. Equally poor.
The Internet Defense League rallies to Restore the Fourth
And they've lost me for everything but Gmail (so far) as a result of the Reader shutdown (and other things).
What about the police officer on page 3 with a base of 73ish, yet a total of over 500k... Bonuses of over 100k. My figures could be off, though, because every time I load the page some data disappears. Anyone else getting missing info?
Apparently the cold war has never ended or the US government never got the message.
Show HN: Link Wheel Diagram Generator
Except that democracy itself consists of a gang of more people beating up gangs of fewer people just because they can. It merely substitutes numbers for strength.

Neither might nor popularity makes right.
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. Previous sacrifices and safety concerns be damned. All the public at large will hear thanks to this salary data is that the public worker is doing substantially better than they are in terms of pay and benefits, and likely for less time and effort. Of course, the majority of people --who labour under private entities that regard salaries as costs to be minimized-- could never expect such treatment. And if they can't get it then they sure as hell won't stand for someone else getting it on their taxpayer dime.

It's classic divide and conquer class stratification, and you don't even have to do the agitating yourself.
Looks like something they got from Sharper Image.
I agree.

This fails to account for: 1) The cost to train a novice developer & 2) The value if having two people equally acquainted with a code base (thereby reducing dependency on a particular employee)
Should Instagram Turn Twitter Cards Back On?
Looked up some of them, and a good number are people who've been working there since the 90s. I know that if I had the same job for 22 years, I'd expect to at LEAST be making 200k...
He is also a former Apple employee, so they probably have a bit more background then some of their other executive hires.
I dig it! Didn't get any of the errors everyone else here seems to be experiencing (Chrome on Win, v27). Looking forward to more of this. Nice job.
It has made all non-democratic forms of government illegitimate by waging wars of extermination against them

What about all of the dictatorships that the US created or propped up? Saudi Arabia, Iran pre revolution, Panama under Noriega, etc?
Google Alerts hasn't been sending me email for ages anyway. And yet every so often I'll go check on my alerts and there are new pages showing up for those searches.
3D-Printed Foot Lets Crippled Duck Walk Again
fyi, publicizing how much union workers are paid is a common negotiation tactic by employers, attempting to erode public support for strikers.

However you interpret the numbers and whatever you post about them, you're shifting the conversation from union concerns and talking points to management's.
Sunglasses! Good to see a familiar name.

Incidentally, yogthos should be aware that Luminus was included: https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/pull/293
If you offer paid downloads from a private repository, preferably with an integrated licensing system, I'll be your first customer.
Clearly measuring productivity in lines of code is the correct way to determine whether goals are achieved on schedule.
I'd have a scan of Oren Eini's multi-part review of this app before getting too excited about that "enterprisey" app.

Here's parts 1 and 2:

http://ayende.com/blog/19457/review-microsoft-n-layer-app-sa...

http://ayende.com/blog/27649/review-microsoft-n-layer-app-sa...

The remainder of the reviews are in July 2011's blog posts. I think the conclusion is that's over-engineered junk.
The average pay for a Bay Area worker is $65K. That worker is a professional with a college degree. Why does unskilled transit work deserve so much pay?
CSS3 Path 2.0 Flyout Menu Example
Just curious, but why stay in San Francisco? Austin is FAR more doable living-expense-wise, and there is a budding startup scene from what I hear so there's bound to be a few jobs. Sure it's Texas, but it's not like you need to stay forever.
This really resonates with how counter productive the review system is a Microsoft, especially at and above the middle levels, the incentives become decoupled from effort and productivity.

When doing good work was reasonably correlated with promotion, stock and pay the system worked. When what was measured became uncertain the system falls apart
I find that pairing more during a kick-off / design phase of a project has been beneficial to my team, but I don't think pairing yields many benefits once design goals have been well-defined.
Just out of curiosity, why would you not want to ride a fully automated train?
There is more to this than what the article suggests, at least based on my experience with several different models of iphones and an old speaker phone on my desk.

What I find is that if the iphone is within, say, a few inches of the speaker phone periodically, with the phone not in use and the handset in the cradle, the speaker on the phone makes a sound which clearly is being triggered by something in the iphone (and I repeat this is across several models - original to 5). So it is possible that what is being picked up is the same type of signal that the speaker is picking up but by the part of our body that the phone is right next to.
"New"!? It's been around for at least 15 years!
Is that wrong? I don't understand. Are the unions always right? Should we focus only on their concerns?
For a flight from Moscow to Bolivia with a refueling stop in Lisbon, it appears that the great circle route takes you through Spain and France. From Austria it appears as if traversing France is the best route too.

Are there strong jet streams or something which would cause it to choose a different route?
Ending the Cold War was a formality to 'restore' public faith in cohesive global organizations. Free-trade agreements and other major economic blocs shatter borders as a matter of policy -- the fact that such tight unity, solidarity, and uniformity between nations has gone unnoticed is probably more disturbing than actual acts that verify this unity (ie: Snowden having nowhere to run to).

Multi-generational voter apathy has culminated to a point where most people are so disconnected from reality that they thought Snowden could escape the long arm of the US Government.
Demanding somebody to do anything will probably not get you very far.
Handling them in the browser is a good idea, but still needs a lot of work to make it workable:

- What happens when their computer crashes?

- How do they transfer these certificates to other devices (multiple computers, phones, tablets, etc)?

- How do they keep them in sync across multiple devices if they need to regenerate the certificate?

- Certificates would be super easy to steal once you get access to a device (arguably easier to steal than installing a keylogger to get passwords)

The only way I can see it working for most users is through a third-party management solution (Google, iCloud, whatever).
[ YouTube ] Computer And Holy Quran - CEH - Saher Team
This reads like it was written by someone with a management background, not a development one. No space given to future maintainability or bugs, only on raw productivity. When I saw that his entire analysis rested on LoC metrics, I could only shake my head. And his comparisons to other industries/activities were just laughable. Apparently pair programming is comparable to having two generals.
I got an awesome tweet this morning in regard to the BART strike that just wanted to share:

@cjc: Average BART employee salary is $83K/yr. A teacher with 10 years of experience in San Francisco makes $50K/yr. Who's striking again?
Sure, but if you can read the original, good design still plays a big role.
They provide a great service to people like you and I who use their transport, washrooms etc. If they were not paid well they would not do their jobs and the BART system would be in disarray. They deserve pay increases just like everyone else.
Comments here are disappointing. Pay is what employers are willing or need to pay to maintain skilled expertise. There's absolutely nothing wrong with collective bargaining driving up the price of the cost of employees. These salaries are middle class salaries in the Bay Area and barely enough to buy a house in some of the poorer areas. If you are unhappy with your own pay, work hard to improve your station in life. It is tax payer money, but it's paying what is needed in order to keep BART moving. BART provides an immense service to the bay area, and it can't happen without the drivers and staff. They provide a valuable service, and I support their strike.
There are lots of systems with at least some lines with full automation.[1] I've been on some. They transport lots of people. I never had a problem on the ones I was on.

I think if rapid transit is to take off and replace car culture (as a viable alternative), it needs to be affordable and has to go where people want to go. That means make BaRT more affordable and make it go more places --Van Ness, Geary corridors, go down to San Jose via El Camino develop el Camino down the peninsula for dense housing.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_trains
http://www.alternet.org/labor/7-things-you-need-know-about-b...

http://www.thenation.com/blog/175063/bart-strike-another-ins...
I don't work there, but I think it is still around. When I was considering whether to accept an offer there, everyone I asked said they had 20% time, although people used it different ways, and some people just did normal work in their 20% time. Can a Googler confirm?
$200k just by virtue of working 22 years? What's the rational for that?

If you do skilled labor, where you are constantly improving your skillset and becoming more productive or valuable (e.g. programming, law, custom carpentry, custom welding, nurse etc,), there is an argument for making a little to a lot more money after 22 years, but for all jobs where a novice and an experienced employee add approximately the same value there is no case for raising salary except to account for inflation.
The best way out is probably to be smuggled via cargo container from the current Russian airport to a seagoing vessel on its way to South America.
So we should just ignore how much they're being paid, and let them fleece taxpayers?
> Resharper

You've kind of hit the key here, Visual Studio alone is decent, but Resharper is really what makes the experience for me. I don't know a single .net developer who could live without it.
Pairing benefits projects that still have uncertainty in design. Two people dealing with minutia just leaves one bouncing a ball off the wall while the other types.
How to make an engaging app?
Dead link when viewed from the UK. In this case the URL is used to identify both the resource and the agent's location.
>I think that in the end it's just that Google did not care about the Reader users.

What % of Google employees do you think are also Reader users?

edit: I assume it is something like 90%. Which is why I'm pretty impressed that this change went through.
Summary: 2 independent developers write more lines of code combined then 2 working as a pair. Thus pair programming is bad. How quaint.
Dwarf Fortress in 2013
"These salaries are middle class salaries in the Bay Area and barely enough to buy a house in some of the poorer areas."

Whether someone can afford a house or not has nothing to do with what market rate for work should be.

"One of the biggest divergences between the Daddy Model and reality is the valuation of hard work. In the Daddy Model, hard work is in itself deserving. In reality, wealth is measured by what one delivers, not how much effort it costs. If I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.

It will seem to someone still implicitly operating on the Daddy Model that it is unfair when someone works hard and doesn't get paid much. To help clarify the matter, get rid of everyone else and put our worker on a desert island, hunting and gathering fruit. If he's bad at it he'll work very hard and not end up with much food. Is this unfair? Who is being unfair to him?" - http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
Personally, I would rather us automate away all the jobs, including all the BART ones. The sooner society eliminates as many jobs as possible, the sooner we'll get to a impasse where a minimum guaranteed salary is the only way for society to move forward. The longer the transition takes, the more painful it will be.
Does anyone honestly believe that a metric based on 'Lines of Code' has any validity at all?
can docker have different operating systems with different kernels (win, freebsd, debian lin, ubuntu) running on the same machine? or same o/s with different kernels? different modules?

the old vps vs. container discussion.
I'm assuming that average that you're posting is just the average of all the salaries listed in the data provide. This includes all the administrators (as far as I can tell). To be a useful comparison, you'd have to include all the salaries of the administrators OR only average the union workers with 10 years of experience (or whatever is the equivalent of a teacher with 10 years of experience).

Interestingly, where did this person get this data? Is it publicly available?
The elevators are disgraceful (old, slow, faulty and small) and unhygienic, for sure. They are routinely urinated on and defecated on by mentally unbalanced people who need care (but there are politics with that too). So it's not totally BaRT employees' fault but the situation needs to be managed better and the facilities upgraded for modern transportation (elderly, people with strollers, people with luggage). One measly elevator per station (and two escalators) does not cut it for the volume of people they handle hourly/daily.
That's a totally reasonable question. I have moved around a decent amount over the past few years and I've made a few friends here in San Francisco, so I would like to stay here for a little bit.
> I daresay that the syntax is the least of your problems when learning Erlang; the message-passing concurrency and fault-tolerance models, and functional style are more difficult to understand.

That's my feel as well. I hear tirades about commas and periods. What are they going to do when they hit a net-split.

Bashing Erlang and stopping at syntax is like bashing a new battle tank because it doesn't have a leather interior. Yeah it is nice if it had leather seats and a mini fridge but if that is really the main criteria used in picking it, one has to wonder...
I couldn't agree more. BART is way better at PR than the unions and have littered the media with facts to fit their narrative.
Your quote reminds me of another from Theodore Roosevelt and one of my personal favourites, which has come to be known as 'The Man in the Arena'[1]. Not sure which TR quote came first, but one likely influenced the other by the look of it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic
Significantly more likely? I'd like to see _any_ evidence you have that this was anything other than a tragic accident before I'd be willing to consider it even 'a little bit likely'. You have a very long way to go before you can claim 'significantly more likely'.
Right. In addition, CarbonLib ran on OS 8/9, so developers could migrate their apps to Carbon but continue to build OS 9 and X apps from the same codebase.
Getting Pelican up and running on Ubuntu 12.04 and Python 3.3
If linode offered an RDS replacement, I would switch now.
The biggest news from this announcement is that Paul Deneve will be reporting directly to Tim Cook, not to Jony Ive.
Behavioral recognition is pretty much TrapWire's value proposition.
Yes, it still exists.
It definitely existed when I was there a few months ago. Many people use the opportunity to explore possibilities of working with new teams in the future.
Don't they remove the app and credit you back $15(when you connect to internet or the appastore)?
Best of luck to TMSOFT, glad to see them fighting the good fight.