skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> People love to say that a rockstar can do the work of 10 regular engineers. That's just nonsense. 9 women can't have one baby in a month, and 10 "rockstar" developers can't replace 100 regular ones.

This is completely unconvincing, and begs the question: why is software development a sequential fixed-time process like having a baby? Where is the evidence for that?

On the other side of things, there are lots of people - just look in the comments here and in previous related stories - of people that clearly say they have worked with devs that are 10x more productive then the average. Why does the author feel the need to deny that? That's the real question.
> his claim is that--even with unit tests--refactoring is not safe in Python et al;

Well that claim is False. I and thousands of other Python developers disprove it daily. Just because they can't refactor dynamic languages doesn't me we can't. Something not-dynamic is probably the language for them. And Python is the language for us.

In other words there is far more variability between developers than there is between languages. Find the language(s) that work for you and quit believing they are the languages for everyone.
That's a minor part of the event from a press standpoint, the focus is the launch. The recovery is only given a ~10% chance of being successful.
I never liked the words rockstar and programmer being associated together. The only valid use case for that is if a member of a very successful rock band, with fans and groupies becomes a programmer as a second job. Only then he's a rockstar programmer.
Dutch police recruit rat detectives to sniff out crime
RSA Animate - Re-Imagining Work (Environment) [video]
Usually "I needed the money" is the common justification. Those other options can't guarantee to start supplying you an income in time to not lose your apartment.
But, I definitely don't believe in Universal Housing for whereever you want to live.

Interesting. How do you think such a system of Universal Housing should work? One alternative is to build high density public housing which, IMHO, has been shown to be an utter disaster from which many poor communities are still suffering.

Another alternative is to incentivize the poor to leave high cost areas and spread out to where they could be housed more affordably/safely/sanely. I'm not sure that's as terrible an idea, but it certainly has downsides, including potentially sacrificing whatever culture and community already exists in poorer areas.

I am not a socialist; my currently preferred form of welfare is simply to give people cash (and more cash, rather than less, if they obtain a job). But I'm definitely curious to hear the other side.
Didn't they just complete a successful launch for Canada mere minutes ago? With completely new hardware? And an untested launch profile?

As we speak, Elon's private plane is over the pacific to observe a simulated return by the first stage: http://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/N887XF

Too much publicity? HAH!
If your team can't write a few hundred lines of critical section code in another language, or at least pick it up in a week - especially when the syntaxes are very similar (this isn't going from closure to java here) - you have bigger issues with your team than their language choice.
You probably don't know many people who bet on fuel prices then. The current price is the best guess for the future price, and that's true with both oil and gasoline. This means that there is almost always a 50/50 chance that any future price will be higher or lower (barring seasonal adjustments, of course).

http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/energy/refined-products/rbob...

http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/energy/crude-oil/light-sweet...

"With the combination of new supplies of oil, an aging U.S. population and the permanent demand destruction we have seen means that baring [sic] a major disruption of global supply gas prices have put in what should be a historic peak."

http://www.futuresmag.com/2013/04/09/gasoline-sees-calls-for...
The Science News Cycle
All these articles are written to market something, in this case the author himself.
Class is not the same as how rich you are :-) there are plenty of poor DAR WASPs who will look down on these immigrant billionaires (some of whom are sons of Abraham nudge nudge)

Bill G would be seen as "one of us" Larry Ellison much less's so.
Are you including food in there somewhere?
From his repo: https://github.com/abahlo/arne.me/blob/master/source/_posts/...
I'm thoroughly unconcerned that it requires 4-8x times minimum wage to live in of the best / most popular cities in the world.

Then why do we require paying minimum wage to people working in one of the most popular cities in the world?

Capitalists can answer this easily: exploiting workers by paying them less than a living wage raises the rate of profit.

But how can you answer it?
I think it was very high level strategy type for 4g I think.
So it's a good thing you're propagating partial truths then, right?

The JVM isn't easy to beat for software that's more complicated than "Hello World". Sure you can beat it, but you're going to have to work very, very hard.

The security flaws exist in the area few people care about (and shouldn't even really be installed any more) -- the sandboxing and web start code.

Did you include gcc and friends in your "too big" calculations? Hard to program without them.
Adding to (1b): it's not just that companies will ignore some aspects of the job description as posted. For some companies, that description isn't intended to represent the expected contribution of a single employee -- if you read between the lines, it might be a description of a new team or of a new long-term initiative. The company might post it as though it were a job opening for an individual out of laziness, out of ignorance of what skills are actually needed, or in the hope that one magical developer will be able to do everything on their wish list.

Ultimately the company will want most, if not all, of the listed skills covered. However, if you can convince decisionmakers that you can successfully start addressing a subset of their needs today, as `patio11 says, then the company may recalibrate their posting to find someone (or multiple someones) to cover the remaining duties or provide training to you (or to existing staff) to shore things up.

The lesson is not to take a job description at face value. Setting aside the fact that some postings are written by people who don't actually understand the role, companies will always try to hire the most talented people for the least amount of money, as they ought to. But if hiring that one mythical ultra-developer is "shooting for the moon", then hiring someone who can effectively make inroads into the company's growth areas is "landing among the stars".
Yet nobody I know in Spain likes the compulsory 2 hour lunch breaks.
It's pretty typical, I'd say, for the least productive member of a set of 10 programmers to have negative productivity...
Ask HN: My attempt at empowering companies to make better product decisions
As a developer, I have built many features. I wouldn’t say all, but many of them were a waste of everyones time. These features were usually built because the product group told us to build them. I found product teams make these decisions based upon some customer interviews, email feedbacks, phone complains and mostly their “gut”. And its hurts the most when we would bust our asses building and releasing it, to only realize that our customers are not using it. Reasons vary from customers wanting X and we building Y to the user flow not being right. Its further disappointing to learn after a release that customers didn’t even care enough to click on the feature i built, forget about using it.

Prioritizing what to build, which features to double down on and which ones to ignore, what to prototype and what to scrap etc. are all important questions which the product team needs to decide. In their defense I feel like these are difficult questions. To me its just that I don't think they can afford to get this wrong. Building the wrong features, maintaining them and then eventually killing them is very expensive and just a moral killer.

The question in my mind is can product teams make better product decisions? Why do we have to ask developers to build things, release it and then learn whether customers really wanted it. To address this issue and empower product teams I have built www.featureKicker.com. It enables teams to deploy features before building them, collect feedback, analyze data and make better, more informed, data backed decisions. It enables a product manager to look a developer in his or her eye and say “I need you to build X and I need it done by Y. I have Z number of customers waiting for it. Here you can read what they have to say”.

I would love to hear from the community of what they think of this solution. I want to help companies make better product decisions and am looking at the community for guidance.

Sandeep
CTO
FeatureKicker.com
So we (Mozilla) are following the spec, which says what it does as the result of discussion/negotiation over a period of at least 4 years (roughly 2007-2011) involving browser makers and font foundries, both in terms of what browsers were willing to implement (not wanting something DRM-like to protect fonts) but what would lead to more font foundries being willing to license commercial fonts for use on the Web. So following the spec here isn't about blindly honoring some piece of paper; it's about honoring the result of a negotiation process that we participated in. WebKit unilaterally ignored this agreement, though it sounds like Blink may well change to honoring it.

Many (but not all) of us believe that same-origin by default is also the right thing for security, that it should be the default for new types of resource linking on the Web, and that not having same origin restrictions for things like images was a pretty serious mistake that we're still paying the security costs of (for example, with canvas image tainting).
"Everyone in Spain feels jetlagged all the time"

Hahahahaah, I live in Spain and that is bullshit.
The article you cite doesn't say anything about overpaid municipal workers or rent control.
Ignoring Your Test Suite
One thing to note is the word "Average". In the financial district, for example, the apartments along the water have far higher market rates than those even a few blocks away
The productivity problem is not about the timezone is about the here all the people work normally 9-13 break until 15 and 15-19 more or less so we spend all the day in office because not all the peole can take the lunch in home.

Pd: yes, we take siesta because we have longs timebreaks.
Guided by Touch Screens, Blind Turn to Smartphones for Sight
What information do you have that allowed you to come to that conclusion?

And if you somehow have vaccination stats on the people who shop or work there, couldn't this be more likely due to the location where a Trader Joe's is situated in and, by extension, the particular demographics it caters to rather than the chain itself?

Edit: Parent's post didn't include any corroborating info at all. Looks like that was edited.
Sad thing is, even if we pay, we still get ads. Like before the movie is shown.

Apparently we don't pay enough.
I've got a technical question:
Does anybody have any idea what a ring that comes off second stage nozzle right before the engine fires is?
You can see it at 1:21:27 on the SpaceX webcast
This isn't a Spanish problem, it's a Southern European problem. You cannot be lazy and expect to lead a good life - the math just won't add up.
Probably just a protective cover they put over the engine. my guess is a glorified garbage bag.
Well, if someone was born, grew up, and spent their whole life in SF before being forced out by rent increases... why not? Should we just say it's perfectly fine that housing markets keep forcing the middle and working classes further, further, ever further out of the urban cores?
Sanskrit - Knowledge Representation and Artificial Intelligence.
The States With The Highest Percentage Of Native-Born Residents
Some of the crops would shift to more northerly latitudes, although Canada is a major crop producer currently. Some of the southern climes would need larger water supplies for crops that would benefit from the new temperature. Low-cost desalination plants would probably be a must[1].

1) In California and Georgia, given their farmland and competing urban needs, desalination is going to be a necessity even without any climate change.
You can always scale easier on the server platform, as well as spin up new instances with new IPs on any VM platform.

Handling it on the server allows you some control over the chaos. Not so much when all the logic is on your mobile app.
This article says some of this stuff is as old as Benjamin Franklin. http://www.inc.com/ss/brief-history-time-management#0
> Capitalists can answer this easily: exploiting workers by paying them less than a living wage raises the rate of profit.

Yes, nothing increases profits like dead workers. Mwahahaha. adjusts monocle.

Anyway, the answer you're looking for is that when workers can't afford to live in a commutable distance to a given job, the supply-pool of workers for that jobs goes down. When the supply goes down, the price goes up (or other measures to increase the supply kick in).
I'm not an expert in the field, but I think one advantage SpaceX has over Orbital is that its capsule is reusable.
I like your board. I would like to give it a try. Could you explain difference between "Actionable" and "Daily Goal". Aren't all "daily goals" are "actionable" since you transferred them from "weekly sprint" or "backlog".
Yeah, this is a place where punctuation in the title makes a big difference. Can we put the exclamation point (or substitute a period) back into the title?
Learning from a Cinema Website
Did the models predicting this one get the past 20 years right? With how many free parameters? Tuned after the data collection or before?

As a scientist, the recent failure of nearly all "predictive" climate change models puts into question the methods used to generate these models.
Few places do this anymore, it's more common in the south which is insanely hot at mid day
I'd say the premise is that people who work in SF should have a right to live in SF.
Vain should be vein like vein or ore or artery.
OT but you should watch http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/ -- several times all the flight controllers do their checks, concluding with "stay/no stay".
Alternately look at the light colored states and those are apparently the places the most people move to...

Florida I get with all the retirees, but what is up with Northern Idaho?

(guessing that is just lack of data)
> Didn't they just complete a successful launch for Canada mere minutes ago?

Orbital Sciences has completed over 100 successful launches in 30 years.

Edit: corrected myself down by an order of magnitude to 100. The perils of relying on memory...
Skipping over the fact that they've ignored the last 8 years of cooling and only taken up to 2005, this data is: A "bias-corrected" data set based data simulated from some models, where the bias-correction algorithm is the result of a study which uses a model-derived data set as it's input, where this model-derived data set is itself derived from another model-derived data set, which is calibrated against "psuedo-observations", and I haven't even bothered to look what model they based that on.

I'd say it's about as reliable as a Microsoft operating system.
> CentOS was forked from RHEL to be a subscription-free enterprise alternative and IS actually being funded by donations, which they ask for.

By people that did not want to pay RedHat for support.

> MariaDB is a fork created by the same person who created and then sold MySQL to Sun for $1 billion (which he was able to do due to MySQL having copyright attribution from all contributors).

Because they didn't want to pay Oracle for support.

> In open source it's extremely easy to fork (ie base upon existing code) however due to copyleft ...

Not all licenses require copyleft. With BSD, for example, I can take your work, modify it and sell it without giving you anything back.

> But is that really a bad thing? If the original programmers aren't interested in supporting the Android platform and someone else provides the service then I fail to see the harm (assuming of course that the licence is abided).

The forked applications were already in the Android market, they were mostly repacked and resold.

> One thing I forgot to highlight was the Valve Steam Workshop donation program which just recently resulted in enough money for two 6 month development contracts for working on Blender.

How many developers and what will they do after 6 months?

> Again things like this makes me believe that exposure and ease of payment is the big hurdle, not that there's not enough people willing to donate for open software development.

For example, to make a comfortable living in Germany, those donations need to be at least 40K € per year.
To back up this argument china should be in five different time zones because the country is so wast, but it is in one time zone and does not seem to suffer from productivity problems.
The old Surface Pro was nice, but for me the Docking Station is a huge step to replacing many peoples Home PC. Also Haswell which is more powerful and alot less power hungry with a decent GPU. Thats why i am alot more excited than last year.
Apple seems to think different right now, thats right, so did Microsoft when the first iPhone came out. Time will tell, i love that they try stuff!
It's not an English problem. The language already has tools to clarify.

Free (to modify)

Free (to use)

Free (to resell)

People just don't use them when they're trying to make a slogan, and it causes confusion. English is full of overloaded words.
See Netflix.
Not the parent, but I bet these findings line up well with Trader Joe's demographics: http://www.immunizationinfo.org/science/demographics-unvacci...
I've no illusion that most people will never be interested in my source. For the 2-10 people that are, being able to duplicate my working environment may be of great use.
Gaining access to the best machine-learning methods
I do not understand at all author's statement that OCaml datastructures are big win over Python's

let {cache; config} = b in
print_endline (String.concat "," cache);
print_endline (String.concat "," config)
;;

vs, actually I'm not even sure what the ocaml is attempting, some variation of

print '%s,' % b.cache
print '%s,' % b.config

Which, in Python, if your printing more than a few should be

print ',\n'.join((b.config, b.cache, b.data))

Or if want all fields and they are in correct order

print ',\n'.join(b)

>> The syntax [of NamedTuples] isn’t great, though, and you can’t do pattern matching on the names, only by remembering the order:

Other than misuse of term "pattern matching", that statement is true and is trivially overcome with two line function, one line lambda, or once and for all by subclassing NamedTuple. Here's the function variant:

def GimmieThing(keyword args in any order)
return ThingNamedTuple(args in correct order)
How about single-letter shortcuts, like GitHub does? Press the ? key on GitHub to get the shortcut list. Some might not be as comfortable (e.g. / on a Swiss-German keyboard, as you say), but they'll still mostly work.
Spain has average productivity compared to the rest of the European Union, so you're plain wrong. Check out the data ok oecd.org yourself, if you're not too lazy.
Does instacart have a formal relationship with Safeway? If so, why don't they serve Safeway in Chicago?
Bullshit. There is exactly zero statistical correlation between the amount of work you do and the quality of life you lead. Furthermore, it is extremely hypocritical to make comments like yours.
HN is quickly overtaking Reddit as the bastion of creative and bizarre bigotry on the Internet.
I've seen engineers with consistently negative productivity: solve 1 bug by introducing 2.
That's one problem that Launch Code[0] (a non-funded, non-profit community effort spearheaded by Jim McKelvey, founder of Square) is trying to solve. They grab a bunch of developers with little experience, a bunch of tech companies who both have and need experienced developers, and put the new developers in pair programming positions at the companies so that the developers gain experience and the company gains a developer.

The company I work for is participating, I'll be the experienced developer that is the primary pair, and I'm excited to see how it will unfold.

[0]: http://www.launchcodestl.com/
Yet they don't iterate as quickly as SpaceX.

If I'm putting a couple hundred thousand dollars aside for my Mars ticket, my money is on SpaceX.
Is there anything besides prejudice that makes you say that? Because reports and studies about my country's have consistently shown that the biggest hurdle is incompetent and poorly prepared managers (often the business owners) and institutional corruption, not lazy workers.
Why not? FiDi is home to some of the most expensive luxury units in the city. This fall, voters will consider a proposal to build new luxury units along The Embarcadero.
I could not find the link to their AMA can you please link that. Thank you.
When I see a developer that can work on a complex product alone in short time and almost no bugs, well this a developer in the 10X league.
As a software engineer currently learning test-driven development, it's fascinating to see all the parallels in SpaceX's approach to aerospace. It's well worth jumping back to around T-40 in the stream to hear and see lots of what they're doing.
What a fantastic resource! Thank you for sharing this.

A bit of an FYI for anyone else downloading: It's 223 pages, so if your Adobe reader croaks or feels glitchy while scrolling, try Sumatra PDF instead. It will be almost like opening a plain text document. Plus you can easily highlight text.

Millions of words have been written about rocketry and space travel,
and almost as many about the history and development of the rocket.
But if anyone is curious about the parallel history and development
of rocket propellants — the fuels and the oxidizers that make them
go —he will find that there is no book which will tell him what he
wants to know. There are a few texts which describe the propellants
currently in use, but nowhere can he learn why these and not some-
thing else fuel Saturn V or Titan II, or SS-9. In this book I have tried
to make that information available, and to tell the story of the de-
velopment of liquid rocket propellants: the who, and when, and where
and how and why of their development. The story of solid propellants
will have to be told by somebody else.
When I entered Barcelona, my heart stayed there. Absolutely stunning city. Not to mention nearly every woman is a 9/10. I remember walking down the beach and joining a drum circle, started playing guitar with them. Someone passes me a joint, the cops roll by, and I tried to play it cool by putting it out and walking really fast away from the circle. I realized nobody was with me, I look back, cops talking to everyone, laughing, asking how their night is. I walked back like an idiot, the cop laughed at me and told me to take a seat, then they just strolled along. Such a small event felt so surreal.
It really is unfortunate that you're being forced to visit these stores and use these services.
This isn't going to work. I worked in the defence industry for a couple of years in an IT capacity and I'm not joking, the guys who run the shop don't know arse from elbow. Everything is run army style i.e. procedurally and non established procedures, even if they mitigate realistic threats aren't considered or accepted. They're that bad that still to this day, there are NT4 and exchange 5.5 deployments hanging around because some clueless fuck hasn't had orders to fix it.

What will happen here is they will create a team that will be written out of usefulness by procedure instantly and that is all.