skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a large number of dead projects in the distributed bug tracking field. There's a few live ones as well. See http://travisbrown.ca/blog.html#TooMuchAboutDistributedBugTr... for my summary of the situation.

I think distributed bug tracking hasn't caught on in the same way distributed version control has because while distributed version control depends only on how individual programmers work, distributed bug tracking depends on the organization of the entire project.

If you look at companies which develop software there are obvious workflow advantages to a DVCS, but it's still a centralized management structure which demands uniform visibility and control over the work the employees are doing. This is a case which argues against distributed bug tracking done in the same fashion as a DVCS, though just like a DVCS it can be used in a centralized manner which merely makes bug tracking faster for the developer.

If you look at open source projects many of them might have a bug tracker, but it's mostly a place where user bugs go to die. Much more typical with herding the volunteers cats is that the mailing list is the prime place to try to win developers over to fix your bug. If you don't succeed then you can try again later, but it might just be that the developers decided that your issue isn't worth solving. In such organizations a bug tracker won't get used anyway, so why bother figuring out distributed bug tracking?

Distributed bug tracking is a good fit with small projects because it reduces the necessary infrastructure. It can be made to work in other project types, but it's less obviously a win there.
I ran my own company for 12 years which probably helped. Took a contracting role at a Fortune 500. Took extra time to come up with suggestions to managers on how to improve the overall development team. Left when the contract was over. 3 months later a management position opened up and the development manager asked me to interview for it.

One of the best ways to get a new position is to start performing the work of that position before you have it. If you're already doing to the work you can remove the risk in figuring out if you'll be capable in the new position.
"Square is even more variable, launching a blistering array of products in the last few months including Square Market, Square Wallet, and Square Cash in addition to its core point of sales products. A lack of focus is not a good signal."

Square Wallet has been around for years. Aside from the nitpick, is it a bad idea for a company to diversify its revenue streams?

Would this article have faulted Square for having 99% of its revenue in its POS offerings?
while(1)code();
> The chance of a person working on a corporate managerial job evetually becomes a CEO

Simple mathematics shows it is very unlikely for any random person to become a CEO. After all, if everyone is a CEO, who is being managed?
Wasn't that app.net?
Thanks for the downvote, but you made an argument from authority and didn't back it up. Not only that, but there are others "authorities" with the opposite opinion.
I actually much prefer bitbucket's issue tracker to github's.
Maybe the page doesn't represent the "rethinking" properly. Our vision is that knowledge bases should not be on a separate website.
For example, if you're a web agency and you sell a Wordpress website, your knowledge base should be inside the Wordpress adminstration. If you're selling a custom solution, you should be able to use an API to plug your documentation there.

I hope the examples explain better what we are trying to achieve here.
That's a lot more than 14 words, pal.
Tech Analysis of “Serious security flaw in OAuth, OpenID Discovered”
> The managers set the wages. Therefore, they will be well-paid, and their contributions will readily recognized.

It really depends on the managers. We live in a culture that rewards paying oneself well, even to the detriment of others' pay. Root cause analysis.
Of course, I'll have that checked out! ;-)
Google vs AWS vs Microsoft Azure | Which suits you better?
Scripts let you do interesting analyses. Dialog, action (non-dialog), and directions all have their own syntax. I once wrote a tool that let you pick movies based on dialog complexity vs. ration action/dialog.

You also have to be careful to use the shooting script. The scripts available online are often many generations removed and quite different from the actually filmed scenes.
HST's fiction and even most non-fiction journalism was never as good as his letters to his friends (his friends included famous Beat writers and 1960s literary legends). His writing quality follow this hierarchy:

Letters -> Journalism -> Fiction

Largely due to his inability to focus on long works due to his (hilariously) reckless lifestyle. He was brilliant in small short pieces. I learned this having read nearly all of his work over the last 5 years. I recommend his collection of letters, published across a 3 book series, which he preserved over the years from being teenager in the 1950s to becoming a famous journalist in the late 60s.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Proud-Highway-Desperate-Gentleman/...

For example one of his letters that went viral recently, written while he was 20:

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/04/hunter-s-t...
How do you store passwords securely?
After almost two decades, still like coding but want to do more management. The technical stuff is still great, but you don't get a say in the direction of the organization.

Non-technical business types don't appreciate the art and beauty, and history - of the craft.
but it's still pretty limited compared to what being an executive or manager can make

If you're just going to arbitrarily pick some hypothetical comparison, sure, it's limited. But that isn't a useful contrast.

Most managers are in dead-end jobs themselves (the mere facet of the pyramid dictates this). Very few rise higher, and are more likely to have young upstarts jump above them. Most make fairly poor pay -- I worked as a dev lead at a bank and was at a pay scale that put me above every single non senior VP or above in the entire organization.

50,000+ employees. My pay as a developer was in a band normally reserved for a small handful of executives. The very, very few who went the management route and won the lottery, so to speak.

I absolutely love this profession, and have resisted all paths that would pull me out of it. I make great money for doing something I love.
While I'd be interested in seeing a serious postmortem (pre-mortem? trans-mortem?) of Google+, this flippant piece isn't the article to do it.
"Real Names" Killed Google+ from the day it opened

Everyone was desperate to get the hell away from Facebook - but the psychotically idiotic "Real Names" policy - making pretty much every single mistake from http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... was a total killer.
There is nothing intrinsically american about this statement. If you think it is black and white, then fine, argue that point. By adding the phrase "In typical american fashion" you transform your post from a potentially valid point into a pointless petulant insult.
I wouldn't call it "dead end" but outside of a few rare companies, programming has a fairly impenetrable salary/advancement ceiling. I loved software development, still do, but it's the kind of career where you max out your salary after about 4-5 years. So, I reluctantly moved in to various flavors of management. Still code little projects at home on the weekends, but unfortunately not as a job anymore.

I'd love to go back to work as a programmer (still keeping my skills sharp and up-to-date just in case), but the best gigs available promise the same title/salary 5 years on.
The author has a point, and one of the keys here is that the hierarchy for developer is pretty flat. All the jobs I've had except one very small startup the structure was like this:

Entry Level Developer (coding 100% of the time)

Senior Developer (coding 50%, managing 50%)

Manager, Lead Developer, etc. (managing 100%)

from the time you take a senior position, you're essentially being groomed to manage the team you're on. Whether you're another level between developers and your director/manager or simply the manager, you essentially stop coding.

I think this is the point. It's not so much that programming is a dead end, the inherit structure of most companies is flat relative to the position. It's an interesting idea, how do you give a guy seniority and a nice pay raise, without taking away what he probably loves to do? Obviously for most companies, it means increased responsibility and pay = managerial tasks.

For the last several years, I've been in this purgatory. I love programming, but every senior position means a reduction in my development role and an increase in managerial responsibility. The problem now is my skillset is at a place where I'm pretty much at the ceiling. It's hard to say, "I have a senior level skill set, but don't want to be a manager." I know my two options are to either bite the bullet and get into management (which to me is like adult daycare) or start my own company.

As of now, I'm already laying the groundwork for a startup, so I can transition out and do my own thing in the next two years.
I agree. Sr. Software engineers at our company can make $120k + bonus. It's not that different than their IT managers.

And IT manager is a really crappy job if you love to code. Also, it is very difficult to go from becoming IT manager to IT director or higher, especially in bigger companies.

VP of IT in large companies is filthy rich territory as per OP, but for everyone VP of IT, there are several hundred developer. Opportunity to become VP, or even director is not all that common.
Finally something I know about. Feel free to ask and I will try to answer :-)
Pretty much. Then the failure to solve the chicken-and-egg problem hit hard.
Apple wants to keep the price down so they can keep their margins high

OP clearly means that Apple keeps their costs down, not the retail price.
For the big tech companies, this is exactly how they are organized. Software companies that don't have job titles like "principal software engineer" and "distinguished software engineer" which rank at director/VP level are going to have a hard time as software becomes more and more critical.
As already stated this was tried with app.net. A spectacular failure of marketing aside, no one sprung for it.

This is also partially why ala carte tv programming and iTunes tv is so expensive: People are not willing to pay anywhere close to how much advertisers/marketing/PR firms are.
So... Not-likely-to-make-you-into-a-multi-millionare == Dead end?

Also: "in 15 years he went all the way to being CEO of a $4B company. After 10 years he retired recently with mansions and cars and no worries"

If not having any worries is your goal, I'm not sure that CEO is the right career path for you.
Perl's OO support as bad as you make it sound. You don't have to use the base or parent pragmas to subclass; it's just a lot less tedious if you do, because there's no special syntax for it. (It's kind of amusing to hear "Perl has too much syntax" in this context.)
Moog Music Factory Tour
PeerNova Created: Merger Between Cloudhashing and HighBitCoin, LLC
Whenever I read news articles about things I know well, I wonder how much misinformation I am getting about everything else.
You got front-paged.
I don't make the mistake of thinking a recruiter calling me on several occasions, attempting to get me to interview is a job offer. What I find surprising is that the recruiter still wants me to interview even after I explained who and what I am. Maybe that's just an overzealous recruiter trying to fill numbers. Maybe Google has relaxed standards outside of what people usually think. One of the first things I said to the recruiter was something along the lines of "Are you sure you have the right guy?"[0] followed up with "I'm not quite sure that I am qualified". Between talking to the recruiter and people who work there or passed the interview, it sure doesn't seem like they are only looking for geniuses.

I'm just trying to offer a point of data regarding what Google by proxy of their recruiters, looks for. The recruiter himself has been working for Google for quite a while, so either he really knows how to game the system, is currently desperate, or Google doesn't have as extreme standards as one would think.

[0] - https://twitter.com/67726e/status/431870786169630720
Most people would consider their own investment in their company to be 'negative salary'
I wouldn't exactly call Haskell "popular". It isn't as obscure as some programming languages, but realistically, it sees comparatively little use in practice.

And Haskell predates Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Java and C#. It has had a very long time to become more widely used, yet we just haven't seen this happen. It's not like people don't know about it; many students, academics and practitioners have been exposed to it for years now, and it does get a fair amount of hype for a language that has experienced limited use in practice.

I just don't think it offers enough benefit for the cost involved with learning and using it. If the balance were better, we'd see it being used. But that isn't the case, so it sees minimal usage.
That could still easily be 50-70 years.
It was kind of weird to see it declared dead as I saw a slow trickle of acceptance of G+ around me and more and more people started to post interesting stuff on it now and then.

Facebook for the more personal stuff, Twitter for reading and posting news and opinions and G+ more like a Facebook for nerd stuff in the middle.

I really wish they would stop pushing those random stories about people I don't know and I don't care about or topics that might seem interesting to me because some stupid algorithm thinks so, like Armin van Buren. I hate Armin van Buren with all my guts and I don't want to see his shitty face randomly popping up. Thank you.
OAuth, OpenID security vulnerability
> With multiprocessing this cannot be done. You can use a Queue for this but it's horribly inefficient.

So document that this is not just a problem with some program you wrote, but multiprocessing itself.
How about fancier graphing paper: Gaussian, log-normal with specified parameters, ...
Just completed a server upgrade and migration. Sorry for the delay - should've seen that coming. Hopefully there will be no more problems.
great rebuttal
In my book, edits like this are fine. You turn a draft into a post-revision work and it makes the site better, especially for folks who aren't reading it conversation style.

I agree with this sentiment. It's more effective to find the correct company and correct project within that company to make sure the lines you write are valuable. That's where the money comes from. I know some dudes who are smart and great coders who are making (relatively) little, because they are working on fun things with limited economic value. On the other hand, there are guys who are merely good programmers who are making a lot more, because they sought out projects with very high value and impact and moved those forward. Although it's hard to say how either group can complain too much considering the relative luxury of even entry-level programming jobs in this market.

Part of the reason that startups can be so lucrative is not that a lot of code is being produced, but that code doing something never before done is being produced. The code is not the product, the behavior it's implementing is. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one.
You don't need to pay to ensure the existence of a microblogging system. pump.io or GNU Social will continue to be around whether or not anyone pays for them.
If startups require intense amounts of time and focus to succeed, how do founders with kids make it work? Children, no matter how lovable and cute, take up a lot of these scarce resources.

I can't speak to startups specifically, but my parents founded Seliger + Associates, the grant writing firm I'm now part of, when my siblings and I were kids. They and especially my Dad spent absurd hours getting the business started, but that's because they absolutely had to. If they didn't, the outcomes would be very bad—like not having a place to live, or food to eat. Desperation motivates. Look at what people who used to live on farms had to do: backbreaking labor from dawn to dusk, often for ten or twelve hours a day.

They did it, and they did it with their kids, because they had no viable alternative, at least until manufacturing came along and sucked much of the workforce out of farming.

In the case of my parents, they worked from home (which meant my siblings and I could entertain ourselves, as long as no one was dying or actively bleeding).

I think the real answer is that you can think of your life as having three possible properties (there are more of course, but I'm going to reduce them for the sake of simplicity): startup, kids, social / relaxation life. Choose two. Sometimes life chooses for you.

EDIT: I've now read through the other stories, and I'm struck by the fact that I don't think any of the people profiled have startups that have been tremendous successes—ones that, say, are valued north of $100 million. By now pretty much everyone understands that startups follow power-laws, and the biggest returns are concentrated in a small number of huge winners. It would be interesting to see how startups in general compare to huge-winner startups.
Sorry, I was confusing this with something else (ECDH_RSA suites, where you can achieve decent levels of forward secrecy by signing a new ECDH key offline every minute or so). All ECDHE_ suites need the high value key to be online at all times, because the signed data includes per-handshake values.
I would pay for Twitter as well. Though it would be a huge backlash, I think it would clean things up quite a bit.

I was one of the people who sprung for app.net. It was a crazy idea, and it's unfortunate it didn't take off. In the time App.net was buzzing with activity I did notice a significant lack of spam and fake profiles. It was nice, but it seems now most have abandoned it.
It's py3 but there is a back port of it for py2 that works wonderfully. I've recently begun using it and will never look back to multiprocessing (on which it is built).
I use G+ far more than Facebook, though I am seeing more and more Facebook-like posts on my G+. Not sure if that's good or bad...
Pattern matching is 1) conditional on values, 2) conditional on structure (not something you can get in imperative languages), 3) data extractor from data structures, all at the same time. Yes, it's helluva convenient. Pity it didn't make it to imperative languages (yet).
Designing with Class: Sinatra, PostgreSQL, Heroku
Thanks for these kind words!

Theme customisation is definitely something on our future features list. But maybe we should move it up on the priority list. ;-)
We tried using open data kit but because of lack of expertise we could not roll out the product.
Hacker News doesn't allow downvoting direct replies to one's comments. He could not have downvoted you (unless he has several user accounts).
This is not that.

CO2 is not a simple pollutant that in trace quantities causes harm, which we can almost completely delete with semi-trivial changes in tech. That is the story of a lot of other air pollutants.

Burning fossil fuels for energy necessarily involves generating CO2. All combustion does - that is the end product of essentially all of the 'carbon' in 'hydrocarbon'. Reducing CO2 requires reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned for energy. Speaking as someone that has spent a lot of time on this area: There are no effective substitutes, at all, for reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned for energy. Carbon capture & storage is a red herring with no long-term effective mechanism, a very limited temporary reservoir system, and energy companies that don't even want to use those without the government writing them a huge check. Affirmative carbon credits for things like forest-growing are very limited by nature (forests only take in so much), and more effective as a way of preserving ecosystems than reducing anthropogenic carbon - so far they're mostly guilt-exemption tickets which change nothing about the degree of resource utilization happening. Ocean seeding seems to sequester a lot less than we first expected, because other nutrients become bottlenecks.

Don't get me wrong, I remain in favor of phasing out fossil fuels for most purposes, but they are really useful things, and we're going to have to attempt to leapfrog the entire 20th century of mechanized technology in developing countries to do it, after we complete the process in our own economies. This is not a small thing to ask.
We don't use github, but when our server is offline, we just spin up a VM from backup, push the latest commit to it and start using it as the new centralized server. I think what you lack is a decent policy, not technology.
That notion shows how dangerous and distortive the reliance on regulatory systems is.
NB: I walked through calculations for tidal power a ways back and it took me a while to realize that it's not the volume of the float which matters, but the area. Power is independent of volume.

Why?

Because the energy is derived from the tidal rise, not the amount of water you're displacing. The relevant volume is the area x the tidal displacement, which gives you the amount of water and how far it's been lifted (average: 1/2 the total displacement).

Or, if you prefer to have someone do the math for you, the City of San Francisco and EPRI did an analysis of how much total energy could be derived from tidal flows in and out of the San Francisco Bay, which I became interested in after an Internet crank suggested that the rise and fall of 30 typical ships could power all of San Francisco.

Not hardly.

http://oceanenergy.epri.com/attachments/streamenergy/reports...

The narrow passage under the Golden Gate Bridge, which connects the San Francisco bay to the Pacific Ocean is home to some of the most energetic currents in North America. In average 237MW of power is embodied in the tidal stream, of which about 35MW could be extracted without any negative impact on the environment. A plant of that scale could reach an electrical output of about 100MW at peak.

http://www.sfenvironment.org/article/hydro/tidal-energy

The study conservatively estimated that the Golden Gate site has 35.5 megawatts of total extractable average annual power, and that 15 to 17 average megawatts (MW) of this power could realistically be extracted by technologies currently in development. The cost of electricity generated, assuming incentives similar to those provided to other renewable resources, is estimated at six to nine cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh)—a cost competitive with current wind and natural gas generation, and about one-third the cost per megawatt of solar power.

As I recall, this works out to maybe 10% of the average power utilization of San Francisco proper, and a minuscule fraction of the energy used by the greater Bay Area. You'd do better to plaster the Bay with solar panels.

More: http://redd.it/1wefio

Tidal and wave energy are prodigious on a global scale, but they're simply too dispersed and too expensive to collect for present industrial-scale levels of energy use.
While I don't disagree with your conclusions, my own personal experiences abroad were quite different. When I was a student in Germany, US news showed up on the nightly news and in the newspaper every day. I was regularly engaged in debate about US politics by neighbors - most of whom were better informed than the average American.
Better idea for Forbes..just come out and encourage Google to buy twitter..than at least we would get a forbes article that comes close to having some actual points in the article.
Actually, it's done some other way. You have Dialyzer, which tells you that your case clause will never match the data you provided or the case will surely blow up because clauses didn't catch some possibility that will occur.
I think everything should work fine and this kind of locks is very uncommon.