skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think 20% is on the low side. But, you really need to define your terms. I would call 1/3 of all programmers useful, in that they can create more value then they cost. However, when you have a tiny budget and need to find useful programmers willing to work long hours for low pay then you really want young smart programmers with a lot of experience. And they only way to have a lot of experience at a young age is to do a lot of side projects.

There are plenty of programmer that will blow your mind making 150+k/year, finding programmers that will blow you mind and are willing to take far less and a slice of equity is far harder.

PS: There are talented older people that are also under payed, but that's normally because they are happy where they are. Finding them and getting them to work for you is hard and expensive.
You might prefer to manage your dotfiles with something like:

http://github.com/jrockway/dotfiles/tree/master/bin
I read this article, and then I read Sergey's Op-Ed in the New York Times. I agree with Sergey more than this guy.
Holy crap, you're right! This dude is younger than me.

Well props to him, he certainly got the cranky old guy thing down pat.
> To Anyone Downvoting This: Let me ask you one question. If someone without a seatbelt gets hit by a drunk driver does the fact that the accident's the drunk driver's fault mean it was ok for them not to wear a seatbelt?

Is a lack of a seatbelt the cause of the accident? Would having a seatbelt on prevent the accident? Is the drunk driver not the 'most guilty' party here?

No offense, but this is the type of situation where the company (Microsoft/Danger) needs to really get smacked back into the Stone Age. It's a case of huge neglect if they just lost all of their customers' data. I mean what will probably happen is just an apology with a, 'sorry this won't happen again folks' is wholly inadequate for what they caused.

Reaching into your other comment, while the bus driver and doctor have laws stating that they have legal responsibilities, there seriously needs to be one here. Regardless of consumers' ability to backup their own data, this sort of incompetence is unacceptable from any company operating on this sort of scale.

It really enrages me that the likely outcome of this whole thing will probably be less than a slap on the wrist, if that. While I'm not really a proponent of 'cloud services,' the fact that companies feel that they can offer these services and try to weasel out of any sort of damages they might cause through their incompetence by trying to add things like, "we are no liable for any damages" in some contract pisses me off. This is the same sort of legal nonsense as the 'arbitration' clauses in EULAs where the company is the one that gets to choose the person that will decide who is right and wrong in disputes... and someone somewhere in the company actually believes that this is fair.
My goodness, did anyone still use RealMedia? Welcome back to 1998.
Static typing gives you 'redundancy of meaning' solution for a fairly rare and not especially harmful, or hard to detect by other means, error of holding some data types under identifier that you meant to hold values of different type.

It's a hard solution (vide generics and all the redundant typing) for minor problem and it cannot justify its existence on such basis.

For me static typing is just a hack on the side of compiler guys to make their work easier for them. It was claimed to have benefits for programmers at later date.
Booville.
Id like to see google give the book content away - including the ability to mash up. They have enough money to just do it for the greater good, and write it off as advertising / PR budget [while gaining revenue from the searches due to their market dominance]

Along with this I think there needs to be a change in law to match the change in technology - Perhaps creative works should simply fall into the public domain after n years has passed?

Extrapolating... I'm not sure what this means for say LoTR, the Bible and baroque music. Putting religion aside, these have a large place in the social consciousness, so should effectively be owned by the public [yes, not a logical inference]

Hmm.. a Cathedral is clearly a creative work. Perhaps they are already owned by some kind of public trust, in effect [by subsidies]
Definitely, a good video! We get to see features such as a 16-note sequencer.
I definitely see the value in that and it goes for any career where creativity and insight is important. Taking the time to step back, disengage and then reengage with new ideas and perspectives can be very valuable. But like he said, it needs goals and structure to make sure you accomplish that, otherwise, you're just screwing off.
Empirical Study of Data Sharing by Authors Publishing in PLoS Journals
Internet Archaeology: sordid past preserved and curated
"We continue to advise customers to NOT reset their device by removing the battery or letting their battery drain completely, as any personal content that currently resides on your device will be lost."

This is the most shocking part of the article. Is the system really set up so that a failure on the server side causes data on the devices to be deleted? That strikes me as bad design. Yes, any sync system comes with a built-in danger that one endpoint will unexpectedly delete data on another, but if servers goes down the phone should hold onto its data until told otherwise.
We don't need offsite backup. Server crashes are something that happens to other companies.
Yeah, I can see that... but I also understand it. I've told people older than me to grow up before. Sometimes people are older/younger than their age suggests.

And, in Ted's defense, back when he started writing he was in the right a lot. I remember his huge article about Meebo, the one that made Uncov famous, because it was all about bashing people for attention. He made point after point about Meebo's failure as a service and he was dead right about all of them. A lot of his earlier posts—the ones about Mahalo and Scoble and Pownce in particular—were smart, critical, and not entirely derogatory either.
"... Don't be insulted; it's just an argument on the internet. .."

Worth reading just for that :)
Why Cloud Storage Use Could Be Limited in Enterprises
Netscape started out selling its browser. People bought it because it was significantly better than the free alternative at the time (Mosaic). Then Microsoft came out with Internet Explorer, which was good enough to challenge Navigator, and was distributed for free.
Fair enough, although at times I "Combine the wisdom of my youth with the energy of my years."
It's far worse than you can possibly imagine.

I have a friend who a while back wanted to make an iPhone app that could play streaming music from various websites (for formats and protocols the iPhone couldn't natively handle). Everything was looking good until they went to talk to Real.

Real didn't even have an implementation for their platform, so like everyone else sane, they simply used the open source libavcodec, from the ffmpeg project, to decode the audio formats they needed (Real, Windows Media, etc). But they figured that since Real Audio is a completely proprietary format, it would be best to get a license from Real anyways.

So they call up Real and ask for a license and so forth. Everything's going great until the guy asks them about the software they'll be using...

... upon which point the guy goes into an almost murderous rampage about how ffmpeg is "stealing the code" and basically tells them that if they use ffmpeg at all, anywhere in their company, Real won't license to them.

And why? Because ffmpeg--legally--reverse-engineered Real Audio and Real Video. The latter of which was the primary point of contention--and the great irony of it all is that Real Video itself is actually a blatant ripoff of H.264, and most of the "reverse engineering" consisted of reading early (publicly available!) drafts of the specification.
When everything is in the 'cloud', how do you know the difference?
agreed. a broken php template would have been much more funny and meaningful.
If you're writing software as DLLs, the venerable Depends.exe is critical:

http://www.dependencywalker.com/

If there was something that made debugging linking errors this easy, then C++ development would be a snap... kind of...
Send me an invite and I will wave with you.
bigspenderopm on twitter
bigspenderopm@gmail.com
Snoop will be pissed.
Same here. Helps keep my mind and my mood healthier and I can get more done.
This does not match my experience with Panera Bread at all. It's been entirely acceptable, but not in any way amazing.

This post sounds less like an examination of Panera Bread's key strengths and more like ad copy.
Your question is like those who boo sports players when they have a bad year. An economic downturn is not uncommon anywhere and having one now is just letting the wolves howl at the moon and salivate. The best players bounce back and so will the economy and the dollar. All this has happened before, many time. It would be unwise to bet against this track record.
Something I discovered: drinking a big glass of water right before bed, I sleep better and wake up without a sore throat or muscle soreness.
Here's what I'm doing at the moment:

Slicehost for web server, backend processing and db. This allows me to scale each major part individually. The processor agents store a bunch of stuff on S3.

I'm probably going to change this to using the backend systems on Slicehost just as schedulers and do the actual processing on EC2. The biggest concern here is transferring the data back and forth. If Amazon provided functionality identical to Slicehost at the same economics, I would switch in an instant.
I knew if I read this whole thread I'd pick up something cool. (Just did both of those things, and they rock.)
Spoken like a true rich pompous azz
I liked this feature, but I think it makes sense for them to remove it. To me it highlights the fact the Github has grown way beyond just hosting Ruby projects.

I'm currently in Rio for the Lua Workshop and many people here have said they'll be moving their projects from CVS or SVN over to Git and Github. I am guessing that within a few months Github will be the defacto standard place to host Lua projects just like it is for Ruby. Hopefully they have at least 50 megabytes of free space to accommodate all of us. ;-)
Sorry, trouble with my bb.

The goverment is very serious about all of this and it is putting a lot of money and effort into it. They are also putting good incentives for local startups.

The biggest con about Chile is the small and underdeveloped VC scene, but in spite of this, there's a good private investors scene, albeit not as accessible. The chilean goverment is also backing VCs by actually giving them money to invest.

I think you should seriously consider it.

More info? Check my profile.
Good points. It's worth remembering that when it comes to this stuff, we're all anecdotalizing in the dark. I say that because it sounds like we've had quite different experiences. (20% of programmers work on side projects sounds low to you, very high to me.) Frankly, I'm not even sure it's possible to properly define these terms, let alone measure them.
I read it as more of a cache -- the phone caches data that you access, and that cache is reset when the phone is rebooted.
I am not actually suggesting that microsoft didn't beat netscape in the browser market but that the apache project is the competitor that finally killed off netscape's last supply of oxygen. Think of apache as the one to deliever the finishing blow.

What's the vote-down for, anyway?
I'm the OP of this one, sorry. And I saw Casey above groaned a little bit at it surfacing again. :)

But seriously, even with all the repostings, there are a lot of us who somehow hadn't already seen it. Even though the headline, and the story, emphasize the scaling challenges and solutions, the larger story is how you can bootstrap something really successful with minimal resources.

Peter, thanks for running a great blog.
A plausible rumor is that the data loss stems from a botched SAN upgrade by Hitachi:

Currently the rumor with the most weight is as follows:
Microsoft was upgrading their SAN (Storage Area Network aka the thing that stores all your data) and had hired Hitachi to come in and do it for them. Typically in an upgrade like this, you are expected to make backups of your SAN before the upgrade happens. Microsoft failed to make these backups for some reason. We’re not sure if it was because of the amount of data that would be required, if they didn’t have time to do it, or if they simply forgot. Regardless of why, Microsoft should know better. So Hitachi worked on upgrading the SAN and something went wrong, resulting in it’s destruction. Currently the plan is to try to get the devices that still have personal data on them to sync back to the servers and at least keep the data that users have on their device saved.

http://www.hiptop3.com/archives/what-caused-the-sidekick-fai...
If it's something that cannot be fixed (these customers are never going to get their text messages back, for example), it is no longer an inconvenience.
The Cause of Bubbles = Financial Engineering vs Investing
the implicit assumption in all of these arguments is that it's more important to ship bug-free (or as close as you can get to bug-free) code than to ship quickly. In the real world, that is almost never the case. In fact, I can't think of a single situation in which it is ever the case.
Websites Built with Kohana PHP
Or the dangers of companies not allowing you to easily export/backup your data.
Wow, tough crowd... :)
I can't do multiple tabs inside one window. The mess on the taskbar really hurts my eyes :-)
No that isn't the assumption. And when the article does discuss project deadlines it most certainly--and with cited references--talk about the trade-offs present in the real world.

The article was written to discuss ways of reducing bugs independent of any other need.

Furthermore, although you "can't think of a single situation in which it is ever the case", I myself actually picked one where a $4 billion machine with six lives at stake was an excellent example of when it DOES matter what the quality of the software is.
Neil's point is basically "KISS", which is excellent advice. I wish he had also talked about the other half of the statement, though: figuring out what users DO want. In my experience, the tricky part is not keeping it simple, it's knowing what to build. Really effective advice on how to determine what people really want...now that's something I would love to read.
From the HN guidelines:

"If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title."
Backups are only as good as your ability to recover from them. How many of us think we are doing a good job backing up data, AND have actually tried to run a disaster recovery drill and have verified that you can recover your systems from your backups? You don't want to find the gaps in you backup strategy during a real system failure, when you're under the pressure of the clock to get the system back up.
Ask HN: Hiring
Would you hire a programmer who spends their free time debating whether they would hire someone who programs in their free time?
At one of my haunts, I oft talk to a seasoned and grizzled developer. He's convinced everyone, and I mean everyone, should know how the internet works. My mom should know the OSI model, he argues.

I suggest it's unreasonable.

As a cell phone user to my provider, my relationship and contract starts and ends there. Then, it gets complex. And yet, I expect it to work without fail. It seems like it infrastructures are credit default swap complex to the average consumer. This is a bad thing. I don't expect an people to should understand the OSI model. I fully expect we'll find a balance between people trusting others with their information (features/convenience) and having it mirrored/synched without disaster locally (nice to be home).
I think the subtle point here is that users don't want bloated applications but
1) They will vocally advocate for additional features that meet their specific needs
2) They will buy upgrades (particularly of boxed software) based primarily on new/additional features
iswitchb-mode is a cool little thing I recently discovered. I somehow enabled it accidentally, was puzzled for a moment until I realized what it was doing, and now I love it.
sql-oracle mode in emacs takes away a lot of the pain of using sql-plus (if you're an emacs-er)
I also use Quicksilver pretty extensively. It drives me nuts whenever I work on another person's Mac, hit cmd-space and spotlight pops up.

Growl is also a pretty cool thing to have if you're on a Mac.
I hadn't read the article cited before and it hit home for me in some ways. I've been the guy to deal with tons of crap code that I hadn't ever seen before and fix that critical bug that was making it impossible to ship.

I'm also a pain sometimes if I don't get my way. Right now I care about page load times and features for our current customers and my management cares about these big initiatives. I see their point but that's not what I want to be doing so I have a hard time caring. It's not a good thing really but the things that I've done on my own have turned into major improvements to our technology and served our existing customers very well.

Not sure where I'm going with this but it sort of put some more perspective on some decisions I've felt as though I need to make about where to take my career. I've been coming to the conclusion that a startup is the only way I'm probably going to be happy at work for the short, medium, and long term.
I use Cloud Sites as well, and it is great for small "code it and load it" projects such as proof of concept sites, or blogs. No SSH or SCP makes version control and deployment tricky.

As a LAMP-only guy, I haven't used this feature, but you can run Linux and Windows from the same directory, which is pretty cool.
Oh, I'm happy!

By the way, last time I used RealMedia was when I had a desktop computer... back in 2002-2003, I think. Windows 98, then ME, then 2000... still remember RealMedia sitting there.. AGH, pure advertising and crappy software.

... Have they ever done something good for humanity? ... At least they were good at marketing.
Had cloud sites when it was Mosso (they renamed it if I'm not mistaken). Performance and options were weak IMO. Sites seemed fairly slow.

We ended up sticking with dedicateds from Rackspace for site hosting. Performance and support are superb.
If you've got a really big SAN, it's pretty tough to back it up completely and independently without... a second really big SAN
Yes and these companies who don't know what the fuck they are doing make up the clouds we use everyday, so the cloud ends up being a hazy fog of data uncertainty instead.
This site is explicitly incomplete. Barely begun, in fact. However, the 'object pool' section has been filled out and has some nice diagrams and explanations.

All in all, I would much rather have seen this link in 4-6 months instead of right now. I'll try to remember to resubmit it around that time.
I'm guessing they have a lot more data than is practical to store on a tape.
Yes, it seems github had a glitch and our page was down.
Ah, I was thinking the child process started from the beginning. I guess the artist was too.

It'd be funny to get some green spraypaint and submit a patch.
They aren't using the term "leverage" in the financial sense (investing money that you borrowed). By "leverage", the article author means "ability to control a situation and/or make your dream come true."
my first thought is: this happens all the time, if by tiny pieces you mean atoms. gently heat a balloon until it swells to twice its size. am i missing something?
FWIW: I've seen this little test before and even shared it around. And the ultimate conclusion is that it probably means absolutely nothing.
Well the obedient type is normally what a company would want to hire to work under it. The crazy people who code in their spare time are more startup-founder type anyways. And these types have a tendency to fail the hiring process more often.
Totally unsexy, but a notebook that has gridlines instead of regular ruling and a pile of pens (some people really hate them, but I love Pilot G7 pens).

Having grids makes it really easy to flesh something out on paper, take notes, etc. and you are forced to pay attention to things in sequential order.
Why is it depressing? just because some douchebag on the internet said so?
Not to discredit shades, but I just tried it and it was giving me this annoying brightness flicker. I'd imagine it has something to do with my extra display, but without that display, what's the point? It's trivial to adjust the brightness on my MBP with the F1 and F2 keys.

I do end up adjusting the brightness of my displays as the night goes on, but I do it using a couple presets on my display.
Visor has helped me a bit. It drives one of my coworkers nuts whenever he tries to work with me on my computer, though. He keeps searching for the terminal window that has the Mongrel instance without knowing that it's in Visor.
The 'Democratization of Credit' Is Over -- Now It's Payback Time
I've had pretty bad experiences with Mosso's technical staff as well. I don't know if that's changed with the changeover to being the "Rackspace Cloud" or not though.
Less is more, get it done and out the door.....
If you want to compare, the song they are covering is Extreme Ways by Moby.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8eV7suSA4k&feature=fvste...
I bet most of the MS Word features could be replaced by a single scriptable extension feature.

It's a little more complicated than to just keep it simple. Spamming a bunch of simple features is bad, but more complicated (high quality non trivial) features is almost never bad. So basically anything that most people can't script themselves, like a face detection feature or something like that, would be a great feature to implement, whereas something like linking Entourage with iCal (which is horribly implemented in Entourage) is a shitty feature. A bunch of these simple things which offer little value and must be customized for individual uses anyways may as well be implemented as extensions instead of features.
they are supporting gems.github.com for 1 year, see article
A balloon is mostly empty space. The paradox deals with solid spheres rather than atomic matter.
Sure. Don't you want people who can form opinions and then communicate them with others?
If you currently work equally well when you are or are not being told what to do (let's just call it micromanaging, because no one really minds high-level being-told-what-to-do), and you don't want to be micromanaged, should you negatively bias your micromanaged output so your managers will stop doing it as much?
This sounds interesting. Someone willing to give it a shot and tell us how it went?
I'm an INTJ too; I should put that on my resume, so I can just skip to being a super respected technogenius
I agree. I've been a regular runner for a few years now and its a great way to relax, let off some steam, and get into great shape. Also depending on where you live there's usually a tight-nit community of runners so you can make some great friends.
Taking two days off per week, one for rest; one for self-development.
I know, I'm saying they should support the actual gem building as long as they are supporting gems.github.com.
Creator of the site is AWOL, for the record. Compiler/interpreter versions aren't being updated and his blog has been left for dead for over a year.
Unboxed - I.B.M Tries to Help Cities Work Smarter
I would stand in line for this.
Important point: it doesn't have to be vigorous, nor a big production.

A daily 5 minute half-brisk walk gives a disproportionate share of the benefits.