skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been in the industry for >20 years. I've met 2 engineers/programmers that some would call the mythical 10x engineer. These are engineers that you can literally build your entire company on their shoulders because they do everything and they do everything with very few mistakes. The problem with the term is that everyone thinks they are 10x engineers, when they aren't. As I've mentioned, there were only 2 people I've met in 20+ years, so they are basically like unicorns.

One of them was the VP of Engineering for the startup I was working at. He was and continues to be brilliant. He was online almost every hour of the week/day and he was always working. He singlehandedly kept our site up by himself, and when he left, it literally took 5 engineers to replace the work that he did. His leaving left such an impact that the Engineering team almost disintegrated because of how much work we had to take on, and the lack of any truly great engineers to mentor the other engineers.

The other was a friend of mine who was the most productive coder I'd ever met. He would also work as hard as I've ever seen anyone work, and the code that he produced did things I've never seen people do since then. Tragically, he committed suicide 2 months ago, and it's heartbreaking. Probably the intensity to which he coded reflected on the intensity that he pursued every other thing in his life, and when things didn't work out his way, like his marriage, it probably hit him much harder than it would a regular person, who would be rightfully devastated.
Kalen Jordan: Founder MageMail and MageTalk
Yes, thank you. Recycling is the default place they will go if nobody takes them. A pity - they are very well built and have decent specs. I was hoping they might still work for somebody.
Perhaps more HN focused, the following list for Bootstrappers and Entrepreneurs might be interesting:

http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/podcasts-for-bootstrapper...
IP protection before approaching VC
Before approaching VCs, is it recommended to start patent process or some way to ensure protection of IP? Does it happen that some VC rejected an idea but gave away someone else refined or similar idea?
IoT Startups Need to Consider Their Business Models Carefully
The author challenged your perspective and you provided no rebuttal. Neither side has any evidence, but in my anecdotal experience I agree with you. I've worked in pretty much every type of tech organization imaginable and the ones that trusted developers across the development spectrum fared best. The ones that had managers handle priorities and wanted heads down coders to implement fared worse, by far. There is an incredible amount of craftsmanship in software, and often times developers are the best product managers because a passion for product is what led them to learn to develop in the first place. Cutting them out of everything but the coding is a mistake, except for a smaller subset of coders who do prefer a heads down role. You can find good spots for them on the right team, but if you don't you end up with a lot of well written code that solves the wrong problem.
I developed a mild fascination with omnidirectional treadmills a while back. It's such an interesting engineering challenge. Anyways, the large size and hefty cost of these treadmills seems almost unavoidable, and therefore makes them unappealing to a large consumer market. It also seems like this technology is the obvious next step for VR.

So, that leads me to the conclusion that perhaps there might be some future resurgence of the arcade. Except they'll have VR headsets and omnidirectional treadmills instead of Pacman.

Wait, maybe there will be Pacman, but you'll be running.
I always go with Zotero, even more with Mendeley being Elsevier, and a company (Mendeley) with no moral compass or ethics.
$3M in Funding, Honest Dollar Hopes to Make Retirement Plans Affordable for SMBs
Here is the spec from dell web site:

Chassis

1U Rack-mountable chassis

30.4" (77.2cm) D x 16.7" (42.6cm) W x 1.67" (4.26cm) H with bezel attached

Rack Weight 35.8 lbs (16.3 Kg)
How is MobileOrg's search? I tried switching from Evernote on all my devices to synced text files, but I found that on my phone I really needed a text/file editor/browser that searched document contents rather than just title. Evernote does this, but I couldn't find anything else that came close.
Author invokes comparisons with the medical industry.

Look, we really really really don't want to be taking anything from those folks. The hierarchies are rubbish, the talent questionable, and the egos immense. At least in software we can show that code does or doesn't work irrespective of who wrote it.
Agreed, this has lot to do with social evolution than government policy.

'X country has it, why can't we' is a useless argument here. If only Indians acted with same degree of responsibility, you could do away with a lot of things.
Corrected the typo. Thanks for pointing it out!
Podcasts I think of as entertainment:

*	The Mortified Podcast	http://getmortified.com/

*	Serial	http://serialpodcast.org/

*	True Story	http://truestorytime.org/

*	The Tobolowsky Files	http://www.slashfilm.com/category/features/slashfilmcast/the...

*	StoryCorps	http://storycorps.org/podcast/

*	The Moth	http://feeds.themoth.org/themothpodcast

*	The Story Collider	http://storycollider.org/podcast

*	NPR Sunday Puzzle	http://www.npr.org/series/4473090/sunday-puzzle

Podcasts I think of as education:

*	Invisibilia	http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia

*	This American Life	http://www.thisamericanlife.org/podcast

*	Radiolab	http://www.radiolab.org/

*	StartUp	http://gimletmedia.com/show/startup/

*	Freakonomics	http://freakonomics.com/radio/

*	Planet Money	http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/

*	A History of the World in 100 Objects	http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ahow

*	In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg	http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04v59gz

Specifically about design:

*	99 Percent Invisibile	http://99percentinvisible.org/category/episode/
Anyone who builds applications built on Twitter's or Facebook's APIs deserves whatever treatment they get.

I've never seen companies that treats their API partners with as much disdain as those two companies.
End-to-End Encryption Plugin for Yahoo Mail
I actually started writing a point-by-point response to this, but it mutated into a thousand words and will be better suited to a blog post at some point in the future.

In the meantime, I think these are generally the same shallow straw-man arguments against Scrum that we all see pretty frequently. I guess the key points to bear in mind will be:

- Scrum is not a be-all and end-all solution to all product development. If you are developing a product for a slow-moving third-party (a case which is described as one of Scrum's downfalls) then you are correct – it's probably a bad choice. So is any agile approach. That is totally fine, and I'm not sure why it's seen as a bad thing.

- Scrum is not a fully-described, cast-iron set of rules that have to be followed. It's a framework which can (and must!) be changed to suit the team, and the product that's being developed. Concerns like wider-scale management and integration of multiple projects are so dependent on the functioning of an individual organisation that it would be ineffective to have a prescriptive set of rules. Your 'Agile Coach', product owners and management team generally have to deal with these issues in other ways.

- Scrum is (apparently, based on the objections in this article) implemented poorly in many places. For example, the 'seemingly endless series of meetings'? That's explicitly one of the things that Scrum does not encourage! Micromanagement is the same. Scope change during a sprint as well. That Scrum is poorly implemented is not a reasonable criticism of it, for me.

- It's okay to fail to meet targets when delivering software, and inevitable that it will happen. Scrum provides the tools to manage and recover from those failures, and to help ensure they are limited in scope. Those retrospectives, for example – it's totally valid to say 'We committed to feature <x>, and failed to deliver it because <unforeseen dependency y> prevented us from doing so'. The important thing is to understand what caused that failure, and how similar failures can be prevented in the future. That's a fantastically powerful tool to have.

Perhaps I'm just biased, because I've been working in excellently-managed agile teams that have been delivering software very effectively, and have seen how useful Scrum has been as a framework to manage the complexity of planning it.
That's not the sort of lesson I want kids to learn. Including my kids.

I want kids, including my kids, to learn that life is fair and if they don't see it be fair, they have to sit down and fix that.
FTA: "TED talks routinely present problems of huge scale and scope — we imprison too many people; the rain forest is dying; look at all this garbage; we’re unhappy; we have Big Data and aren’t sure what to do with it — then wrap up tidily and tinily. Do this. Stop doing that. Buy an app that will help you do this other thing."

... and at the bottom: Megan Hustad is the author of “How to Be Useful” .... From it's blurb: "There's a lot of career advice out there. Much of it dumb. But what if someone read all the advice books -- over a hundred years' worth -- and put all the good ideas in one place? Could you finally escape the cube? Stop mailing things? Be happier?"

I dunno, but Ms Hustad is doing exactly what the TED talks she derides are doing. Maybe she's upset because she has never been invited to talk at TED?

I have never looked at TED talks as a solution to anything; to me, they're just interesting people talking about what they do.
Three.onefouronefivenine.com
It indeed is interesting question. The solution which comes first to mind is creating a graph, with words as vertices, edges will be only if two words have a difference of single character. Once this graph is created, it's matter of running shortest path algo between two vertices. However, creating the graph itself could be a bitch, depending on size of dictionary.
Wow, that post is spot-on; thanks.
We used to have quite a few nice, small machines. The one of the Psion Series 5 was amazing for the size. I had an HP Windows CE machine that was only a little bigger and the keyboard was even better. Lack of USB, SD and Wi-Fi rather limits their usefulness nowadays ;-)
Website Hackers Slip Under the Radar with Impersonator Bots
I spend a lot of time thinking about big-O performance of my algorithm implementations. Not all the time, but the concern comes up frequently. If the job is just gluing framework bits and bobs together to stamp out CRUD apps, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised when low-skill programmers step up to take it?
>>they're just interesting people talking about what they do.

I thought this, but then there were a few TED talks on fields that touch my work. I was furious that TED would provide a venue for charlatans. In some ways the people who promise the most, and whose can be boiled down to sound bites are rarely the folks who do the interesting work.
The electromagnetic fortification of the suburbs
The time I spent with my dad building a model of a turbofan jet engine - with real spinning blades - for our local science fair, is one of my fondest memories of him. And while it is true that he helped a lot we also did all the work together. Just sayin'.
I value your opinion, even if I do not agree with it. The argument of "Scrum being poorly implemented" is brought again and again.

It's just another one of these go-to killer arguments.

If Scrum is so mega simple, why do we see endless cases of it failing to being implemented correctly?

Maybe we should start thinking of a framework, that people can actually implement and make successful, without requiring an entire army of coaches and consultants, who make a ton of money from it.

I'd love if you'd continue the discussion over at Agile Overflow.
I will say, this TED talk improved my life immeasurably, if only for two minutes and fifty eight seconds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s
A People centered marketplace around culture
Tailoring creative solutions on a global scale through strategically aligning culture, common interests, visions and skill.
Personally I don't think any team is disciplined enough to ALWAYS do it manually and the con-founder of "it works on my machine".
"I'm not sure what's left to measure if we attempted to remove support, facilities, and motivation."

Money? Unless that's filed under support.
Hemlock doesn't have a large taproot like cultivated carrot, it's really not possible to confuse them (unless you're eating the leaves like your article suggests... I didn't even know carrots leaves were edible).
I'm not sure why the author is dismissing space-filling curves so quickly, just based on the age of the idea. I've worked with them extensively, in the context of spatial indexing in a database system, in both research and product settings. They address a number of problems described for interval data types. The techniques I've been working with "decompose" a spatial object into a number of regions by recursively partitioning the space, ending up with a small number of "z-values" for each. A z-value is represented by an integer, which is then used as a key in a conventional index, e.g. a sorted array, balanced binary tree, B-tree, skiplist, etc.

Getting a uniform distribution for sharding is easy in one dimension. I'm not sure what kind of scaling the author has in mind, but if you put the z-values in a B-tree, it scales exactly like a B-tree, i.e., extremely well. I agree there is no exploitable ordering of the spatial objects, but the trick is to order the z-values. If a given spatial object gives rise to 4 z-values, then they -- and the spatial object -- appear in 4 places in the ordering. That's fine. Run your search (in one dimension), get qualifying records, and then get rid of duplicates later.
> The sad thing is that nobody has any better idea than strict rules enforced without mercy.

The other sad thing is that so many online communities die because the moderators aren't willing to resort to that, even though it works.
Is there a way to switch explicitly between Python and Bash mode? The "ls -l" example makes me pretty worried that this could mess up basic bash scripts that already work just by defining a variable like "ls" and forgetting about it, or forgetting where it's defined. It's a great idea, but there's a lot of room for stuff breaking that worries me.
Whereas every company is falling over themselves to hire the 10x programmer.

Is this true? I've been involved in a number of hires over the years where we quite specifically did not want a "10x programmer". We knew the position didn't pay enough, and had enough tiresome, non-novel work (e.g. building data processes for client data. Not big enough or interesting enough to be big data or technically challenging) that we simply wanted, in effect, a marginally competent chair warmer.

From seeing hiring and employment practices, this seems to be absolutely common across the industry.

Similarly there is another comment that opines that every programmer thinks they're a 10x programmer. Now maybe it's because I have a work history in places like financial firms and banks and insurance and telecom, rather than pure software or Google-esque, but this is absolutely untrue. I found that the vast majority of developers were simply careerists.
Isn't this the point of URIs? https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986
Because those 6 chars need to have a backing store to map them. You cannot derive the 6 chars just from the content of a file. Whereas with a hash function, you can.
Here's a few I enjoy:

AWS Podcast: http://aws.amazon.com/awspodcast/

The FrontSide Podcast: http://frontside.io/

The New Stack Analysts: http://thenewstack.io/

Software Defined Talk: http://softwaredefinedtalk.com/

Under Development Podcast: http://underdevelopment.io/

GigaOm had a great one as well called The Structure Show but it's now defunct as of last week.
Yarn for Hacker News beta adds search, tablet UI, new categories and more
Hi there,

This beta represents a major update to the codebase, far too much to test by myself, and so I've currently uploaded it as a beta, which you can access via the Google Plus community at https://plus.google.com/communities/113925577732023099124. I would greatly appreciate any feedback :)
I think natural walking is more likely to take off. Why abstract it when you can just walk. Sure there will be issues with running out of real world space. But that can probably be solved via some sort of body based gesture.

I say this, after going through the original Crescent Bay demo at Oculus Connect, where being able to walk around even within a 4x4 foot cube of space it was amazing having real world movement match your characters.
> Because, protip: no high school student can do graduate-level scientific research

Of course they can. I do graduate research in quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics. You can easily do research-class DFT work with a personal computer, open source software, and a strong drive to learn. It's done all the time.

Granted, I use Titan for my largest simulations, but I've gotten publications out of work done solely on my Macbook Pro.
Ex Machina Is Catfishing Guys on Tinder at SXSW
While trying to get unicode working on an ncurses project of mine, I fell into the rabbit hole... I really wish I hadn't.
10x engineers do not work 10x harder or produce 10x code. What they do is write code that is 10x better, in that it has few problems, few design errors, does not have to be rewritten (at great cost), is more adaptable, maintainable, etc. They make the right decisions up front about the approach to make.

For example, they can select the right approach to concurrency for a particular problem, rather than spending much time later chasing concurrency bugs.
>>If its a fraud its a fraud you can get your money back.

Sorry, but in a country where credit card companies send the local mafia after a person if they miss a few EMI's. No one is realistically going to trust 'dispute the transaction, get your money back' promise.

There will be so much fraud from both the ends, it will be hard to bring the chaos in control.

India needs a lot of social evolution before you could trust the public with these things. We can't even discard a biscuit packet properly, let alone these kind of things.
The basic thesis as I read it is:

You're a 55-year old engineer who graduated from school in '81. You're being interviewed by a 24-year old engineer who graduated 2 years ago. You're asked, in an "algorithm interview", to explain some detail of the implementation of an AVL tree.

In reality, despite the fact that they're covered in CS courses, virtually nobody uses AVL trees in industry. In fact, people barely use balanced binary trees at all, and when they do, they use red-black trees, and they use someone else's implementation, because they're a bear to debug.

The 24-year old has an advantage with this question because they were recently taught about, and perhaps had to do exercises/homework/tests based on, AVL trees.

That this happens is stupid, because it's very unlikely that conversance with AVL trees is going to make much of a difference to your on-the-job performance. Almost all the narratives you can come up with about this involve reading tea leaves and are shot down easily by better selection/hiring/interviewing techniques that answer questions more directly.

This line of questioning can go too far; I don't, for instance, think knowing the big-O characteristics of an AVL tree is unreasonable (it's a balanced binary tree, and you should have the complexity of operations on those in resident set throughout your career).

(AVL trees are just the first example of algorithmic trivia that came into my head. Substitute Kruskal's Algorithm, or k-means clustering, or whatever,)
If you feel degraded by the version of Scrum your team is doing, then the team is doing it wrong or at least the retrospectives are not working. And if you want to make your own decisions, then you are probably better off alone. But that is not the fault of Scrum.
Absolutely!

Chart any stock, and find it's high point. That's where I bought it.
> He was online almost every hour of the week/day and he was always working.

It's a lot easier to be a "10x engineer" when you work 2x-3x the hours everyone else.
Fork of Impala optimized for s3 and cloud
Scalable A/B experiments at Pinterest
>it's much harder for judges to sniff out people who didn't do original work in the biological sciences category

This applies to biological research all this way up the chain, including research done at top Universities, and by "top men".
Really hope this Material Design nonsense doesn't take off. It's awful (especially on the web).
Because computers and reality don't actually deal with immutable data? I love the reasoning powers you get from it at a code level, but it's simply not a fast way to do things in many cases. Also, many applications do not care about all (or any) interim copies of data.

With respect to web content, what are you proposing? If I got to site.com/product1data and you update the price, we certainly don't want the URL to change. In such situations, how would a versioned system add any value, and how would the UI be exposed?
Hah! Like the good old Microsoft Natural Keyboard, eh? I would go for that if it locked in place, actually, but the wobblyness would drive me nuckin futs.
I have the Gear VR and the DK2. I think mobile VR is going to take off just as fast as a category than desktop VR. I personally find it being wireless/portable to be worth the loss of positional tracking. I'm sure they'll get mobile positional tracking working in no time and then it will just blow hardline VR out of the water (caveat, minus having less fancy graphics), and it will definitely get cheap fast. It's already only $250 for the VR holder plus a Galaxy Note 4. Once they fuse these things together into one project and also streamline the hardware even more it will only get cheaper and lighter.
I'm not making claims about the correctness of the approach (I'm not enough of an FP math whiz); I was just pointing out that your original critique appeared to be based on a misunderstanding.
I wouldn't be surprised if surgeons feel like 10X'ers compared to general practitioners, in a sense (of course, a surgeon "being 10X as productive as a GP" doesn't make literal sense).
> the Meerkat app will no longer be able to automatically push notifications that announce the live event to all of a Meerkater's Twitter followers.

Good. If "people I interact with twitter autospamming me every time they use an unrelated service" becomes A Thing then I might as well not use twitter.
Eddie Huang had an interview with Joe Rogan where he talked about the behind the scenes weirdness and cultish feeling he felt as a speaker when he tried to leave.
I feel that zeal occasionally, but smart phones and having a portable computer on you at all times probably deserves that award. But why do we have to play favorites?! I love all tech children equally. Especially when they combine into Mobile VR!! :)