skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps it's also important to recognize that sometime someone who is the second best, or even just "good" at something, rather than "the best," might actually be a better person for your company. Having worked with people who are at the pinnacle of their field I have noticed 2 trends:

1. Such people tend to be very good at what they do, and largely bad at most other, even related, fields. This is not one of those tired stereotypes of a genius who is bad at social skills. There is a good explanation for this: someone who managed to become one of the best in their field, probably did so through concentration of their knowledge in that field, to the exclusion of others.

2. People who are the best of the best can sometimes overspecialize. You know the old saying, to a hammer, every problem is a nail.

In a small company with a few employees you can not afford to have such a person unless their field of expertise IS the domain within which lies the problem you are trying to solve, and even then, you should be careful. In a large company, you can have more specialists, but be careful as well.

It is also important to realize, as the author of the article pointed out, sometimes good enough will do. You do not need the best iOS dev or the best JS person if all they are doing is creating a front end for you new revolutionary AI engine. You probably want to go for the best AI person you can find, however.
Productivity, versus some imaginary standard developer. 10x is ten times as productive per day. 0x is presumably useless.
> they take a position, but they try to hide it

Of course they do. That's what the public actually wants when they say they want "intelligent reporting"—an opinion they agree with that they can pretend is unbiased fact-based reporting. (It's the same idea as sarcasm: it's a display of intelligence to be able to signal one thing to your friends and another to the general public.)

True fact-based reporting, on the other hand, gets blasted by both sides of a debate for "supporting the other guy"—because any statement that's not explicitly in favor of them, even a statement making an orthogonal point, is against their agenda.

> the strife in dome inner cities was cast as police vs population when in reality government is at greatest fault

Most problems come down to systems of incentives spiralling out of control when nobody is watching, that create principal-agent problems when agents do what the incentives tell them to do. My favorite piece of NPR is Planet Money, because economists tend to at least be attuned to the "incentives" framing for most subjects, even if all they get to talk about is monetary incentives. I'd love to see regular reporting done by economics-trained (and maybe game-theory-trained) journalists, though.
Congress Is a Game, and We Have the Data to Show Who’s Winning
Life imitates fiction? Jack London wrote a short story (part of the Smoke Bellew series) about something similar:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Smoke_Bellew/Shorty_Dreams
If the "burritos" in Austin are anything like those found in San Antonio...

Well. That would make them these little things you can fit thumb and forefinger around that come off a grill. They are but sad, pale, imitations of the true glory that is a Mission burrito. A burrito as done by someone who believes it just a slightly upsized taco.
Show HN: Synth.fm
Looks like 3D is going to be 'the next big thing' in DRAM, one way or the other.

We are going to have AMD HBM [1], NVIDIA stacked DRAM [2] and Hybrid Memory Cube [3]. But why do we need all three, when the latter is supposed to be a standard? Or are some of these actually duplicates?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bandwidth_Memory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_1000_series

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Memory_Cube
Nonsense. The survivors feel differently. That's very real.
Which university in Istanbul ? Are you Turkish ?
Not necessarily the same thing, but often interdependent. Like "great sense of humor" and "unable to take anything seriously"... not really the same thing, but often interdependent.
Those calls may not get through to you, but they'll get through to a bloke like me, who happened to get your old number, hates marketing calls and will play games with the callers (Billy speaking, Yes your ridiculous offer is relevant to my interests, I'll take it) and extracting data from them bit by bit (My address? I still live in Pratville and haven't moved. OK, Fine, I'll confirm the details you read to me.)

If I had fewer scruples I'd actually use the data for criminal acts, but I simply amuse myself by seeing how far I can get with callers.
..and exactly how is that relevant to the above? Perhaps you could grace everyone with your detailed rebuttal of the above scientific information...
NPR: quietly polite apologists for the status quo.
thanks a lot, i ordered the book and will look into it, i am at bay area can you advice a good patent attorney ?
Posting this from somewhere other than beyond the grave, so no.
Two words: Forer effect
I'd just like to point out the obvious here:

Hiring mediocrity is apparently terrible, but everyone seems content with founding mediocrity.
Team iOS:

Scott Tury, AOL, Chief Architect Mobile

Todd Brannam, PERFECT SENSE DIGITAL, Mobile Architect

Team Android:

Nathaniel Waggoner, XAPP MEDIA, Android Lead

Jared Alexander, CAPITAL ONE, Sr Mobile Developer
If you are looking into Zinc, there is a newer version of it here at https://github.com/mcoffin/zinc/tree/new-build

If I'm not wrong, it will be merged with the official version soon.
Housing is infrastructure. Not building housing is not building infrastructure. If you don't build "luxury condos", then what was intended to be middle-income housing will become "luxury condos" because you failed to build sufficient infrastructure. This is not a hypothesis - this is an empirical observation from every city that's ever tried rent control.

There are exactly zero tricky debate tactics going on here.
My mother says a specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing. Likewise, a generalist knows less and less about more and more until they know absolutely nothing about everything.

This applies to looking for "top experts", and also to "full stack developers".
Dr. Abe Othman on Augur's Blog “What Is an Automated Market Maker?”
> The first 5 programmers hired with fast dwindling startup funds all need to be ultra talented and smart.

I'm not sure what to make of that. Maybe I'm suffering for impostor syndrome, but when people mention "A-players", I'm thinking people mean something like "top five percentile". Which, if I'm going to pull names out of a hat, means you have a short-list like:

Steve Wozniak

Bryan M. Cantrill

Slava Akhmechet

Colin Percival

Linus Torvalds

And you've maybe already ruled out the "B-team" (here comically chosen because of their lack of direct engineering visibility -- currently obvious commit sign-offs -- not because of any assumed "lack of ability to make the A-team"):

Alan Kay

Guido van Rossum

Larry Wall (I really have no idea, I don't use perl. I suppose writing perl as a reaction to posix-shell fatigue at NSA actually qualifies for the A-team... but I mean ... perl. B-team. ;-)

I've only met one of the persons on either list. And they are all, way above what I can assume is available for most start-ups. For one thing, even if they all were awful 10 years ago, they've had 10 (30) years to really, really improve.

Now, if you mean that people with some kind of coherent idea of coding, adaptability etc -- or want to "shop down" to something like: https://www.codeeval.com/profile/e12e/ (that's me) -- feel free to send me an email.

But impostor syndrome aside -- I'm not "A-level" in any sense that is meaningful.

That doesn't mean I haven't encountered my share of javascript jockey's or single-minded php masters that have both fewer skills (not so bad) an more of a constrained mind (much worse) than me. But please don't label me "B-level" and "can code a wet paper bag in CSS" "C-level".

There was a time when all I did was code wet paper bags in CSS. Of course, I did web standards before it before it was cool[1] (and I'd learned to spell check emails) -- but I'm not sure how you can tell talent from mediocrity+experience. If you do, you should probably run an HR-startup.

[1] http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail84... (Oh, to have one's young hopes so brutally crushed. I suppose I should take some comfort that he probably thought I was a native English speaker).
Ask HN: What are the know ways for startups to break through the noise?
I am thinking of starting a job search website/app in a specific vertical and there are a few competitors. though the competitors are none a break through with a massive network effect.

i can see one day someone create on site in that specific vertical which everyone would only go there but i cant think of what it takes to make it happen.
AngularJS is to applications what ElasticBox is to automation
Correction: SPRITE comes with an HD camera and gimbal AND is compatible with GoPro models!
PhDs may be only ones were both aware of consensus as a problem and not plagued by it.

As a Zookeeper user however, I can promise you that anyone trying to actually implement or use consensus was very plagued.
This happens in the US, too, right now.
This could be big in safety-critical firmware business.

Some utility to assist bulk conversion from C to Rust would be nice. That way Rust-based firmware could be reality in 2025. :-)
One reason the 10x is a myth.
That sounds.. quite distracting, a real-life version of checking HN all the time.
How would you find the time to focus on building something with all these meetups and hype and... squirrel!
NBA Playoffs: Training with ‘Wearable’ Technology (Part 1)
This sounded fun and manageable, so I felt fine. Then, as we discussed the technical details of the project, I started to get nervous. I was going to be pulling data from a MySQL database using PHP (although after some trial and error, we decided to use Go instead). I would put the data into an Amazon S3 bucket and then create an API to pull the data from S3. Finally, I’d add a page to an existing UI written in AngularJS where I would present the data in beautiful and informative charts (created with D3.js).

This reads like everything I consider wrong and offensive about our industry.

Congratulations to this person for pulling it off, but it's really sad how many different things they had to contend with to get something going (seriously, 2 weeks setting up a dev environment? wtf?).
Crowdsourcing a Corpus for Search of Business News (for Russian Native Speakers)
If your goals are to make a good bit of money and retire by solely doing your consulting business, then you definitely aren't missing out on much. Save that dough up for when the bubble bursts.

That said, if you are interested in a new living scene, weigh the pros and cons. SF has amazing weather and average person is pretty intelligent. However they are passive aggressive as hell and dating scene for men is absolutely terrible.

I don't know if you're seriously interested in it, but I also think you are reducing your chance of building a huge startup, in large part because:

a) SF-tech is a positive signal for funding

b) easier access to funds from VCs + angels

c) easier access to tech clients (nothing beats face to face)

d) easier access to business information (want to find out how Zenpayroll makes money? Find some employees and get coffee with them. Try doing that in St. Louis).

e) A lot of great tech talent has moved here, so you can find some awesome employees relative to other American cities
Sure and Adobe is distributor of Photoshop, but I wouldn't really say they're in the "downloading install files" business.
No.(source: I'm 37)
>Of course, they never figure out how to edit the site, because the WYSIWYG editor is anything but, and even the text editor "enhances" the html you type in inexplicably.

That hasn't been my experience with tens of sites and tons of clients I've known. Simple, non IT people, can edit the sites and change content VERY easily.

Oh, and of course MILLIONS of people edit their own posts for their blogs in the hosted wordpress.com, with the exact same editor.

So, I call BS.
> For intance, when is it ever OK to let your client write directly in the database, even for their own data? If you're going to pass their calls through a deny and allow call, why not just expose RPCs to the client that will handle any writing?

Good question. A pattern I like to use for this in Meteor is to rely solely on their Method calls which allow you to restrict any database ops to the server side. The trick is that you lock down all client-side writing from the get go so you're not trying to guess whether you set your rules properly. Here's an example of that pattern: https://gist.github.com/themeteorchef/194a803f8a28840f475f.

Re: concurrent purchases in your store example, you can actually strip reactivity from certain database queries. So, on the front-end you can prevent state shifting out from under users. To control data on the server, you could have a method that checks whether or not the inventory has been depleted before allowing certain operations (e.g. routing to a new page, manipulating the database, etc). Definitely possible to do this without going bonkers.

Does that answer what you're looking for?
tldr: Nope, it's just getting going!
7 Golden Nuggets to Success Inside Your Home Business
>do not have a process for washing and drying your hands w/ paper towels that is completely touch-free

This is different from my personal experiences. In the last few years, I've dried my hands with a touch-free system in the vast majority of airport bathrooms I've used. I've found airport bathrooms to be touch-free at a much higher rate than public restrooms in general.
Equating slavery with violating IP laws is a fallacy of extrapolation. One does not compare appropriately to the other. Especially considering IP laws have their roots in Monarchally bestowed monopolies and arguably do not do what they purport to do, which is encourage innovation.
Heard a brilliant quote on this topic at a meetup last year: "If you think your data's schemaless, what that really means is that you don't know what the schema is, and then you really have problems".
This is related to the 10x debate, but kind of tangential to this post:

If you are actually 10x and super-duper smart, you're probably undervalued as an employee at any company. For example, companies have actively colluded to lower rates, so you are fighting to be on top of a sinking ship. Although salaries are probably still rising, you should really be a consultant if you actually want to get paid what you're worth. [0]

If your 10x comes from natural talent and work ethic, you should seriously consider moving to security (app, embedded, web, whatever) to help prevent governments from robbing the interwebs of privacy and security. [1] I'm blatantly arguing for 10x people to strive for a 'higher calling' and to get out of line-of-business software development if they are actually this person. In all likelihood, you will probably be better compensated as a consultant in this side of the software field anyway. I do realize there are other noble pursuits outside of security, so good on you if you're chasing that already.

[0] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/05/01/talking-about-money/

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden etc
I think Google partitions people into categories, so if you have searched a bunch of programming related stuff previously, it changes the weighting for the rust programming language.
Fetch, MindMeld API Provide Apple Watch Concierge Service
New Domain Sparks Icann Debate
Australian Tax Office Says Uber, AirBnB Must Collect GST
In case you're wondering, there are 8 digits on the one dollar bill serial number, so assuming a random draw by the DJ, the odds of one of the 100,000 dollars matching the draw every day would be very close to 1 in a thousand. After a year, you'd only have a 30.58% chance of winning at least once. The expected value of combing through the dollars to find a match would be about $30 every day. I wonder if he sorted them into a binary tree.
Your comment has - at best - a tangential relationship with the linked article, and I greatly enjoyed it. Thanks for posting, it's one of the more "real," things I've seen here.
Theorem:

E[X] = E[X]

Proof:

E[X] = E[X]

<vigorous applause>
>WordPress' API and its limitations are so annoying that I just can't imagine developing for this platform unless you desperately need money.

Yes, it's for professionals. Hobbyists can always use some Haskell web framework.
This is true in a useful sense. The more you know (about anything worth knowing) -- the more you realize you've yet to learn.

The more holes and short-cuts you're (painfully) aware of in tools and libraries everyone use every day, to get stuff done.

To be aware of how artefacts are made, is to be afraid. Be that artefact sausages or firewalls. The trick is to then learn enough to know which sausage to eat: or at least find a level of acceptance that lets you enjoy the stuff that tastes good, even when you know how it's made.

And after lunch, maybe you'll serve a json rest api with php.
This is not true in my experience. It's just as likely that someone's "intelligence" in one area gives them a false sense of their ability to understand other areas. They'll jump into some unrelated or semi-related area, learn a little, and quickly act as if they understand it as well as the understand their main area of expertise.

This is especially true if the new area is something they're peripherally familiar through everyday experience. I'm a teacher, so teaching comes to mind, here. Everyone has opinions about teaching and learning because everyone spent 15-20 years of their life doing it.

Intelligent people often act as if

Understanding of Area A + Familiarity with Area B = Understanding of Area B

But as Hegel said, "The familiar is not understood precisely because it's familiar."

See also: every thread ever on HN about law, politics, race, or gender.

In my experience, one's ability to develop expertise in many fields has much more to do with one's temperament. Most people I've met who who are able to do this live in a kind of visceral, mortal fear that they might believe something that isn't true. They're more likely to see certainty (in others as well as themselves) as a symptom of utter, hopeless confusion than as a symptom of understanding.

Blah blah anecdotes, yadda yadda caveats.
MUST BE HEARD! Melodic Dubstep - Paralyzed [Male Vocal]
This is a AWESOME SONG!
I use CoffeeScript whenever requirements permit. Recently I've been working on a small side project using ES6 (via iojs) and I have to admit that it's pretty refreshing to see JavaScript take on some modern improvements and it's clear that today's CoffeeScript loses out on critical functionality that ES6 brings to the table.

With that stated, I still overwhelmingly prefer CoffeeScript's syntax to ES6. I'm glad ES6 took some inspiration from CoffeeScript, and Babel is a great way to bridge the future of JavaScript over to client's of the present, but I'll always prefer the CoffeeScript syntax for white-space sensitivity, support for optional semi-colons, optional parenthesis for function calls and optional curly braces for object literals. I don't need those features but I really like them. For me, the real future of JavaScript is a re-imagined CoffeeScript that takes on some refined semantics in order to bring ES6 feature support into the CoffeeScript compiler. Admittedly, that is not a simple undertaking (though I'd imagine the code would be simpler as a whole since it would necessarily trash obsolete features like pseudo-classes etc), but I know I'm not the only person who would love something like this.

I don't know how jashkenas is feeling about ES6, but one day I'll have my ES6Coffee, even if I have to brew it myself.
> On the server side, this lets you use java which is a lot more performant than javascript is.

Is it?
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/javascript.html
Sorry, I was not clear: I think if you have the option to work in Silicon Valley, you can make more elsewhere.

The housing crisis and (to a much lesser extent) generally high wages amplify this imbalance.

Lots of people say that Silicon Valley pays particularly well, and I think this is true only statistically. Silicon Valley pays world-class engineers more than Chicago pays mediocre engineers. I believe a world-class engineer is likely to make more in Chicago than in Silicon Valley, provided that the engineer can find a suitable job at all in Chicago.

So if want to maximize expected income, I think you should live in NYC working in finance, or if you don't like that option, anywhere in the U.S. except the Bay Area. I don't know anything about the rest of the world so I wouldn't give any advice about that.

If you want to maximize the likelihood that you can find an interesting job in software, you should move to the Bay Area.
Instead of the "directly-streamed linear programming" model, you could do radio audio broadcast the same way you do GPS: just have the local radio towers spraying some selection of podcasts on a loop (with high enough frequency+bandwidth+compression that the effective audio rate is faster-than-real-time, unlike satellite radio), and then have "radios" in cars (or wherever) which catch the files and cache them.

You can build whatever you like on top of that—a hybrid device that will siphon up local OTA content along with arbitrary podcasts when it can find 4G, and then intelligently arrange the combination into linear programming, for example. (Really, though, you're just creating a weird sort of secondary internet that only allows retrieval of files relevant to the local area. In fact, you could make the "radio" into a 4G picocell that actually re-serves said limited internet to your phone, where the OTA content then shows up in your regular podcast app.)

Effectively, this would be the over-the-air equivalent of how pay-per-view (not video-on-demand, the older one) worked, but with the client device then acting as a set-top box to turn the received broadcasts into something equivalent to video-on-demand.

This would also be equivalent to how the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview received game programs.
Preference != condescension.

Or preference <> condescension, if you swing that way.

I'm currently dayjobbing in a world of Java on Windows. It's kinda horrible, especially after recent experience with Ruby, Docker, and fully automated infrastructure. But there's more to the job than tool choices. Fifteen years of legacy code has its own interesting challenges to overcome, and the work environment is terrific in many other ways that I probably wouldn't get at a modern startup.
What's that supposed to mean? They maintain MOST of it.
Hey, thanks for checking it out.

We think the price is reasonable when you compare it to the cost of maintaining web pages by hand. Engineering time tends to be pretty expensive (in many cases upwards of $100/hr). Shogun enables anyone on your team to manage your website with ease, which could save multiple engineering hours per day/week depending on how many pages you have.
Video: Smithsonian 3D Scans the Spirit of St. Louis and Other Historic Aircraft
>Radiolab, Planet Money and Freakonomics are my bread and butter NPR shows

It's interesting that you list those three (excellent) shows as examples. Only Planet Money is actually produced or distributed by NPR themselves. Radiolab and Freakonomics are both productions of WNYC.
Nice! The main point of CertSimple is 80 second EV application process (including generating the CSR) and EV issuance in an average of five hours - this could be a worthwhile addition to the the 'Notes' column.