skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is true of outsourcing generally, not just outsourcing to lower cost offshore regions. Back in 2000 I left my secure dev job with a large US bank to join a startup and chase the dotcom boom with a startup. The crash happened, I got laid off, no one was hiring, so I ended up joining a boutique 'consultancy' doing dev for banks. Over the course of the next three years I learnt a brutal lesson in the consultancy development business model. As this post points out, there's a fundamental misalignment of interests. The client wants the project done, and the consultant resources gone. The consulting firm wants maximum headcount on the project for maximum duration, and therefore maximum billing. This misalignment means the consulting firm can't speak the truth to the client. The consulting firm can't speak the truth to their employees either, and will usually give them some flim flam about how consultancy is the best of all possible worlds as it combines the security of permanent employment with the variety of contracting. In fact it combines the worst of both - the insecurity of contracting with the lower pay of permie work. Consultancy firms run on one key benchmark - utilisation level. Most, like ThoughtWorks or IBM Global Services, will aim for 65 to 70%. That means 65-70% of employee hours must be billable to a client. If you drop below that rate you have to fire people. At the 'boutique' consultancy I worked for they ran at 95%. Folk would roll off a client assignment at 5pm on a Friday, and get a phone call firing them at 5.10pm! So far, so simple. As the original post made clear, it's all about margin. And, as the original post also made clear, the result of this business model is one disastrous project after another. So why does it keep happening? The fault there lies on the client side. The clients hiring the outsourcing and consultancy firms are usually large corporates looking to manage costs down. The project sponsors are senior managers with long term careers in these highly political organisations. When their projects fail they can't make a fuss about it as that would draw attention to their own management failures. Instead they have to pretend the project is a qualified success, and jump to another team or silo in the corporate environment so some other sucker is left clearing up the fallout. So the consequences of failure are repeatedly eluded, as Mr Pointy Headed Manager slips off to another team, and the consulting firm moves on to the next billing opportunity. I was a little shocked when all this became apparent to me, back in 2002/3, when I saw a $25,000,000 project get canned by a large US bank without ever getting into production. Now of course I understand that it's just how orgs like EDS and IBM Global Services make their money. And the upside is, as the article points out, that it enables wealth transfer from developed economies in North America and Western Europe, to developing regions like Eastern Europe and India, by means of rising developer salaries. The conclusion I draw is don't ever work for a 'consulting' firm like ThoughtWorks. Be a permie or a contractor...
I believe you are referring to the original title: "List of Y Combinator companies I have worked with(hacked)" (I had the same feeling when I opened the page).

However, the author is a security researcher and has indeed hacked (as in, disclosed vulnerabilities) the companies in question, so I thing the title is not ambiguous.
tl;dr: outsourcing doesn't work anymore because the salaries in third world countries are way higher than what it used to be
Yea, I'm not Ukrainian but I'm 99% sure that figure isn't right. $4000 per month is what a dev makes in the Netherlands.
It's a massive shame that PiCloud went down as that had containerized environments, extremely fast startups and auto scaling. It was one of the few things I've used that really solved my small-scale data processing problems simply and cheaply.

> If magic units of computation can run instantly on demand, what more do you need?

Some control over flow, scaling and batching wrap everything up for me. Startup times for my code are non-zero even if the environment is, and adding on queues with a "batch grab" means I can scale things far more sensibly (I can cram a lot of stuff into a single matrix mul if I can pull 100 items at a time from a queue).

I really, really miss picloud :(
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Most of the companies do care about their security, and they handle every email with proper attention.

And yes YC companies are best to work with
You're talking about 3rd-party tech? Could you name one (or some?). Given that Linux is big server-side the tech would have to fit into that stack so I'd like to see how that's done for curiosity sake.

I think having it native is actually better because then companies will see the impact on their bandwidth and compute resources so that'll force ad-tech to be less bloaty. In theory.
I don't think the problem is that they cannot find anybody who can program assembly in general, but they use a very exotic, old architecture with very limited memory. So someone has to learn this specific architecture with apparently limited documentation (and a google search won't cut it). And on top of that in a very unusual and critical application i.e. if you brick the processor you have a real problem. If this was e.g. a modern run of the mill ARM processor, you can find a lot of qualified assembly programmers.
Yes, That's what I did. Thanks for understanding.
It certainly used to be something like that, but the emphasis is now on health and behaviour. Drink driving is a lot less common.

http://www.drinkaware.co.uk/

Statistics: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/ras51-re...

(It's also just a "unit".)
Yep, buying a car sucks. But this is one of the largest supply-chain operations in the world. The dealer franchise system and its legal framework have evolved over 100 years and are balanced pretty delicately. It can't just be refactored by waving a regulatory wand at it and hoping for the best. Cars will still have to be warehoused, delivered, serviced, and resold. Somebody has to buy your old junky trade-in. Somebody has to run the showroom, if you want to actually like see the car before you buy it. So we're going to do a regulatory taking of the franchise, worth millions of dollars per dealership, and then have the manufacturer open a showroom and warehousing lot and service center in every town and city that has a dealership? Or just open a direct sales channel to compete with dealers, but make the existing dealers perform service and deliver inventory? And take your trade-in?

Manufacturers hate dealers. It's mutual. The only reason consumers don't hate the manufacturers so much is that they have never had to deal with them directly. Dealer protection laws are there because manufacturers have a long history of trying to steal from dealers, cheat them, and put them out of business at whim. Those are the manufacturers that consumers are asking to deal with directly. I'm sure they'll treat consumers better than they treat their business partners!
Now HN has free advertisement section? :^)
not to mention that big companies also have in office gyms and classes (usually yoga)

and many mid-size startups also provide those perks by budding up with gyms
The exact same search as the author used but in NL shows you earn more in NL

http://www.payscale.com/research/NL/Job=Senior_Java_Develope...

Doing some comparisons between various European countries it looks like the wages for junior and middle experienced devs are wildly different, matching what you might expect. But the wages for senior devs start to converge.
Inductive Programming Meets the Real World [pdf]
SXSW Interactive Cancels Two Panels on Harassment in Gaming, Citing Threats
I usually do well in a general code interview. But it's certainly not the same, as mentioned many times on HN, lots of devs have problems with code interviews and personally I find their value doubtful. Solving some puzzle is not the same as writing a technical blog or building a side projects over months or years.
I was targeting YC company, I just filtered my success with YC companies.

With bug bounties there are many cases of duplicate issues or they are aware of issue internally. That count as failure for me but not to the companies.
I love this article.
I've only spent a year working in the automotive industry between detail/lot attending, not even any sales. I've noticed some real big problems with the way dealers do business. It needs a serious overhaul. I've been working very part time on some of my ideas to reshape the industry. It definitely needs some shaking up.
Have you read the blog post ?
> Elon Musk has a hell of a horse in this race

Tesla is a recent entrant, so actually it may have been the other way around: Musk looked at all the horses, and worked out that there was a potential winner before even deciding to enter the race.

Compare with Honda, who have been making Internal combustion engines since the 1940s. If anyone has a pre-existing horse in the race, they do.
> Dealer protection laws are there because manufacturers have a long history of trying to steal from dealers, cheat them, and put them out of business at whim.

That doesn't justify them. I thought the US is supposed to be anti-regulatory? Why didn't dealers handle this by becoming primarily multiple-manufacturer and thus able to switch to or favor a different manufacturer at whim?
Yes, but it's not a constant, but more of a configurable option; change can be made trivially, and as often as needed.

Unix init scripts for networking can do MAC changes for you every time an interface goes up.
A long time ago I saw an ad on the back of a magazine, paying tribute to Dell's direct model. It was a Johnnie Walker ad, with a bar napkin. On the napkin was written Dell's business plan; it had "make computer, sell computer" basically crossed out, replaced with "sell computer, make computer."

Make the car -> sell the car

Sell the car -> make the car

This switch should have happened a long time ago. The near total elimination of the vast inventory system. It would make most automakers dramatically more profitable.

Dealerships should be replaced by small automaker-owned sales venues, stocked with one of each model for test driving purposes. Customers order their car, with some limited customizations. They come back in a week and pick up their car, and save 20% off current prices. The automaker never builds a car that hasn't already been sold.
> ... want to hire me ?
not a promotion, huh?
US science agency refuses request for climate records
I don't think I lack social skills in particular, I'm easy to get along with and in all my jobs I (think) I made my bosses happy. What I lack is the selling part, the "explain what were your challenges in your last project and how did you solve them".
Since it's traversing the PCI bus hierarchy, not easily.

There are also a number of shortcuts for "shutdown is just two writes to a given register" that some OS probably expect to be around these days (a field in FADT) that I'm not sure how a complex ACPI shutdown routine would fare in practice.
Freakin awesome way to get free app store credits
Good article, and most anyone who has used Upwork will relate.

It's not just about off-shore devs. Any time you hire someone part-time / short-term and pay them hourly... what's their motivation (keep in mind they were the lowest bidder)? To give you the best quality code, or to extend / prolong their contract?

If you want to make sure your priorities and goals are aligned with your developer, make sure they are on-staff and have a percentage of the company. Or better yet, learn to code yourself.
This is fantastic :) Thanks guys. I had an Amiga 600 when I was 10, but I didn't know anything about demos until much later. Wish I still had it :p
Can you please explain the point of your post?

Why is it relevant whether the story is a "surprise"?

Expressing your blasé attitude does nothing but downplay the significance of this.

The type of people that express arguments like this are the reason that these sort of things continue to happen.

"Oh, the Iraq war was based on lies? Yeah, everyone knows that".

Just because it's an accepted reality does not mean that you should just let things get a free pass. That's how you allow the same things to keep happening.

Congratulations on not being surprised. Everyone is very impressed.

Sorry for the rant. This is probably my #1 pet peeve.
How to master Twitter with these simple hacks
It can be done with a dimensional scheme or with a normalised schema. Ralph Kimble argues for the dimensional approach whilst Bill Imon argues for the normalised approach.

For myself, I tend to go with Kimble, but there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. Wikipedia has a decent summary of this here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_warehouse#Dimensional_v...
That was the normal case in most of the US until pretty recently. Now manufacturers don't want competing brands in the same building. They want a uniform branded buying experience. So they make it very hard to transfer franchises if the new franchisee sells other makes at the same location. The manufacturer has refusal on the sale of the franchise, which is most of the dealership's value.
I think the real tldr is: Outsourcing companies and their clients have incompatible incentives; because the outsourcing company only keeps getting paid as long as the project isn't finished/delivering value to the client.
That elimination of the inventory system works great for cars produced locally. What of those produced overseas, or even on the opposite side of the US? Consumers can handle waiting a week for a car they ordered, but you can't just throw a car into the UPS cargo hold and deliver it to the buyer's doorstep a day or two later.
Yeah. People think that because it works with Tesla, it will work with everyone, but they miss the point that Tesla is a pretty unique company - both because they're new to the market, and because under Elon's leadership, they have making the best possible car and electrification of world transport as a terminal goal, not as instrumental to simply getting more money. Other companies won't play nicely like this, because they don't have a mission to achieve.
How many did you attempt to hack total and how many did you not succeed at?
Ad's are blocked at such sites by URL path (for images) or by DOM path, or by regex. It is even easier and predates adblock, see Greasemonkey plugin.
You're thinking of domain based adblockers. There's also DOM modifying adblockers and javascript manipulating adblockers.
you haven't read, i wrote "croud sourcing" is best !
Yeah. I always found it weird that outsourcing actually is a thing, because misalignment of values is pretty obvious. I will guess that the company doing the outsourcing is usually also burning someone else's money to fund the project.
> cropping up in Africa after decades of mostly war, misery and poverty.

Because Africa is a country.
Indeed. Let's not forget why direct sales are illegal - they used to be exclusive. It was even harder than in the OP because you walked from manufacturer to manufacturer.

Not that I don't think it is time for an overhaul or other models but ignoring history would be churlish.

You pay for the inventory costs of spoilage in other industries!
Huh, I've never seen those before, and I own a diesel car. Are they worth it? What do the tweakers do that the entire Mercedes crew couldn't?
This works great if you don't mind cutting down the number of car models a whole lot. Factories are reconfigured multiple times a year to make different models and there's weeks of downtime between manufacturing runs. It might be months before there's a factory that is ready to make a lower-volume model.
Oh man this is huge. Are you guys opening Chorus and the Pivotal HD stuff too? I'd be shorting HP stock right now, because Vertica just lost all of its appeal. Teradata and it's Hadoop H-SQL or whatever must be shaking in their boots too. Are you guys going to attempt to upstream this or is it forked to the point of no return?

I'd love to work on a project like this but I've got no PGSQL experience (though I have worked on HFT both with KDB+ and writing a fairly decent functional knock-off operating in production and I bet the distribution and data set problems were similar). How is EMC to work for as a parent company?
The US is quite regulated overall and is anything but anti-regulation at this point. It has more laws governing its economy than any other nation, and adds thousands to that tally annually. It's not an exaggeration to say that nobody can keep up with it all, and that's before getting to the insane tax code. It hasn't been a classic free market of very low regulation, in nearly a century.

George McGovern - politician turned entrepreneur - wrote one of my favorite articles on the subject in 1992:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702034064045780705...
"If it wasn't compatible with existing Ruby and you couldn't use existing Ruby with it, why would you be happy to call it Ruby?"

Im happy calling clojure a Lisp? Why not call this new 95% similiar language by what it is - a Ruby? If it were 20-25% similar (elixir) or even 60% I could call it ruby like X lang and be done. Thats not what the point Ive been trying to make though.

When is an object a bowl and not a cup? Is it when it loses its handle? What about if it has a handle but is wide and open and deep? I personally dont think its as binary as your making it out to be (100% compatibility yes/no). If this were the case there would a canonical Lisp and no one else could refer to a lisp as such.

"Like ISO/IEC 30170:2012?" No, that hasnt been revisited since 2010 was for ruby 1.8.7, and doesnt include the whole standard library, which means if you want to accept that youd have to throw out your argument because by your very definition it couldnt be a spec for a Ruby since it doesnt include all exact behavior like mri.
I wonder if it's possible to do a similar thing for codegen. i.e. generate more efficient code based on SMT solver and CPU model.
Also known as:

* Tether Your Phone Tuesdays

* Work from Home Tuesdays

* Fucking Stupid Idea Tuesdays

"I know, let's get a bunch of really smart people, and totally fuck over their productivity 20% of the time." Genius!
>>> The automaker never builds a car that hasn't already been sold.

I am not familiar with the industry, how long does it take to make a car and deliver it to the customer (let's assume to a major US city)?
do not remember the ratio, but sometime it was easy some it wasn't. As I test only website, most companies do test their sites themself. So you can consider 70-30 ratio for success-failure
My day job is of a full stack developer

Side Projects:

jquery-fade-slider - http://jqueryfadeslider.com

A jQuery plugin to add fade effect to your slider items

Google Drive Browser - http://rohit-sharma.in/Google-Drive-Browser

A mini-app which lets you get the list of files from your drive which are modified most recently

Places App - http://places.rohit-sharma.in

A foursquare like application

isbndbjs - http://rohit-sharma.in/isbndbjs

An SDK for retrieving data from ISBNDB

http-requestor - http://rohit-sharma.in/http-requestor

A Wrapper around Net/HTTP which allows you to perform HTTP Requests

rails-gsa - http://rohit-sharma.in/rails-gsa

Integrate GSA(Google Search Appliance) with your rails application
Exactly. They aren't banning roaming charges, they are capping them at a rate that is still a rip off.
In Europe, only used cars are sold directly off the parking lot or showroom of the dealer.

Normally, you choose the options (color, engine options, leather seats, ..) and the car is built for you. You can pick it up some weeks/months later.

Manufacturers of high-priced cars may invite you to pick up the car at the plant when it comes off the line. They have a special "experience" designed around that.
"Wow, you value a persons life so little that you would let them die if they didn't work."

How the actual fuck did you read that into what I wrote?

... deep breath ...

What I meant was, and perhaps I was unclear, is that material goods are a requirement for life, and a good many of them if you want to thrive rather than just 'not die'.

Those goods have to be produced, by someone. Work has to be done. This is not negotiable. It is a fact of living in this universe.

If that work isn't done by you, then it has to be done by someone. You can't just "opt out" of work, all you can do is either a) do it yourself, b) let someone else do it for you, c) force someone else to do it for you.

Right now, my children are in state (b). There are many adults in that state too - they are dependant upon the work of others. In many case that's through no fault of their own, either, and I think that it's entirely just that a civilised society look after such people.
I don't quite understand what you're predicting would happen if all dealer protection laws were removed. Car manufacturers would drive dealerships out of business, and...then what? Be happy not selling cars? I suspect they would still want to sell cars, and that's going to need some local presence.
Is there an existing library (like a Cascading Tap) for parallel loading Greenplum from Hadoop? I couldn't find one.
What does being new to the market or having a supposedly noble goal have anything to do with selling cars directly to customers?
What kinds of vulnerabilities did you find?
SecureCRT: How to import sessions via CSV file
Just as an example, if you're Toyota, and you know how well your top five models sell in the US, you'd either build two factories strategically located near the west and east coasts, or you'd build one giant plant in eg Texas and ship the cars west or east, splitting the time it would take to ship it across the entire country side to side.

Most of Toyota's profit comes from just a few best selling models (that tend to be their best selling models year after year). That's where you'd start on this type of automation, and you'd invent new manufacturing technology accordingly as necessary.

The criticism I see most often on the concept, is that it'd be challenging because our manufacturing processes are pathetically ancient. I agree: it's time to move manufacturing into the future. It's not a question of if it can be done, it's: who is going to do it first.
Based on the fact that a large industry is not doing this I would guess there are some reason it's not a good idea economically. I don't see an obvious flaw in your suggestion, but it's so simple that someone in the industry have to have come up with it already and decided not to do it.
In my first job I made 15 euro's an hour and was billed to the client at 125 euro's an hour (this was as a java dev in the Netherlands 8 years ago).
HN visitors have a long and glorious tradition of self promotion.
The reason there are laws protecting dealerships is that manufacturers were screwing everyone over as much as they could. Tesla can be trusted to deal with customers directly without screwing them over, because of the reasons I mentioned. Other companies don't have them, and can not be trusted. Therefore you can't assume that just because it works with Tesla, it will work with the rest of the industry.
This seems like an opportunity for an Uber/AirBnB move.

Find a jurisdiction anywhere in the USA where direct manufacturer sales are legal. Negotiate with the manufacturers to handle direct-to-consumer sales for them. Write your "app" so that customers can build their car online and have the order go straight to the factory. Charge the customer a "delivery fee" to get their heavily discounted car to them, from which you make your profits.

Seems like a lot of work, and a lot of fighting with a lot of bureaucracy, but that's what all these "disrupt the industry" startups like to spend their billions doing. I'm surprised that nobody is doing it today.
Isn't it the internet that's setup like a rat brain?