skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Beyond that, management and accountant types make the assumption that everyone with the same job title is interchangeable. The result is that they take the work of local engineers with a substantial amount of domain knowledge (experience, which maps to higher salaries) and try to offshore it to engineers with no domain knowledge (inexperienced in the field of the application, and often inexperienced period).

Because of their assumption of interchangeability, they end up with a lose-lose model of costs. For illustration, assume a (local) domain expert takes 1 hour to do a job and costs $100/hour. Assume the outsourced inexperienced engineer only costs $33/hour, but takes 3 hours to do the same job because first they have to learn the problem domain.

When you outsource this job, it takes three hours and costs $99. Doing the math, this means the company "saved" $201 because the assumption of interchangeability implies (incorrectly) that the domain expert would also have taken 3 hours.

When you "insource" the job, it takes one our and costs $100. By the math, the accountants figure they left $67 on the table because the assumption of interchangeability implies (again, incorrectly) that the outsourced engineer would also have taken 1 hour.

The only way to win this game is to not play it.
pg: so I guess this was a case of "smart person, bad idea" http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html ... but on the face if it, the idea seems like a pretty good one to me.

Why didn't YC like it? What am I missing?
> the XP interface I use is not the Fisher Price one that it comes with out of the box, but rather the Win2000-alike one but that still has the XP start menu and other XP-level accoutrements.

Amen to this. I am still running XP on the Windows box that I have, so can't speak to the Vista or 7 experiences; but I know that the first thing I did when I upgraded from 95 to 98, and then from 98 to XP, was to hunt for a way to disable as much of the eye candy as possible and just get a familiar start menu.
"I've been responsible for several outsourced problems, and one common factor among them is trying to get Indian programmers and PMs to just be straight with me.It's a difficult barrier. I haven't figured it out yet."

I might be able to help (I'll probably get downmodded into oblivion when some of my fellow Indians wake up but ... ).

The thing is, even in India the best (or even half way decent) programmers don't work for Infosys/Wipro/TCS and other outsourcing companies, who are probably the folks you are dealing with. The second tier outsourcing companies are worse. The good people go work for Google, or Yahoo or Microsoft, (and increasingly these days on their own startups) same as in the USA. The numbers of the latter are on the increase.

The number of really good programmers is as low here as anywhere else. I know maybe half a dozen after fifteen years of working in Bangalore that I would trust my project to.

Yet another (and the most important) factor is that all these outsourcing companies are heavily bureaucratic to a degree a Westerner can't imagine.

Most of it happens because the economics dictate overstaffing. If your revenue model is N people * m $/ hr, it makes sense to increase N as much as possible on every project. Anyone who survives for long in one of these places is by definition someone who practices CYA as an artform. Anyone outspoken and/or willing to admit mistakes will be ejected from the system very fast.

So yes, when you outsource crappy work to India (and most of the work outsourced here is mountains of legacy crap code no one in the West wants to work on anymore, often outsourced without meeting or talking to any of the engineers staffing the project, often on the basis of what some slick salesman put on his PowerPoint deck, yes then you get bad people.

And that is the truth. Your experience is valid and is the norm. Working on outsourced enterprise projects, without hope of ever working on a decent codebase, is soul killing and degrading. You can't expect decent developers or managers on such projects.

When someone replies "Yes sir, I will certainly be very honest with you, sir," that is a good sign you've got one of the bureaucratic ass kissers. "Sir" is always a danger sign. When you hear something like "WTF made you say that Peter? What are you really worried about?" you have a chance.

Yes there are sharp developers and managers here, but it is hardly likely they'll be working in bottom feeding enterprise outsourcing companies. (The director level people at Infosys etc are often very sharp people, which is how they conned you into outsourcing your project to them but that is another story for another day ;-) )

Please don't outsource to India (or anywhere else) before speaking to and attaining a comfort level with engineers and other team members who will be working on your codebase. By the time you encounter these "yes sir, I'll be honest sir" types, you are already lost.

My 2 cents. fwiw.
Is that an incremental backup, or the full backup? I would expect a full filesystem backup to be easier to do in block mode for large parts than only part of the filesystem, while incremental backups could be made much easier with filesystem support, such as what ZFS can do with the increment from one snapshot to another.
Must Read: Interview with Chrome OS Engineering Director
Indeed. It seems like new users like it, while (at least a vocal minority of) the old ones hate it. I'm not sure driving away regular users while gaining fresh ones is a desirable outcome of the redesign.

I think this sums it up pretty well:

http://twitter.com/joebottherobot/statuses/8036178992
I ran through it providing answers for Gill Sans and I got back 30 possible fonts. Gil Sans was near the bottom. I guess this is pretty useful if you're working from a picture of something.
Lexicon: A Roleplaying Game
The article says: An implementation of the LACKRack, which adapts an IKEA side table for use as a stylish home data center.

Looking at those pictures, I disagree. They are not stylish at all. It looks like someone bolted a bunch of old gear from ebay onto a cheap table in their messy apartment.
Should mention that I wasn't extremely happy with the result, although it's still kinda neat. The fibers in the tape kind of hang off the edge (perhaps a sharper knife would help with that), and the whole thing is rather sticky, since the edges start peeling up a little. Perhaps something like gaffer's tape would work better.

Not sure I'll get around to posting a full how-to, but the idea is that I took 1 or 1.25" square dowel and cut it into 8 cubes with a hand saw & miter box (table saw with a fence would give more consistent cuts though). Taping involved putting down a piece of tape sticky-side-up, setting down the cubes adjacent to each other, and then cutting off the excess with an x-acto knife.

You should be able to follow a video of one of these to get the joints and proper colors figured out.
Good Luck, but like edw519 said economize your time. :)
INXS Sales Donated to Haiti
> e.g. when the employee has some kind of cross-department authority to make decisions and affect large chunks of a product which they would have in a startup but which would be proxied via some other people in a larger business?

Upper management has these authority in larger businesses. They also get paid magnitudes more.
Anthropogenic global warming is not a theory being put forth, it's the logical consequence of physical principles that are well established. It's not at all like Einstein proposing General Relativity.

I'm sorry to be blunt, but this is just plain wrong, and shows a profound misunderstanding of the scientific method.

First, do you think that Einstein was just making stuff up from whole cloth? No, he was working from well-established physical principles, building onto it using logical reasoning. Despite the fact that his reasoning was logical, there was still every reason for requiring verification (and indeed, Einstein insisted on it) because there could be alternative explanations.

Similarly, AGW builds on known principles like the "greenhouse effect". But the way it seeks to apply these to a hideously complex, chaotic system requires extensive verification. What's known to be true at the micro level might not be applicable to the entire system at all.

Thus, the theory of AGW is precisely like that of General Relativity in that it absolutely requires verification. (Unfortunately, it's unlike GR in that it's not so easily experimented upon)

The scientific method requires that the burden of proof is on the claimant. The one proposing a theory has the responsibility to prove it; the world at large need not disprove it. It must work this way, because it's generally not possible to prove the opposite. When you say you saw Elvis, you can't require that I prove that you didn't.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof#Burden_of_proof...

[Edit: spelling fix]
[Edit #2: I'm really dismayed to see the parent post getting up-voted. I can't fathom how you can assert that AGW is not a "theory being put forth", and thus escapes the requirement of proof.]
Seeing as they get payed in base salary plus bonus, with the bonus being as big as the firm wants it to be, it varies. If, for instance, he turns everyone's excel macros into lisp macros and makes half the firm redundant, all in the space of one year, and the boss miraculously not only forgives but praises him for it, he can get...yeah, a few million, really. But I'm making no guarantees.
What I want to know is what things would be like if we were a tidally locked moon of a gas giant, which, due to the ambient heat of the giant and proximity to the sun was still livable.

There was a scifi book about this - cannot remember the author - but the satellite was close enough to the gas giant that it was extremely elongated.

I'm more curious about the "what if" scenario - what if it were more spherical than spheroid (like earth); what if it was livable (at least on one hemisphere): what would the seasons be like? what would the weather be like? Given that it's tidally locked, the day would be determined by its orbital period, not its rotational period; how would this affect the length of the day, especially if it has an orbit which is not parallel to the gas giant's orbital plane? Eclipses would be much more prevalent, I'm sure.

How would people on such a planet determine their calendar? Phases of the planet? Hmm.. It would be interesting to seriously calculate all of this out. Unfortunately, my experience in astronomy approaches nil asymptotically :)
Sick play list, love the huge photos, disaster of a UI.
I'm going to stick with it and let them work the issues out.
I don't get it. I've had that at several living places. The one closest to the sink is the disposal, the others are lights.
Flightcaster (YC S09) Wins the Amazon Payments Prize
Nice.

I wonder if the daytime brightness would really be that impressive? I guess they have a lot higher albedo than the moon, but the moon is barely visible during the day.

Also, they wouldn't be visible all night most of the time, because they'd be shaded by the Earth. But at night they would probably be bright enough that it would be difficult to see stars. A lot brighter than the full moon, for sure.

The lack of stars may even have prevented the development of astronomy, and for sure it would be a big headache for astronomers! Maybe having observatories exactly on the equator would work, but otherwise it would be very difficult to see anything faint due to the glare.
Exactly. Scandal leads. So we've got a war between "We're all going to drown!" and "AGW is a liberal conspiracy!". The demographic for "Maybe we should look seriously at cheap options for energy efficiency and carbon mitigation." is practically zero.
Sorry, question, why do you say that potatoes have no nutritional value? Everything I have found seems to indicate potatoes are high in nutritional value (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato#Nutrition). I have also heard it said that it is possible to subsist entirely on a diet of milk and potatoes, as many Irish families did for quite a long time.
I tried a low res and high res picture of some Gill Sans here and it failed too. And they have Gill Sans in their db. The results list had fonts that were kind of close but different in some significant ways.
Afrikaans is not a "sort of a Dutch dialect".

It is a separate language, derived from Dutch (note, there are difference Afrikaans dialects). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaans

Interesting write-up of what is considered a "dialect", and how it differs from "language": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect
I have real experience with this and my experience with Eastern Europe/Russia is not very good - with India it is abysmal.

Yes the cultural differences are less but in most cases the masking of the problem is still practised, albeit a little more efficiently , which means you find out the problems a little later, that's all.

As someone else pointed out - Good developers are few and far between , irrespective of country and/or culture.
I didn't find the PDI thing too bad. It's a relatively simple assessment of how people react to authority. Consider it a distance to autonomy. The lower the PDI, the closer the average person in that group would consider themselves autonomous.

Some countries value individual drive and an equality along all of the power spectrum where those in managerial positions are more like guides than commanders. Other countries have different cultures and values where those in obviously higher positions are deferred to and deserve to be treated with all respect their title confers on to them.

Neither is better than the other, just different. And in order to work better with these other cultures, each side must understand the values held by the other side and reach some sort of middle ground where we can communicate with each other effectively.

I do like your 'hired locally' hypothesis. It makes sense.
Redundant only if you use just 1 browser. Second: it's a piece of personal art (pop-art).
Carbon nanotubes used to make batteries from fabrics
I use it all the time to get back to iGoogle, which is my starting point about 60% of the time.

EDIT: Correction, I don't click the actual home button, but I execute the same command with a mouse gesture (via the unfortunately named StrokeIt).
There seems to be no understanding of 'version' by the search algorithm. For instance with Python:

http://devcheatsheet.com/tag/python/

Version 2.4 is near the top. Even if that was the most popular cheat sheet, there should be some way to have references for newer versions at the top. I know it's a tough problem that Google hasn't cracked even, but it would be nice to have addressed even with a workaround like a version keyword for each cheat sheet and then a list of versions on the right side.
It all depends on your electrician. Mine is exactly the opposite.

I haven't thought about it much, but it occurs to me after reading that post that garbage disposers might best be operated with a footpedal.
I used this app today to figure out a font that I have been wondering about for a long time. After about 30 questions, it got it correct (at least the answer looks identical to the font I've been looking at for so long). Very useful app.
Healthy Aging,Key issues for older women,Getting the Nutrition You Need
Why can't you just label the switches, though? A couple strips of paper and tape are all you need. (Of course, the fact that such a fix is necessary does confirm that something is wrong with the design.)
i wish Google could put that into Fast Flip.
My javascript performance comparison between Firefox 3.6 and Chrome and Safari

http://www.manu-j.com/blog/firefox-3-6-vs-chrome-vs-safari-j...
Google Not Reading Your Personal Email Cause It’s Boring
I have a posterous blog that uses a custom domain. One thing that I would like is for the automatic tweeting of my posts to use my domain for the short url.

So something like http://hacketal.com/i-want-a-coffee-mug-like-this-one should be posted as http://hacketal.com/random instead of http://post.ly/random
Two classes and a thesis away. I'd finish the grad degree and try to get some of the groundwork for the startup set while in grad school.

I finished an MSc and made Feedback Army and started on After the Deadline at the same time. If both failed, I would tell myself "at least I have the degree"
For a video version, check out Alexis' talk at Startup Bootcamp.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdDGVhqMuWI
In the Web era, getting in the door for authors is tougher than ever
Visualize failure, and then don't do that. I suggest you immediatley start creating innovative features that will set you apart from the rest of the crowd. You only get one real chance at a flash point and potential customers need to see what sets you apart from everyone else. I would focus all my time on the features that you feel will solve enterprise microblogging.
Following ICT tradition, the Enterprise Edition is more than three times as expensive, while providing less stability than two of the regular products combined.
Weak in Review 01/20/2010 &#8211; Notes
I did a three year stint as an associate at a venture firm. Drop a line: c.reese@gmail.com if you'd like perspective.
Oracle-Sun Merger Wins EU Approval
What about performance? Is it going to be as slow as other VPN services?
The slowness eventually drove me to chrome. And so far, not looking back...
Ask HN: Review my location tracking site
$357.95/43U vs $7.99/8U. Definitely a real rack is better but I'm unconvinced it's 8x better for the uses presented.
http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...

Is in the "vi" section but not the "Vim" one.
Great implementation!

Most of your visitors will be coming because they want to learn a language from a cheat sheet or have a quick reference. This seems like a great target audience for Amazon links. If you had 2-3 books you recommended in the right sidebar for each category, I think that might fare better than Google Ads. Could be worth A/B testing.
post.ly took us about a week to build, and really shows the power of our API. It's a great way to teach people about Posterous, and trounce all the other Twitter media services out there.
Improving sales with 3 characters and a misspelling
After using Chrome for 6-8 weeks, I can't go back. Firefox has so many things going for it (history, extensions, compatibility, etc, etc).. but I can't handle the slowness. The JavaScript performance deficit is bad enough, but the outrageous startup time puts it over the top. I'll keep it around for occasional compatibility testing, but it's no longer the go-to browser.
Honestly, you might just want to stick with the notes. The book is full of good information, don't get me wrong, but it's a tough read. It's dense and slow-going, but thorough. These notes contain everything you practically need to know, so unless you're really interested in understanding it in depth, the notes will probably do.
Check out classic shell:

http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

It gives you back your start menu, and can fix windows explorer if you want it to.
You should add a button that says "Report broken link". For example the My UNIX cheatsheet under ssh is broken. What do you think?
If it wasn't for the checkbox bug, I'd be pretty happy with Chrome. However for now, Firefox it is.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=0551...
hm... i came away with the opposite opinion. how do i know that the example icons he showed hit the "sweet spot" between too much and too little information...rather than everyone being trained to recognize those icons.

i'd rather see a user study with a control before i jumped to any conclusions.

often times people call a UI "intuitive" when what they really mean is "familiar."
I agree that there needs to be a way to easily distinguish between versions. I am planning to add version keywords but haven't gotten to it yet. Also, I hope to add more sorting options too, such as date created, which might also help.
Two classes and a thesis is still at least 3 years away.
Browsers would be nice. Best organization I've seen!
Sorry, but if you think that AGW and General Relativity are statements of similar stature, you need to learn more physics. General Relativity could not be derived from the prevailing paradigm at the time (Newtonian physics). It was a completely new framework proposed to explain certain observations that could not be explained in Newtonian physics. In contrast, AGW was not proposed to explain any observation. It was derived from accepted physics.

Not that I ever said that you don't need to subject either to tests. You absolutely do. But if you think you can "prove" a scientific theory, I think it is you who is showing a profound misunderstanding of the scientific method.

You can never prove a scientific theory, you can only disprove it. You can confirm a theory a million times but that does not imply that it will work the next time. It does however give us some amount of confidence that it will.

My point is that as far as scientific statements go, that AGW happens is like saying "I think the ball will fall", while to say that it doesn't happen is to say "I think the ball will fall, but imperceptibly slowly.". Both should be tested, but given that one agrees with known physics and one does not, I think the latter should be viewed with more suspicion.

But maybe that's just me.
That (running soft-Kindle on other platforms) is Amazon's play - removes cost of hardware (thin margin) and carrier charges (now borne by host), making the Amazon store more profitable ...
As far as I know our comprehension of brightness is logarithmic. Something with a ten-fold increase in brightness over the moon, would in reality look barely any brighter.

I wouldn't doubt that if the earth had a series of rings that we would still be able to see the stars. However, this would obviously depend on the composition of the rings and their albedo. Also it would vary by latitude, at the equator the rings would be barely visible.

Latitude would have likely been easily discernible far sooner than the usage of astronomy in navigation, it wouldn't be hard to measure the width of the rings to measure your latitude. Even a crude measurement would have been immensely useful to early ships crews. Longitude would likely have been more problematic, however knowing the moons phases and the time of day (which would be discernible by the position of Earth's shadow on the rings) would likely be enough to determine longitude.

I doubt human development would have been greatly affected by having planetary rings, it may even have helped the technological revolution by enabling long-distance sailing earlier.
He doesn't get to see the cool doodles then, though.
The problem with not telling difficult truths is a cultural one, it's about losing one's face. I dealt with maroccan programmers for a while, and after 2 years got one programmer to be truthful with me. But boy took it time!
You really should use a test that focuses both on pure JavaScript and also DOM/JavaScript interaction. The fact that Chrome processes JavaScript faster doesn't necessarily mean that Firefox is slower in a real application that interacts with the DOM (although it may be, I'm not sure).

Edit: See http://dromaeo.com/
The reason I hate particle board is that it fails in a non-graceful and completely unrepairable manner.

I went to lecture one time and the speaker needed to move the podium which consisted of 3 sides, a top and 2 internal shelves all made of particle board. He must have stressed the structure in just the wrong way because the entire thing fell apart like a house of cards. Funniest thing I've seen in a long while.
The difference is that they have a track record which makes it seem very likely that when someone subpoenas them for the identity associated with a particular ongoing network activity, they will tell the plaintiffs to go fuck themselves.