skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many large companies have dev centers offshore. If you count them as outsourcing, I have seen very good examples of reducing costs while maintaining the existing product quality (I say maintaining, because it was never great to start with) Concrete example: one of the largest travel industry outfits has several hundred people in Poland, and they do excellent work. IMHO

In contrast, from the 20 or so projects that I have seen outsourced to India, I have not yet experienced a success story. But I have seen many examples of excellent Indian developers here. When I asked them about the difference, the common answer is.. " If you are good, why would you stay there to make on 1/3 of what you can make here! "

Finally, Lately I've seen several senior engineers cashing out from here and returning to their countries to much favourable employment conditions.
This is exactly what my argument was against. Why make it complex when a simple global would do? Why say GlobalSingleton::var when global $unique_var would do, as long as the app does not abuse these global vars?
The more I read about grad school the more I can see that it's not something you want to do in the hope of landing a better paying job when you get out.

As people have mentioned to the sense of entitlement of a masters graduate from a top uni are probably keeping them out of the job market to. Unless the narrow field you researched is exactly what your applying to do at a company experience is probably going to look better.
I think it all depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Large scale projects are not well suited to outsourcing in my opinion. There's too many unskilled providers, but my biggest hurdle has been the language barrier. Even when people "speak English", there's a lot of miscommunication based off a few words they don't know, interpret differently or even differences in local customs!

For smaller projects (e.g. developing a website for a local business), outsourcing can be very profitable once you find the right provider. I've had a reasonable amount of success finding good providers in the past and they can cut development times on easier projects if you communicate clearly and provide wireframes / spec sheets. Most recently, I hired a PHP developer from Singapore who was asking for $5/hour and after I saw what he could do (with other languages as well), I immediately raised his rate to $10/hour without him requesting it. Now I've got a long term, loyal developer that works at an extremely affordable price to me and provides quality work. Is it the same quality as a $100+/hour developer in the US? Probably not, but it's very good and I'm happy to always put some finishing touches and modification in myself. I still save tons of time on smaller projects that way.

So to answer your question, yes and no. It depends what you're trying to accomplish and the exact providers you're going to work with.
What if Disney finds the character resembles too much a copyrighted character?

If we plan on extending copyright forever, we will end up with a pretty crowded characterspace in a couple decades. Are you sure you'll be able to come up with something that's completely original a couple decades from now? Is it sane?
Sure. I think it probably works due to my own experience, but slowly sipping milkshakes all day is not going to make you slender. Obesity has multiple causes.
Learning what a proof is is valuable for programming too. Many people don't see a difference between a proof and an argument. It is valuable to learn the difference between "This is why this program is correct" and "Here are some reasons why this program is probably correct".
They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)
... and because of these issues, the idea guy usually doesn't understand (or appreciate) the amount of work needed to develop the idea, and so its difficult to come to an agreement on terms (equity share, etc).
Wow, lame. It works with PDF, I assumed it would work with ePub. I assumed wrong.
What would you think if we added automatic Freshbooks integration? Then we could show income from non-recurring sources.
<snip> ... a pair of financial sleuths, Ms. Reinhart and her collaborator from Harvard, Kenneth S. Rogoff, have spent years investigating wreckage scattered across documents from nearly a millennium of economic crises and collapses. They have wandered the basements of rare-book libraries, riffled through monks’ yellowed journals and begged central banks worldwide for centuries-old debt records. And they have manually entered their findings, digit by digit, into one of the biggest spreadsheets you’ve ever seen.

Their handiwork is contained in their recent best seller, “This Time Is Different,” a quantitative reconstruction of hundreds of historical episodes in which perfectly smart people made perfectly disastrous decisions. </snip>
There are so many possible directions that somebody might want to go, though. If you're ultimately interested in reinforcement learning, you don't immediately need to understand EM in order to "get" Q learning. Or to work on discrete problems related to computer vision, having a basis in linear programming and algorithms will get you further than logistic regression or SVMs.

I'll agree that anybody doing machine learning should understand the basic idea of maximum likelihood learning (e.g., logistic regression). But how far do you go beyond that? This is really the heart of the issue, I think. Yes, there are a ton of things that are really useful to know, and any machine learning student should learn them at some point. If you're trying to do an interesting project that teaches you something about research (and thus looks good on a graduate school application), though, what is the best use of your time?
As the Cosmic AC was not in space, but "in hyperspace and made of something that was neither matter nor energy", there should have been no objections to it taking the role of Maxwell's demon and reversing entropy, powering the universe through its hyperspace computational powers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon
I would posit that Wordpress is the wordwide leader in 'crappy PHP software.'

(And I'm not a PHP hater, my company writes 90% of our stuff in PHP, and WP works great for blogs and brochure sites. But it's nasty underneath that pretty UI.)
Sure, it's simple. A newborn baby doubles it's weight in a month. Why? Because it's eating a lot. A woman gets pregnant and puts on 30 pounds? Why? Because she's eating a lot. A teenager goes through a growth spurt and puts on 20 pounds? Why? He's eating a lot. A cancer patient loses 20 pounds quickly. Why? He's not eating much.

But this might not be the most useful level of abstraction to look at. It's sort of like looking at this comment and thinking that it's on your screen because your computer fetched it from your wireless router.. true, but not very useful or informative. You might want to step back and ask why these people are eating so much or so little. Surely it isn't just willpower (whatever that is). There are plenty of slender people who can't bring themselves to do things like study for an exam.
Now, the hole was blocked by displaying "Error. Try again"
Battery Life Becoming Bigger Issue for iPhone 4?
When they say "all FOSS is based on copyright" they're right, but that doesn't mean FOSS doesn't work without copyright. Copyleft wouldn't work, but the spirit of the BSD would definitely be possible.

Isn't the real point of FOSS that we can all benefit by contributing to common systems everyone can draw on? Using coercion to disallow use of any kind goes against that philosophy.

How many countless closed-source companies do we rely on daily that would be nice to make cheaper by FOSS project code? Every consumer good with a chip in it, a lot of infrastructure, etc. By preventing distribution we lower the impact of our code.

It looks like a lot of these distribution restrictions are purely ego driven.
Single page: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.ht...
Not only that but depending what kind of db wrapper class you have you probably want it to be modified by the code that touches it. Sure you could pass it around, I guess it depends on how many people touch the code.

Personally I global the database wrapper, the user session class and config stuff (which yes I could use constants). Although if the code base I'm referring to wasn't 95% me coding I would probably consider using global less.
But in the project you cite, wasn't knowledge of Islamic banking norms 'domain knowledge', rather than a cultural side-issue?
It's not rocket science. Escaping HTML properly is a good start. Not just "Oh yeah we better disallow any <script> tags". I mean properly, escape every single character so that there is absolutely no possible way that anything can be interpreted as anything but a literal character to be displayed.

<noscript_within> sounds like a good solution if you have no idea how to properly escape html.

If you want to be extra sure, just send the data as JSON and build it out in the DOM as createTextNode so you're sure it's actually text and nothing else.

From Reddit:

>> All you need is: <script><script>PAYLOAD
>> Any HTML after the second non-closed script tag survives unescaped.
>> YouTube escapes the first script tag and not the second.

This isn't "XSS attacks are inevitable and so hard to defend against". This is "WTF are you thinking youtube? Did you get a 12 year old to code your comment parsing code?"
Lots of things though I think could be a bit more careful about a core, wordpress as an example includes a large amount of code on each and every page, when in reality a lot of the time much of it doesn't get touched every load.
Lots of developers will gladly code your app, cash your checks, and go home. But if you wanted me to put blood and sweat and tears into this project, I'd want equity. A lot of equity.
Android bandwagon attracting developers and advertisers
Mercurial 1.6 released
If you can spend the money, get a coach that will take a video of your stroke above and below water. The feedback from watching those videos will be invaluable.
This is great! truly great. I have a few requests:

- You have a dollar everywhere ($). it would be great if I could customize the currency.

- Adding the ability to add expense/income from the past would be great. I can see how you would make the date selector disable that as a default (because you can't travel back in time), however, when there are recent additionas etc that were in the past and you want to add them, it is nice to be able to see/browse the graph..

- The recurring income/expenses seem to go back in time, not start from the date I picked... at least everything is red and weird. I don't know if that's a bug, maybe I just don't understand.

Great work, anyways!
Keep More Time Using Examples of Research Paper
When you have to submit a research paper and you have no idea how it should be presented, going through some examples of research paper will provide you the knowledge required. With this knowledge you will be able to submit a well written research paper.
They did their homework (800 years of it)
Start by doing...pick a relatively easy algorithm, implement it, and fully understand why it's doing what it's doing. If you start out by implementing something with extreme math-fu it may just seem like magic.

My first ML project was to implement STAGGER (Schlimmerand Granger, 1986), which is a very simple algorithm for handling concept drift. Then I trained it on the domain {red, green, blue} X {square, circle, triangle} X {small, medium, large}. I fed it 40 positive examples of small red square, then 40 positive examples of large green triangle, then 40 positive examples of medium blue circle, and watched the learned concept change. I understood how and why it worked, and that felt pretty good.
I love the concept, pitch page, and cleanliness. I'll just add though that I hate getting initial passwords in the current format. I'd prefer a random word/number set "fastdog123". I know that's nit picking, but it's sort of a humanness element that gives me warmfuzies247.
Terrafugia: land at the airport, fold your wings up and drive home
On the other hand, when someone reads "echo LOOK_AHEAD" they immediately know it's a constant and thus (a) global and (b)(more importantly) defined once and never modified by the code.

With "echo $look_ahead" there's no indication of that, and in the future another dev might add something that modifies $look_ahead's value and break other parts of the code, making for sneaky bug (which incidentally is why non-constant globals are so disliked ;))
Tell all your friends about it. Write to bloggers who have written about the problems your app solves (or if it sib entertainment, relevant bloggers in that space). Tell us about it. Socialize a lot and tell everyone you meet about it (after you've genuinely enquirer about their passion/work/life).
Only on HN would people argue that it's more important for a small business owner to know how to write code than to know business.

Sure, that's sometimes true. But it's definitely not universally true. Even for a high tech "internet company."

Craigslist didn't succeed because Craig was such a good developer. Any clown with a PHP book could have coded the first version of that site. (In fact, I think it was written for free by volunteers)
Can't read it. I don't want to register.
What other hw features could you have on these devices.

Solar panels, e.g. Apples's patent for a screen integrated one, contactless inductive charging, pixelqi style sunlight readable display, e-ink style display which uses no power to keep a static display, display privacy with a display that can change it's viewing angle right down, make the back optionally touch sensitive as well, if you remember Doc. Brown from back to the future had some augmented reality binoculars, you could speculate about possible camera improvements which would aid that kind of thing such as infra red sensitivity to help apps locate people in scenes, haptic feedback more than just 'vibrate', and again very speculatively dynamic changing materials - e.g. If the handheld device could change texture, kinetic charging, pico projectors, pressure sensitivity both on the screen and on the device generally, someone made a nice hack to wear a magnetic ring so they could gesture above their phone and sense it using the compass - theremins can do similar using some kind of em field distortion, could a device integrate anything like that without a huge aerial?

I'm not sure if you're saying there's nothing else we could put in a device now in hardware terms, or if there's nothing else interesting we could put in a handheld device ever, or just nothing we could put in that a consumer would want, but I'm not convinced for any interpretation.

its better when you decouple hardware and software.

Citation needed.
Add Music To Your Workflow To Improve Results
>> Finally, Lately I've seen several senior engineers cashing out from here and returning to their countries to much favourable employment conditions.

Including those from India. You can live very well when you couple the low cost of living in India with the higher salary after making direct contacts in the U.S.
lost interest reading it when I saw void main(void).

Reading code needs patience and getting used to the coder's style.
Appears to be identical to the item in "Computer World" ...

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178819/Flying_cars_s...

... even down to the links embedded in the test.

A link to that item was submitted earlier:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1481828
While that's nice if you have the cash to spend, for most indie devs that is just not an option. If you have suggestions on how to do this on the cheap, check out this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485783
> YouTube devs could put <script> within their php pages

Youtube is written in PHP ? I thought it was mostly python.
I was in the same position as you. Your best bet is to learn to code. Not only will you get more respect of programmers better than you, you'll understand the mental effort it takes to program, even if it's something that seems so "easy" to do. Trust me, there are alot of dependencies to think about when programming something that looks simple initially.
I can read it, but I'm outside of the US. Does the print link work? : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/technology/03atheist.html?...
Yeah, I've found it a bit of a nightmare at times trying to integrate it into a website, in future I plan to just use a separate user system for the site and just link them.
I'm pretty sure the audience on HN understands sql injection without having to refer to a cartoon.
It's also very possible that your site has just started ranking higher for this search term...
Flash Ported to iPad
amen, and you might find that some of the ideas that you thought were really good or tractable might end up not sounding so good, once you get a better feel for how to actually implement them.

as an analogy, i know almost nothing about teenage girls' fashion; so even if i go to the mall one day and get inspired by some idea of how to do some innovations on a particular teenage girl fashion item, i highly doubt that i would be in a good position to actually make a company out of it.
Sure, take time to gather evidence, work with authorities and document the crime. But there is no good reason to leave those apps in the top seller lists once they've discovered the problem.
This proved Doug Crockford is right.

Security problem should be fixed in HTML5.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10fnZ2chEYg
Remember Apple is at its absolute peak today. There's nowhere to go from here in terms of features or polish.
Sure, they can add voice recognition, brush up the hardware even more and perhaps they'll even find another killer-feature or two to add.

There's nowhere to go in features or polish unless they add more features or polish more - what kind of argument is that?

From there the primary differentiating factor becomes price.

Because Apple have always been driven out of markets by competitors with lower prices...
Ask HN: How much do you program?
I am not satisfied with the effort I put in. I was wondering about the working style of other programmers.

How many days in a week do you write code, and, how many hours in a day?

What else do you do with your time?

Are you working on your startup?
someone is addicted to bloging
I doubt there are many who would argue that Drupal is crappy software. And here's the shocker: it uses globals and most of it is procedural PHP! Let that sink in... Signs alone do not prove guilt. =P

But -- just to be a hypocrite -- my number one sign of crappy software is deeply nested if statements. The more you branch the more loose ends you have to juggle up in the air as your solution is formulating.

Just to be productive, allow me to share a tool that has evaded me for many years: assertions. No really!

function GoodFunction
assert(good_state)
do_one_thing_very_well

Reads better, and leads to better design than:

function GoodFunction?
if( oh_right )
do_one_thing_very_well_slightly_differently
else
do_one_thing_very_well

In the first the oh_right condition just doesn't fit in and you start thinking about what caused this logical branch in the first place. In the second we feel little hesitation to add an elseif if need be, further increasing complexity.

To give credit where its due, "Coders at Work" has actually changed my coding style. I highly recommend the book.
It's a few lines of code, I would not call that complex. And the usage is.

GlobslSingleton::set('Something Meaningful',$unique_var);

and

GlobslSingleton::get('Something Meaningful');

I don't think this is complex at all.

This doesn't force you to use $unique_var as a variable name(I know it can be worked around). One of the biggest problem with globals is that they can crash and burn if someone else's code purges it by accident.

Also my pattern allows 'load on demand', I can incorporate it in if I'd want to, your does not.
3. ...

4. PROPHET

What issue to you see arising from this exposure?
semi-troll comment time: the title of this article seems a bit elitist and demeaning ... what are the rest of the git tutorials on the web, then? "Git for grubby coders"? i don't see how simply presenting a bunch of DAGs all of a sudden makes it like "ohhhhh Computer Science!"
Anecdotes, surface connections to studies, weasel words and similes galore. Not worth the bandwidth it's, erm, printed on.
Everything you experience drugs and changes your brain.
A sex therapist or psychologist only see individuals that are troubled. Worse yet, they have every incentives to create more potential patients to treat.

Moreover, it does not treat the subject of sexual fantasies which would be argued to be dopamine inducing vivid experience.

It also does not address the notion of a correlation between pornography and reduced sex crimes.
One begins to understand why Zed Shaw once wrote an essay called Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All.

I once thought he was being too hyperbolic there. I'm beginning to come around, however.

Anyway, there needs to be a sequel: Bloggers Need To Learn Basic Survey Methodology Or I Will Kill Them All.
I guess the question for me is “what do you mean by successful?” After a lot of trial and error I’m to the point where the simple outsourcing I do is relatively successful by my own standards but that success is not based on saving a lot of money. Let me explain…

Essentially what I do is spec out the project very specifically and have local people write the front end. Then we outsource the backend and have interns use the locally built frontend to thoroughly test the backend delivered from the outsourced company.

This isn’t dramatically cheaper since you have to spec the thing locally and pay interns to test it while still paying the outsourced developers (it only saves about $2.65 an hour by my calculations). But it does have advantages in that it allows us to be more flexible with our schedule (we can employ more or less outsourced workers as needed) and it does make for a happier development environment (allowing local developers to focus on the relatively more fun front end development and less on the nuts and bolts backend stuff)

So in the end I feel it’s successful though again not so much in the financial sense.
- you probably won't get so much visits from it

- promote the story to bloggers/other press who may want to do a similar story on it. Offer them your own phone nr. and phone nr.s of other developers of these apps, make it easy for them.

- keep an eye on your stats, if you don't have real-time stats, install them for a week or so.

- make sure the site is up.

- perhaps add a message to your site "welcome nyt readers" trying to convert them
I assume you meant "profit". "Prophet" is probably not the way the OP intends to go, what with the atheism and all.