skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder how much of this is the engineers themselves (and their training), and how much is due to how the industry was built and continues to function in India. Traditionally, innovation and creativity wasn't a positive thing for the type of work that was outsourced there, and I'd imagine there's a good deal of momentum that has created a culture of valuing accuracy to spec and timeliness over creativity and innovation within companies.

I certainly don't see a lack of creativity or innovation from immigrants from South Asia working in North America.
I agree with you completely on the humility, that's the only ones I would best be involved with, but these are not the ones who make it into this kind of book.

The emphasis is on the extreme, privileged and over-the-top attitudes stereotypically encountered.

Fortunately, exclusive communities with these stereotypical aspirations are not as overwhelming as they could be.

It's a small book, largely true quotations, and I think worth reading as an entertaining way to refresh awareness of peculiarities that can arise as riches are struck or wealth is created or increased.
Not if I want AMP pages. (I mean, I don’t, but there are presumably people who do.)
Every country had to start somewhere. This could be their start.
Shell tricks for simple cluster management
Simple shell tricks to run commands on multiple hosts parallelly
Why not use electricity or natural gas for heating? Both would be more efficient than using hydrogen as an intermediate step.
Could Finally Be the Year of E Ink, Seriously
Obesity, CHF, smoking, poisoned by air pollution or ground water waste, cancer due to the above...sedentary lifestyle, non examined mental life, glued to the TV and basing all opinions on cable news, no exercise and crappy diets...it's not a good way that many americans live.
I've been diving into this literature a bit recently, and it's been mostly encouraging. Affordable clean energy is realistic.

Clean energy sources are typically the cheapest sources of energy [0]. The intermittent production issue is solvable: At ~150 $/kWh storage, a combination of storage and renewables is the cheapest energy source 95% of the time [1].

The cost of different energy storage methods is coming down exponentially [2]. A combination of Li-Ion battery (short-term), pumped hydro (medium-term) and hydrogen (long-term, i.e. seasonal) storage is probably how to smooth out the burstiness of renewable energy production eventually [3].

When green hydrogen infrastructure is commonplace, the hydrogen can also be used to make synthetic jet fuel and feedstocks for the chemical industry.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9

[2]
https://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy2017110/figures/1?pro...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
It also:

- Acts as the primary mechanism to make the data in the chain immutable, as the cumulation of the work (chain of valid blocks) becomes harder and harder to reproduce.

- Anti spam, i.e. you need to put something at stake (electricity and hardware cost) to participate in the issuance and transaction ordering
Yeah, that's correct. Most people are poor and afraid to venture into unknown territories. The consumer market isn't so receptive either for this reason. Coaching institutes and education centers are touted or seen as a path to wealth but they are just sad factories with tens or hundreds of students in one class.
And then the problem is scaling rapidly enough to handle those users. A whole lot of the engineers at FAANGs are running infrastructure that, for the startup with zero users, doesn’t exist.
You don't have to placate the BLM zealots. You can say whatever you want. If people disagree, your comment gets a gray tinge. I don't understand the downvote animosity here.
That’s because even one example suffices to prove an existential claim such as masks can interfere with breathing. That’s not true for universal claims such as masks don’t interfere with breathing.
Apple iPhone SE – 64gb
> If Gemini ever became as popular as the web, that would stop being true.

Your implication may be true, but Gemini will never become as popular as the web (well unless the web becomes extremely unpopular at the expense of something else besides Gemini).

My wife would see "no images" and that would be the beginning and end of using Gemini for her.
I don't think it's fair to assume the quality of Indian workers is worse. They are paid less purely because of cost of living and locational differences. Uber is smart enough to know this and it's the exact reason they will end up paying less for similar quality.

Also, in every company there are jobs that are trivial and jobs that require talent. I assume the more trivial jobs like bug fixing will be outsourced, while the rest of the engineers are kept for product design.
What a huge mistake in my opinion if that goes through. Everyone who worked with indian companies should keep an eye on what's going on. Far too much more damage can be done!
Fair to whom? The investors who are now taking on a greater project risk? The SV developers who would be losing out on jobs?
In that case you'd be better of using methanol which can also be used in fuel cells.
Yeah, forgot about that one.
I fully agree that we need to fix health care for the uninsured and underinsured in the United States.

However, do you ever wonder why so many Americans aren’t voting for socialized healthcare? In reality, most of us aren’t at risk of going bankrupt from a health care emergency. Again, I fully agree that too many people are at risk of going bankrupt from a healthcare emergency, but it’s not the norm for the average American like you might read online.

The United States does actually have government health care programs for low income and disable people (Medicaid, covers approximately 23% of the US population) and for elderly (Medicare, covers people 65 and over). We also have government subsidies for lower income people (up to 400% of the federal poverty level) who need to buy their own health care plans through the marketplace.

Again, it’s not perfect and I agree that improvements are necessary, but the reality of the situation is a bit different than many of the reductionist comments you read online.

When you’re earning 2x or even 3x as much as European counterparts (using my real-world experience managing international remote teams), paying the health insurance premiums doesn’t feel like as much of an inconvenience. In my case, my employer pays my premiums and my out of pocket maximum spending is capped at $1000 per year, worst case.
> “... a public health and disease expert who is worried that mask effectiveness is being over-hyped...”

Medical professionals have their own sources of information (just talk to a doctor about hand washing vs. hand sanitizer).

Then I assume the concern is some members of the public are taking risks while wearing masks, thinking they are more safe than they really are? I don’t understand the concern, because if you’re really concerned about the virus you’re staying home. If you’re cavalier about the whole thing, then you’re likely standing <6feet and doing other “risky things”. And finally, for everyone else there are the simple rules.

This seems totally different than, say, the controversy about the anti-malarial drug, which had severe potential side effects.

What am I missing?
> the kingdom of god is not heaven after you die

Quite a few religions will regard the present moment as such (Buddhism, Judaism), but not all propose an afterlife. Whether all the world is the Kingdom, by definition Heaven is too.

The weight of messaging and interpretation shifts with the times to capitalize on the fact that people are more life-affirming when times are good, and if broadly there's toil and suffering, well, hope for peace in the next life.

I think it's disingenuous to ignore the distinction. You can quibble about what-its-all-about, but in accordance with the dogma there's either afterlife or there isn't, and that knowledge is so prominent in popular culture that non-believers know it, people from other cultures know it.
The seller of the book has more money than they would have without the pirate.

You can argue about morality and the appropriateness of this behavior, and I'd probably agree with you on most points. The world you describe probably isn't the world I would prefer to live in, all things considered. But it's tricky argue that the bookseller is _economically_ worse off than they would have been without the pirate - as you just showed.
Looking at median income doesn't significantly alter the conclusions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
Isn't that a little pathetic to write a comment then keep staring at the voting on it?! And then delete it if it gets negative? Be a man, like Eleanor Roosevelt. Write the best comment you can and walk away. Life's too short to obsess over HN voting like that.

> They were coming fast and furious

All 4 of them? You know can only possibly lose 4 points, right?

Also, I noticed that on some topics I know more about than most, the best comments on the page are initially downvoted, then return to the black fairly soon.[0] You may just be penalizing yourself with the panicky deletions. And I'd much rather your comments stay here, if you meant what you said, and what you said and how you said it seemed good to you. Well, maybe you are a real bastard and frequently write horrible comments that should be deleted, but I doubt it. :-)

[0] Maybe/probably this happens with every topic, just I can only see it on topics I know best, where I can clearly see which are the good comments and which are plain wrong/ignorant.
Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Expert Nomination
Just got the bill yesterday for my "free" Covid test. $250, insurance pays $105, you owe $145. (The test was free, the office visit was not.)
Working remote does not need to be working from home also. Coworking spaces are a thing and I’m my experience can bring the best of both worlds, a groups of people who have their heads down 90% of the time but really make the other 10% fun when everyone joins in the conversation about the new sandwich shop on the corner
How about your job, do you volunteer to have it outsourced to a poor engineer? Would they do what you do as well?

Don't they have their own ridesharing companies? I don't see why they need uber's jobs, that wouldn't bring much wealth to them but to institutional American shareholders mostly.
I’ve lived in some really crappy places in the US, but the only place I’ve often seen and experienced people committing obvious crimes in broad daylight was Europe. It was pretty weird having someone struggle to unzip my backpack while walking down the street. I bound the zippers with a lock and they couldn’t get in, but I guess they didn’t notice because they really fought to get it open.

Seeing obvious pickpockets and scammers operating 10 feet away from police officers while being directly observed was what really blew my mind though. I hear loads of people say they’re disappointed with Europe and the crime is overwhelming these days, but man, they’re not kidding. It’s insane what’s tolerated so openly there. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t had valuables stolen randomly while in Western Europe for short periods.
>Self driving research can be done India..

Or just not done. There's no reason for Uber to be working on self-driving at this point. Door to door fully autonomous driving in relatively dense areas--i.e. where it makes sense for Uber to operate--is decades away. Autonomous highway driving--which will probably arrive earlier (maybe much earlier)--does absolutely nothing for a would-be automated taxi service.
What about moving to Europe? Salaries in the UK, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands are much lower than in the US, and even lower in Central/Eastern Europe. While the timezone barrier is still there (although lower than India), the work culture is basically the same as in the United States (except with more work-life balance).

Actually, why not Canada? Salaries are again much lower than Silicon Valley, the timezone is the same, the language is the same (except in Quebec), and it would be great to stop Canadian software engineers from moving to the US in droves due to lack of opportunities at home.
I think you are pretty wrong on that mark. I know fairly good devs in India who can't get a job because most pays so bad that they end up either switching the field or moving to somewhere abroad. Sometimes, they just wander around like ghosts on family money. Unlike US, it's not uncommon to spend your whole life with your parents/joint family.

To get a good job in India, you will need more than skills - connections and a limited edition degree.
Well this has worked great for Boeing, a once great American engineering company.

On the other hand India has an excellent education system and highly skilled engineers, and any capital flow away from the five big cities in the world that sinks the vast majority of it can only be a good thing.
A counter argument I see sometimes is that the reason Americans spend more on healthcare compared to other rich countries is that American consumers spend more on just about everything than most other rich countries (and also earn more money). I don’t really know how much merit the argument has.
Playing video games with friends, online, after work. That worked pretty well for me for the last 3 months.
A recent report [1] looked at the efficiencies of generating hydrogen at a waste water treatment plant to lower production costs. The WWTP provides the water and uses the oxygen that is also produced by electrolysis to increase the efficiency of the biological treatment process vs air. Some of the electricity for the electrolysis can also be sourced from biogas produced by the WWTP.

[1] https://www.jacobs.com/sites/default/files/2020-06/jacobs-ya...
Why would they deprecate support for the primary display system used on Linux?
For about ten thousand years now, human societies everywhere had haves and have-nots. Transition from have to have-not could be swift and brutal. The thing that you stopped having could be your wealth, or your liberty, or your life. Transition from have-nots to haves was an arduous process, most times multi-generational, and most times unsuccessful.

In such societies, survival required alliances, sometimes side switching, and most surely secrecy, misdirection and deceit. Conspiracies were the rule, not the exception. Actually there were no exceptions, there were only conspiracies everywhere.

The ability to guess what's going on was then a huge advantage, and you bet evolution has selected for that. Could evolution have erred on the side of being too trigger-happy? Little doubt about that. Innocent until proven guilty, benefit of doubt, right to due process, habeas corpus, etc, were all luxuries that few could afford until very recent times.

The fact that some people believe in conspiracy theories should not puzzle anyone. This is our natural state. Education and culture is how you exit this natural state, but even then, you are never completely immune to believing a good story. At least I know I'm not. Maybe I'm in a minority...
Are you sure? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse
Are you talking about YC or another accelerator?

Not sure why you linked yc page either way?
Hey, I’ve felt the same about missing social aspect of office during these wfh days. One thing that has worked for me is, I do virtual coffee chats with couple folks in my team and other friends at work every week and we talk about stuff of mutual interest work or non-work related.
I would recommend just removing the cruft rather than throwing everything away. But cruft should really be removed continuously.
Where are these boot camp web dev jobs starting out at $100K? If such jobs are plentiful, wouldn’t they be in area where the cost of living is so high that it would be better to live in a lower cost of living area with a lower salary?
Usually rich and poor means net wealth, not income.

Median net wealth per adult, in US dollars is relatively good measure. US is ranked 22 globally. Source: "Global wealth databook 2019" (PDF). Credit Suisse. https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...

European countries ahead of the US: Luxembourg, Belgium, Ireland, France, UK, Spain,Austria, Italy, Malta, Norway. Interesting how many countries (France for example) is ahead of Germany in both mean and median net wealth per adult.

In the US 34.5% of population has wealth between 100,000 USD and 1 million, In UK 44.8%, France: 46.3%. US has significantly more people with wealth over 1 million. German Gini index is 81.6, France 69.6. USA 85.2.

EDIT:

Table 3-3 is super interesting. Membership of top wealth groups for selected countries, 2019. (absolute number of people).

Over USD 100,000; Number of adults (thousands)

China 113,410
United States 103,198
Japan 55,370
Germany 26,012
United Kingdom 25,388
France 25,110
Italy 23,284

China already has more people with wealth over 100,000 USD. (20.8% of total) than any other country. No wonder why US companies want to stay in Chinese markets.
Find times outside of work to socialize IRL with humans.
Which of course is the same reason why android and ios will never show you data on how often you use your phone and allow you to send less time on your phone...

They don't want kids sending thousands of dollars. It is bad PR for pocket change for them. They already have options in the OS to prevent this. They just need to change the defaults and a few additional features.
Spectacular presentation
I am from Hyderabad and one of my friend works at Uber Engineering here. From what I understand, the quality of engineers matches to that of his US counterparts, if not better. He got his degree from IIT, a tier 1 college in India.

I agree that India has not been the best in terms of tech innovation but the situation is changing. The start up ecosystem is booming here and investments are following too.
It will be as effective as JR recommending people not to use phones next to elderly seats. Entirely ignored.
> Outsourcing to India has gone on for 2-3 decades. It's not some new disruptive thing.

I guess what's different here is that Uber is a proper tech company and knows how to identify good engineers to hire. The same cannot be said of non-tech companies that have outsourced to consultancies like Infosys and Wipro.
The design priority of "public, readers, and authors" was given in that order because reasons, which anticipates and preempts your response.
India is well suited for building and supporting applications like this since it has an extremely good talent pool that can manage and deploy solutions. Uber app in itself is not that difficult to operate and hence I strongly believe this is the right thing for shareholders.
And even looking at median income would still leave other things out -- like the much higher fraction of that household income which goes to medical expenses in the US than in, well... the entire EU for starters.
If you also factored in healthcare and education costs (including university), I suspect the US would rank lower than that.
But most of Europe aren’t spending 20-30% of their income on healthcare. If you take that into account I wonder how these numbers stack up
Assuming this question is asked in good faith, this is obviously not the right way or anyone's idea of distributing wealth. And ultimately this is for Uber's profit, not the good of India.
Close and tranquil solar system has astronomers excited
Or just create a browser without javascript support.
Yep, the most common way I've lost access to machines is by messing up the iptables/ipfw rules. Read a post here about avoiding that by having a timed reset with sleep.
How is code quality control in India?
> “The problem with the "wear a mask" message is...it distracts from the more important message of "keep your distance" and "wash your hands"

I don’t get this impression at all. In fact, I was thinking that if someone wears a mask, then they are more likely to be doing the other things (more or less reliably)
How does this account for things like taxes and shifting of expenses?

It is common knowledge that in the USA, they will pay you extra in the corporate world, but that extra money goes to family health care, education, transport, and other things that are covered by European taxation schemes.

If you look at discretionary income, the median corporate employees are making similar incomes.

And of course, SWEs are outperforming in USA, and manual laborers are outperforming in EU
> Are people really having trouble with loading speed in 2020?

Huh? Yes. Hugely. I'm on my fast home internet using a new iPhone I bought two months ago, and loading a NYTimes article just took 8 seconds. God only knows if it's bounded by network or CPU or both, if the problem is frameworks or ads or what. And it isn't even "stuck" on anything -- I watch the blue loading bar in Safari move pretty smoothly across the top.

I did a search for a NYT article on Google, clicked it, and it appeared instantaneously.

That's an insane difference. I know everyone hates AMP here, but when I've got my user hat on rather than my developer hat... it's unbelievably more performant.
For my workflow, being at home worked well until momentum from before was lost. Initating new things, knowing who to contact and getting flow going, just doesn't always pan out that well virtually. When everybody knows what to do, it's smooth sailing WFH. However, most of my job is ahead of that curve, and with constant reorg and active internal sabotage (no less accurate word for it when people know what they're doing), nothing works better than than accidentally bumping into somebody in the hallway, or at lunch.

Also, meetings seems to be most efficient and comfortable when it's all or nothing = either everyone is virtual, or they're all physical.
The challenge with outsourcing is management overhead and turn around times. Biggest mistake I see my customers make is outsource and not control the quality of the engineers.

Inhouse they have a sophisticated and long recruiting process. When outsourcing they take the first they get (and as a new customer, be assured, you do not get the best engineers but you need to fight to get them).