skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, I guess as the original poster of this incendiary comment (?) I can chip in about what I actually meant.

I don't think simple CSS bugs are beyond the skills of even the below-average Indian outsourcing shop (though I'm sure some of them fail even on that level, and depending on how finicky you are about your CSS, maybe no one can do it but yourself).

However, in my experience, the more complicated the task, the less likely it will be to get done via a simple outsourcing contract. A huge consulting company can successfully outsource very complex things, because they can invest in ensuring they hire quality resources.

Someone who has personal contacts with people whom he knows are competent can also do it, because they already know where to find the quality.

For the rest of us, though, there is a sea of bad options (the kind that often charge a few dollars an hour) and a few islets of quality. It's very hard to figure out which ones are the good ones, and these islets get smaller the more your task is complicated. Past a certain level of complexity (e.g. "put together a synchronous framework for a tool like Etherpad") you might as well not bother, your chances of hitting land are so low.

This is not specific to India or Pakistan, it applies to China just as much. Eastern Europe is less of a problem for me because there are fewer communication barriers. My point, clarified, is then: Outsourcing complex tasks to a remote location with which there are communication difficulties is unlikely to work.
Work hard, play hard.
"The government guarantees in relation to this series of bailouts are more akin to investments - some of the money will be lost, but not nearly 4 trillion dollars."

How do you know? There is virtually no transparency aside from what it costs and where the money is being drawn from? Theoretically they can just use the money for parties and private jets, bonuses, or even purchase stock at double the market price... very sound investment indeed =)
Functional Programming tutorial using Visual Basic
What constitutes a true ad hominem argument?
i have a "friend" who "works" there. this really is a cost saving effort.
I actually wrote India, Pakistan, China, South East Asia... and then replaced it with /etc.

I don't think it's unfair to make characterisations based on geographic location. People are not equal, and some nations are definitely "worse" than others in some respect.

Remember that I'm not saying that an Indian in London, for example, would be likely to be more difficult to work with. I know several Indian people in London, and some of them are better coders than me. I'm talking about Indian outsourcing businesses in India, and making an aggregate judgement of what it's like to work with them (not about whether they'll mug you). I think that's fair.

For instance, "Be careful about going on holiday in Somalia" is an equally generalising statement - not all Somali's are pirates or warlords - but it's a fair statement because if you're gonna set foot there, there's a reasonable chance you might meet one of them, so you should be forewarned.
I'm not presuming I am one of the candidates you are looking for, but as someone who has been able to afford a bit of choosiness here are some of my thoughts.

It isn't about engineers vs. non-engineers. It's about helpful, courteous, and respectful, vs uninformed, detached, and unconcerned. A lot of HR people don't seem very invested in the position whereas the direct manager might be, so maybe that's where the stereotype comes from, but I've had many, many, many contacts from engineers (usually at smaller companies) who weren't so hot on the people skills.

On one occasion I worked with HR people. They were sharp and had their stuff together. In meeting them before interviewing with the engineering team, they were well dressed and very professional. They were courteous.

At all points I was aware what expectations I should have for notification, what the timelines were, and what the next steps were. In salary negotiations they were very respectful and it didn't feel like they were trying to find my lowest spot (though presumably they were).

This was extremely impressive to me. I've worked in plenty of situations where the engineers are good but the organization is poorly led or otherwise dysfunctional. I can talk to the engineers and tell if they know their stuff. That'll come in due time. It's harder to tell, does payroll go out in time? Is this an environment that will treat me like an adult?

When I ask for time off, am I going to have to e-mail ten different people for all the projects I'm in (I'm someone that can be useful in multiple areas), or will there be some structure there?

These things are harder to tell. Some people might like to be more seat of your pants. I personally expect competence at all levels of an organization, and not knowing these fundamentals is a red flag, and demonstrating them, conversely, is a good sign.
The BaseShield App Store for Windows launches (YC Winter 08)
The post is factually incorrect because the items listed are _expenditures_ and that means it is money which was spent, the bailout is a loan guarantee and we will get a lot of it back (and in fact might make a profit on the whole thing.) If you take out a loan and spend it on comic books then that is an expenditure, but if you take out a loan and invest it in something there is a possibility that the investment will pay out and you will be able to pay back the loan and potentially make a profit on the venture.

The claim that no attempt was made to calculate the social and economic dividends of any of the other ventures listed is a complete fallacy, there are numerous hand-waving (and a few well-researched) papers describing the long-term costs and/or benefits of each expenditure. The difference is that in the case of the other ventures there was very little known at the time about the cost of doing nothing but we can see quite clearly that the cost of doing nothing now will be far greater than the amount we are proposing to use to prop up the system.
"These sorts of experiences give me hope for the future of this profession. I firmly believe that the culture of good ol' boys' clubs and bondage-and-discipline programming languages are fettering access to the minds and talents of too many promising individuals. It's a crying shame."

Oh, geez. Melodramatic, much?

I know it's antithetical around these parts, but I like C++. If you want to talk about beauty, there's beauty in OO design. There's beauty in type safety. And there's most definitely beauty in a language that will make correctness guarantees at compile time. But then again, I've been using C++ long enough to have some perspective. I remember when Java was the silver bullet; now it's Ruby. This too shall pass.

Most of the complaints that I hear about C++ come from inexperienced programmers, and most of those complaints boil down to "I don't understand it". That's fine, and to be expected -- I didn't understand anything either, when I first started. The tragic mistake comes when you begin to assume that type-safety, encapsulation, access control, and other "bondage-and-discipline" features of the language were put there simply to make your life more difficult.

There were (and are), talented C++ programmers, and I think it's possible that some of them know what they were doing.
Personally I like phone interviews. I don't like to in-person until we are serious and chance of hire is relatively high.

I've been fortunate thus far and always looked for a new job when I want to try something new, not when I'm out of work and hungry. Taking time off of work to interview for a bunch of low-chance jobs is not something I'll do unless I'm extremely excited about the company.

Maybe this isn't a bad thing (you want excited people), but how many employers work at companies people wake up knowing they have to work there.
I had my doubts after reading the gigaom article, but the Reuters article I found mentioned a statement from a Cisco person saying it is a cost saving measure.

I guess it's a safe assumption that employees will not be paid for these days. Can your "friend" share a little more information? So far, there seems to be very little information available.
Great eye to notice that - I remember the same sort of nightmares with C++ (not so much Java).

Bottom line is that things are getting much better these days.
Yeah... Thats what we thought about the TARP too. Originally, it was almost poised to turn a profit. Then Paulson decided that buying troubled assets was not the way to go. The lesson is not (just) that government has trouble ever turning a profit but that its far too unpredictable. Human factors get vastly amplified the moment the government gets involved because power moves from the distributed hands of the market to the centralized hands of congress and a few top bureaucrats.
There are any number of financial and organizational reasons, but I think this could have a lot to do with the intellectual property Values of n holds. Both Stikkit and I Want Sandy make heavy use of natural language processing to turn short pieces of text into structured data, which has intriguing possibilities for extending Twitter's feature set.
E-Commerce shrinks for first time, research firm says
More on the ‘Is Google Evil?’ Debate
HTC TOUCH CRUISE P3650 BLACK UNLOCKED
HTC Touch Cruise P3650 Black Unlocked phone has to be the only choice for you. The phone has all that makes the owner feel happy and others envy! Yes, the HTC Touch Cruise P3650 Black Unlocked is surely a head turner.
Once again with Twitter's BM
Good idea. Actually, I think a platform to make A/B testing super-simple for developers (like us!) could be a business in itself.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people who are in debt despite their best efforts - we should be helping these people, who I believe are a minority of all people in debt.

You are wrong on the Internet. Most people in debt are in that situation because of uncovered medical bills.
Ray Ozzie wants to push Microsoft back into Startup mode
Tweeting from Mars: What NASA has learned from the experience
My Web Doesn't Like Your Enterprise, at Least While it's More Fun
Kaizen for Developers: No Inventory
Rands in Repose Gives Dropbox Love
I have to echo your point about the response time. I recently interviewed with a large well-known software company, and I told them about some of my schedule limitations (due date on an existing offer), and the HR person seemed dodgy about it at best. My interviewer loved me, but told me that the company generally was unable to respond in less than 4 weeks.

If you want your potential hires to feel valued, move through the recruitment process at a good pace. There is absolutely no reason there should be a 4-week gap between first and second interviews. I've seen plenty of companies that have gone from first interview to offer in the space of a single week - that includes flying the candidate in.

The worst part is that I emailed the HR contact reminding them that this deadline existed, and to this date (a week and change now...) I have not yet even received an acknowledgment on their part.

Oh well, I'd been warned against that company to begin with.
We're demonstrating that we've solved the problem as stated, not demonstrating that the halting problem can be solved. There is no time frame for how long your test program can run (in the clients wishes), so even if there is an infinite loop in the program fed in - your own test program also waits infinitely. Because your program never stops, and is basically still doing it's job, the client cannot tell you that your solution is wrong. He can only tell you that your solution is wrong if you return a wrong answer, but you never do.

So while the halting problem cannot be solved, the clients requirements can be fulfilled (logically).
Sam Zell: Former real estate mogul discusses his approach to newspapers
This is the fifth time you've made this point in this story's comments.
Raising the respect level of education research in computing Permalink
Treating URL protocol schemes as cruft
A promising individual will seek out a more expressive language if that's what they're looking for.
Inappropriate Abstractions A Conversation with Anders Hejlsberg
http://digg.com/tech_news/SnapAds_Survival_Of_The_Fittest_Me...
I read the description, and though - that sounds pretty cool. But trying it sucks:

1. I don't know what these 'apps' are. Only baseshield apps or any applications at all?

2. I'm using Mac OS X. It offered me a .exe. Tell us that on your homepage

3. Surely you can spend a bit of money to get some proper icons and not use icons that hundreds of people are already using

4. Give me some sort of idea what apps are in there without requiring me to install a .exe. Is it worth it at all - I can't know without some idea of the apps.

In general, it's a pretty good idea, and something like this is neccessary for windows.
Why does every defense of Git seem to begin with a personal attack on the intelligence and knowledge of the critic?

Because nearly every argument I've heard against Git has been stupid or just plain wrong. It isn't necessarily true that a person making a stupid argument is stupid, but it seems to be true more often than not.

I am usually aim for something a bit more civil than "you're stupid", but I've certainly thought that very loudly when reading criticisms of Git. I gave a Git talk at a local user group meeting recently. One audience member was deeply upset about "git reset" and how Git should never be used because of that feature. I thought to myself, "I guess you never use the backspace key either." (And of course said, you can easily delete commits with Subversion. svnadmin dump, edit the dump in your text editor, svnadmin load. I have done this to correct bad merges in the past -- deleting commits is much easier than living with a dumb mistake for the rest of my life.)

Anyway, I think my point is that a lot of people are afraid of anything new, and they come up with dumb arguments to convince themselves that the new thing is bad. Git is very new, and version control is a touchy subject, so a lot of bad (and ignorant) arguments come up. It is really sad, actually. When I discover a new way of thinking that makes my life easier, I don't get upset. My life has become more enjoyable... why would I not want that!?
Hmm... Point taken. My perspective is distinctively Canadian, and massive unpaid medical bills are quite rare around here :S

The majority of "poor" people I know personally are there because of their own indiscretions.
Virtualization layer!

That's something I would not have thought of first.
Despite the fact that windows security was on my mind when I started reading that article.

Virtualizatin is a hefty technology chunk to bite of for a small team, very impressive.

Best of luck to the BaseShield dudes and dudettes.
Get laid off party - angry unemployed unite in harmony
Everybody who just got laid off - cool down a little - come and join our regular picnic on the union square.

Bring a lawn chair or blankets. Salads and cupcakes are welcome. We will have some little chit-chat and let our minds bloom.

for more info join the facebook group!!
MapQuest: “We’ve Come Out Of Hibernation”
well people like you seem to ignore it =) and I still haven't gotten a good counter argument (it's actually just the 3rd time I think) and o yeah the investment argument has also been repeated to no end
Concerning #2: Right below the giant "Install Now" button it says, "Beta | 14MB | Runs on Windows XP and Vista".

I don't think they expect OS X folks to download it...
I still don't see how that makes the article factually incorrect. The article doesn't claim that the bailout is not an investment. It simply says "Hey, this is an awful lot of money that's all going out at once".

Never mind that we may or may not get it back (although if the parties involved could measure risk accurately, we wouldn't be in this mess) -- but the bailout amount is so much that we have nothing else to compare it to other than these massive expenditures. There's no other way to get a sense of scale. If you only want to compare it to investments, the only thing I can think to compare it to is the Chrysler bailout, which IIRC we eventually made some profit on. The S&L bailout is already in the list, and we lost on that one. But both of these are orders of magnitude smaller than this bailout.

(And when I said that no attempt is made to calculate dividends, I meant within the article, not within human history.)
I'm not railing against type-safety, compile-time guarantees, encapsulation, or access control. In fact, I use them every day. I think haskell is pretty neat! And you can definitely get stuff done in C++. I'm not arguing against any of those things.

What I am saying is that in the rush to create the best engineering solutions, we have forgotten how to make programming approachable to the newcomer. Even people with aptitude and inclination get discouraged, if not by the technical stumbling blocks of the language they are using, by the unfriendly culture which has surrounded the craft.

Even children can write simple English. They aren't discouraged from reading and writing because they aren't great novelists. Good teachers try to teach the fundamentals and instill both the technical capability of writing and the joy of reading. Current CS pedagogy fails utterly in this regard. Early students spend so much thought on extraneous things like public static void main and pleasing a compiler that little attention is left to see the beauty in the theory and practice of computation.

The lack of a decent REPL or any useful interactive introspective techniques make C++ and Java particularly awful for teaching introductory computing concepts. Ruby is much more friendly on that level, as are many other languages. Look at projects like _why's Shoes or some of the things being done with Squeak. Look at the volumes of hackers who cut their teeth on things like BASIC. Look at how many industrial-strength best practices we can bypass while still teaching the fundamental joy of programming.

Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, designer of many key gameplay concepts we now take for granted, was once asked in an interview what the fundamental concept behind his games is. He replied that the fundamental nature of a video game is that you press a button and something happens on the screen. It sounds simple but cuts through to the heart of the matter. Similarly I think that the fundamental appeal of computer programming is that I type something in and the computer carries out my wishes.

The love of programming is something that seems to come to people only by happenstance these days. If a language like Ruby can help more people to discover that love then more power to it.
Google Maps hack turns book into geo-novel
Where There's A Tweed, There's A Way
New blog post from His Catalog's Alisa: Where There's A Tweed, There's A Way http://hiscatalog.com/blog/2008/11/25/where-theres-a-tweed-theres-a-way/
To me, it's on the boring side...doesn't have much on a webforum.
Looks like a cool project.

What's your business model? Ads?
Wow, that's actually a really good idea. I always assume there can be no innovation left for the desktop. I've got to stop thinking that.
Lets Go Deep - Your Fantasy Football Season Is Not Over, It's Just Begun
Compulsive gamers 'not addicts'
The featured five on the homepage moves way too fast. It switched when I was still reading.

Beyond that, interesting site. Good luck!
"Because nearly every argument I've heard against Git has been stupid or just plain wrong. It isn't necessarily true that a person making a stupid argument is stupid, but it seems to be true more often than not."

When you find yourself thinking this, it's a good sign that you need to take a step back, take a deep breath, and think a little harder about your opponent's arguments.
A promising individual may not even know that more expressive languages are available. The onus is on us as knowledgeable teachers to show newcomers the world of possibilities.
I'm not surprised.

There's a selection bias in the people who bet on elections. You only bet if you think you know something other people don't -- if you're wrong you lose your money. If you're wrong as a pundit, nothing happens. As they say, the bettors put their money where their mouth is.

There's an interesting counterargument: people who use prediction markets to hedge against the outcome they don't want. I don't know how many people actually do this, though.
+1. Reminds me of this:-)

http://www.welton.it/articles/scalable_systems/

I should rewrite it though... it's kind of crufty.
I promising individual does not have unwavering trust in their teachers and accepts that the knowledge being passed on is likely flawed or incomplete.
That's awesome. Definitely interested in an open-source version. Let me know if I can help, contact details in my profile.
Taking naps boosts memory and creativity
Sites using Catalyst:
http://www.catalystsites.org/sites/all
and
http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/wiki/SitesRunningCatalyst
Duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375973

The BBC has some weird url thing going on there.
If what you say is true, this measure doesn't seem to make any sense.

If their employees cost more than what they produce every day, doing nothing for 4 days is similar to closing your eyes and wishing the problem away.
I doubt many -- even those inflicted with the abnormalities mentioned in this documentary -- would choose to live in the world before synthetic materials were available, in 1908, say.

We could make everything out of straw. Including men.
It's also important to remember that the reverse is true:

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority...
Neat, seems to work reasonably well.

Inkscape's a bit slow, and the breakout game has some horrible sound lag, but the get/install/run UX is really great.

Anyone know how the virtualize is done?
I second #4.

I don't use Windows, but I would be more than happy to recommend BaseShield to others that do if I only knew what apps were available.
And also important that in arguments that devolve to appeals to authority, arguments about the arguers are not always fallacious.
Looks like a fun social site, seems more like a possible facebook application than its own site though.
Project managers hate branching for exactly the same reason; only one branch is going to be the actual product and the other branches are wasted effort.

OK, then you'd better not use any revision control at all -- any local checkout is also a branch. You can make changes to your working copy, and nobody will ever see them. I know people that have avoided committing for days because we had a policy against branching, and they needed to do a very extensive refactoring. What a helpful policy! At least we didn't have to maintain a branch...

The fun continues. When you do an "svn update", that's a merge. Except, it's a lossy merge that is happy to throw data away. If there are merge conflicts, you don't have the opportunity to say, "oh shit, fuck this update, just give me my files back". Your data is gone, sucker, so fix those conflicts right now!

Git, in contrast, does not suffer from this problem. It won't let you merge when the index is dirty. ("git stash" is a nice way to cleanup the index without losing any data, if you Have To Merge Right Now). When you merge and there are conflicts, you have a variety of options. You can forget the merge ever happened, you can fix it, or some combination thereof. Without branches, that wouldn't be possible.

Anyway, I'm glad I don't work somewhere with "project managers". I don't need people micromanaging my coding, nor does anyone else.

(If you don't like Git, just say you don't like Git. But there is no need to make up an imaginary entity who is arguing against it, because that's just silly.)
Thanks--we'll look at slowing that down a notch! :-)
If they're losing money every day, closing down for 4 days makes sense.