skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've worked with a handful of Indian developers who were great, and happened to be living in the US. Almost all Indian developers I've dealt (or had colleagues deal witH) with remotely (them living in India) were not good. Surely there's not something inherently genetic, as the people I worked with here in the US would be just as bad.

The common trait I noticed with the 'bad' developers in India was a tendency to always say 'yes', almost in a servile manner.

"These are the goals for the next week - can we hit those?" "Yes".

"We need to incorporate some full text search, either with Solr or direct Lucene - do you have experience with either?" "Yes".

"I need the login system to also do some logging and alerts based on the criteria I sent over yesterday. Was there anything in the email you have questions on?" "No".

OK, in that last one, the answer was a 'no', but the 'yes' position - "Yes, I can do it, I know this, everything will be fine" got to be a bit baffling, because clearly after several days or weeks would go by and nothing would get done... asking "did you understand the specs from 2 weeks ago?" was met with a knee-jerk "yes", yet the understanding wasn't there.

No doubt, I've encountered this with non Indian developers of all stripes and locations, but far less often. It feels like culturally there is a big emphasis on projecting an image that you know everything that needs to be known. I think that's common to many cultures/locations, and perhaps more common in software than other fields (?). But it's also easier to detect when you're face to face, even just on an infrequent basis.

All that said, I did a code review of code from the Ukraine recently - it made me weep with joy (almost literally). It was a massive project, but it was some of the cleanest code I've seen in more than 15 years, and probably the cleanest code I've ever seen of that size that was not a large open source project. I was humbled at how good it was, and how disciplined that entire team was. One thing I learned about their operation is that they have regular communication daily, and one of the project managers gets over to Ukraine every so often for some face to face time. I can't say that's the key, but I bet it doesn't hurt.

EDIT: Someone else mentioned specs being vague. This brings up another point I've noticed with offshore Indian developers moreso than others - a willingness to ask for clarifications. It ties in with my point above, I think, but is another angle. The Indian developers I worked with in the US seemed quite comfortable asking questions about specs/docs - the ones I've worked with who were based in India rarely asked questions about anything. Is this just cultural (living in the US tends to make you question things more?) or something else, or just my lone experiences and everyone else's is the opposite?
You described an implementation of the Confirmation Bias :D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
I put the 'community' in quotes because I really don't know if the jewish culture could be considered a community, as it's bigger than that.

Again, where in my post do I say that the Jews where the only victims of the holocaust?

Do you really have any doubt about the influence of the jewish people?! For me this is just common sense.

Just explain to me what's particular about the holocaust that makes it much more important than any other genocide in our recent history.

I really don't believe there's anything.
Here are the slides for a recent talk we gave about JuliaOpt:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FlHt245YxPXFwOHmxLYW...
Point to me where I said that jews were the only victims?

It's not very smart to comment on a text you obviously haven't understood.
I used to work for a large background investigation company.

The Federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) generally (there are exceptions) limits pre-employment background checks to convictions within the past seven years. Although sentencing can bring this into scope. So for example if you were convicted 10 years ago, but were sentenced to 4 years probation that conviction could still be used against you. State laws can impose further limits on background checks. Depending on how recently this conviction occurred and your state of residence it may not even be an issue.
Relevant To California [edit: public sector]:

October 10, 2013
Jerry Brown signs bill to ban felony question on public job apps

Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a bill that bans government employers from asking job applicants about their criminal record until later in the hiring process, effectively extending the state's policy to some 6,000-plus local and regional government agencies in California.

http://blogs.sacbee.com/the_state_worker/2013/10/jerry-brown...
This must be unique to the US though, in other countries you have to go through quite a lot of red tape to be allowed such information, even as an employer.
Dating and Marrying a Mexican VC
HN should require you solve some form of fizzbuzz to get voting/posting rights
On some architectures it's the way he wants it (always zero on overflow), on some it's the way you suggest (shift is mod 32), and on some it just generates junk.

Bitshifting is an operation that people generally expect to be extremely fast. Adding a check on every single operation generated by a C compiler just to guarantee identical results upon overflow probably would not go over well.
I think this has more to do with the types of companies that outsource to India. They're not doing it because they view India as a source of talented programmers. They're doing it because they view India as a large source of cheap, disposable butts in chairs. And guess what? You treat them that way, and that's what they become.

I think the moral here is: seeking the best talent from across the world is a worthy goal, but seeking the absolute cheapest labor force possible leads to pain and suffering.
I've read about this. Unfortunately, it's just a "movement" at this point. I have volunteered at some organizations that work in this space within my state.

However, the primary focus is for a larger contingent of convicts whom are returning to society after being incarcerated.

I was never incarcerated, I am not a minority, and come from a middle-class socioeconomic background, and it's extremely difficult to argue discrimination in hiring for a job that very few people are technically capable of performing.

Unlike service work for example, being able bodied, not-addicted to drugs, etc. are not the only qualifications, and any employer can easily point to a lack of an abstract qualification as a perfectly legal and acceptable reason for rejection.

Long story short, I'm not also of a particular persuasion (politically and personally) that I should be afforded any special treatment. SO I thread a particularly thin line here.
You're right my bad. 500pts to downvote
Woah, really neat. Thanks!
Calibre allows you to trivially create a local wifi-accessible server to side-load your ebooks and pdfs from other sources.
vs 9 million iphones in the first weekend
I see your point, chc. And you are right. Talking politics on a site like HN is defacto undesirable. But the NSA dogs made feces mandatory conversation--if we want to live our lives *shit free--and so the door once opened just gets wider. It is sad. All this stuff is really sad.
One of the most interesting things about discussions regarding bitcoin is you can always count on a few people getting quite angry and spiteful, as if they are personally offended by its existence.

Remember friends, keep your identity small ;) -- http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
Yes, salesmanship has helped me a great deal. I always lead this conversation with the volunteer work I have done, and the testimony I have offered before law makers, which usually catches people as off guard as first learning about my background given my qualifications.

I also try to take the attitude, that given the current hiring environment for engineers, it's not hard for me to "go somewhere else" if I need work, and that they should be happy to have another "warm body coding" rather than worrying about some legal obligation as a business owner that they've never had to deal with before and don't understand.
Technically there are no hard/permanent Yes or No answers in human relationships. Only "Yes for now, I think" and "No for now, I think". Both positions can change later or be revisited.
It sounds like you probably work at a quality company with high standards. It's unfortunate that there are companies who don't practice the same diligence, yet you get all stereotyped together as Indian coders.

In the US I have a totally different impression of Indian coders which I happen to know is shared by more than just myself. That is the Indian coders I have known were extremely smart and particularly good with incredibly complex code. One of my friends who got hired at a place where the team was mostly Indian confessed to me that he was somewhat intimidated to start because the team was "all these genius Indian coders" and he wanted to be sure he would hold up to their standards. I hope that does not sound racist. I thought it might be interesting counterpoint that Indian programmers located here in the US do not have a negative "bad coder" image that I'm aware of - quite the opposite in fact.

I know this is a stereotype just as it is to stereotype outsourcing. But, I think most US programmers negative opinion is not directed at the programmers themselves, but rather the logistics and various other challenges of outsourcing.
Totally missed the FAQ there. Thanks!
Eben Moglen is one of the most impressive speakers you might have the privilege to hear-in addition to his razor sharp argument and crystal clarity, Moglen speaks without notes.
One option is to apply for a pardon to the governor of your state.

If you can show the reasons why you were doing what you were doing (in short, repercussions of a parental suicide), show you did receive a degree, have people who can vouch for you now (including the work you have done and the value you have provided their business), you might have a shot.

In other words, have you become a valued member of society worth erasing a felony conviction for? If it is erased, would your value to society increase or decrease? What has your character been like since? And most importantly, what potential political ramifications exist if your conviction were to be pardoned?
That's an interesting point, I hadn't thought about multithreading. Is it truly undefined in the nasal demons sense, or is it just that the behavior is hard to predict in advance?

I assume everyone reading a discussion about undefined behavior knows what nasal demons are, but just in case someone doesn't: in illustrating just what "undefined behavior" means in C, it has been suggested that it would be perfectly legal for a compiler, upon encountering such, to cause demons to fly out of the programmer's nose. The point being that it's not just a matter of producing an unexpected value or something of that nature, but a completely unexpected behavior. As a real-world example, early versions of gcc would, upon encountering a #pragma (whose behavior is undefined) would start a game of nethack.
Some context and elaboration:

CNN's Don Lemon talks with a columnist ( Orville Lloyd Douglas )who wrote about his hatred for the color of his own skin.

Full video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DujnL7w5ic4

Shorter version:

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2013/11/17/...

Edit: Fuller video added.
That is encouraging. However, you are not entirely free from your past. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UtsSPOdQzw
As an economic hobbiest I wonder how much of this is part of BitCoin and how much is part of the restriction on the 'float' of available coins. Specifically several recent actions, from the Silk Road take down to the wallet services going away have reduced the quantity of available coin that can be used for transactions. Is that the driver behind the price? After all the drug trade didn't just "stop" when Silk Road was taken down. And if you've got obligations to pay in BitCoin and your wallet provider just went off the air with your stash? Now you are out trying to get coins to finish the transaction before the other side of that transaction declares it invalid right?
I haven't used App Store in awhile and appreciate the ability to view videos on the apps in the Google Play store
If you were writing Big Bang Theory scripts this might actually be a great way to optimize the process.
The Opposite of Love Is Love
There are quite a few quad-core, single-board, fanless ARM computers: utilite, wandboard, odroid, udoo, radxa.

I have two odroid U2 that I use for testing distributed and multithreaded code. One odroid core (exynos 4412 @1.7GHz ) is more than 8x as fast as the pi, for some numerical simulation code (ODEs). Storage is eMMC, so should be faster than the class 10 SD card in a Pi. It was very easy to get Linaro set up on them (for headless use, as compute servers). Recommend highly.

I use my two RPi for file serving, backups via rsync and btsync, limited web (one is at a remote location).

There's a utilite pro on order as well, but they are a bit backlogged, as I understand it. I'm looking forward to the 2x Gb eth (odroid is 100Mb) and faster bus and disk speeds.
The Watcom C/C++ compiler used to have a neat shift optimization bug.

If you shifted one way a few bits then shifted back a few bits (As you would in calculating addresses for graphics operations), the optimizer would think you were undoing the operation and do nothing. or interestingly shift n-m bits.

You had to do some dummy operation in between for the code to actually execute. This was true at least up to Watcom 11.
I use mine for a fermentation temperature monitor/grapher, and another for a squeezebox client.
iPhone models have a lifespan of 1 year. Game console models have a life span of 6-7 years.
it was actually a meta joke... they complain about the mods updating the title to the original one even if less informative... and that was the original title by OP
Also if you look through the package list, you will see people doing all kinds of stuff with Julia.

http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/
I am using two of those two million RPis with camera modules to record pollinators visiting flowers (backpackable; activated by motion; solar powered). I'm still ironing out some kinks with the software, but the quality of footage produce by the camera module, the low power requirements and the flexibility you get with the RPi are really pretty amazing considering the price.
Yes, the PS4 is suffering because you need very large pockets to own one.
Wolfram came here some years back--to Columbia University. A huge room was packed, but nobody understood him. He tried to explain his vision for universal patterns. I followed him. Few did. He was above their heads. The presentation ended in confusion. Some jerks in the room said Wolfram wasn't anything but the creator of Mathematica. They couldn't relate. He'd come here to look for good people to join his research team. He wanted recruits.
Google is totally right to not care what a "sufficiently small population" of users think if it improves the over all experience. The trouble is - that small population accounts for a very large portion of the popular videos. At the end of the day, youtube is nothing special without it's giant farm of servers and fast loading videos, which they seem to struggle with. Upsetting your power users almost never works out.. Some internet math.. Google + Youtube = Digg 4?
MobilECG
Apple TV + Kinect equals 60" iPad in your living room.
Especially with an encrypted disk.
Ask HN: Salary Allocation by Task Attractiveness?
This is a bit of a weird question, but recently, talking to other developers a lot about it, we came to the conclusion that it's fun to work on new things and it often sucks to work on maintenance type of tasks.

This is also why hiring developers during a prototyping phase seems often easier than to keep them on board later down the road (a year or two in), when most tasks shift over to 'keeping the product running and adding fixes and small features'.

So, I was wondering whether anyone had experience with or heard about schemes where you would allot a developer budget for the month, but distribute payments (within ranges) on how 'popular' a certain task/implementation/work-package is.

For instance:

20% of developer budget is allocated to the necessary new things, like trying out a different DB system, infrastructure experiments, iOS prototypes, bayesian sentiment algorithm, crawler, etc.

80% of developer budget is allocated to fixing the admin panel, writing a report-generator for traffic/ads/sales reports, fixing DB issues, rewriting/revisiting code that keeps causing troubles, etc.

And then have developers self-assign (where possible) to which work they'd like to focus on/contribute to. When you want to make a bit more money that month, maybe accept helping out with 'more boring tasks', if you feel like you need a bit of a break and just want to experiment with new things, accept that this month you might be making a bit less.

Basically, looking at it from a different perspective, how do you make sure that the very core thing most of us devs love the most, i.e. 'trying out new shit until we've figured it out' stays a solid part of your daily job while at the same time, making sure all those maintenance things get taken care of responsibly?

just an odd idea, would love to hear your thoughts.
Agreed, title should be adjusted.
This is a hilariously stupid article. It makes sweeping generalizations of a country of a _billion_ people using nothing but anecdotal evidence. Really, if anyone is going to make a claim as bold as this, and as potentially insulting to a race of people as this, they better back it up with some numbers.

This is very clearly a case of "you get what you pay for". If you want cheap labor, you're going to get cheap quality. Just like everywhere else, there exists good programmers and bad programmers, passionate people that strive to learn and get better and those that work just to get by.
> "We have a vision to raise our families together."

Seriously, how naive, have they ever heard a newborn crying non-stop or a toddler going off on a tantrum? Might disturb the karma a bit!

There really is nothing new here, ask any impoverished artist living in a plasterboard cubicle in a warehouse with ten others, it's just a different group of people with common interests choosing to live together.

Having room-mates does not make a "commune".

A "do-ocracy" is simply figuring out how to live together

Working at a tech firm or using the Internet all day does not make one a "hacker".

Having been in one of the bigger places before, and seen the state of the communal areas (washroom), the paper-thin walls, the constant coming and going of strangers, I would advise only the young, sociable and tolerant to live there.
Change cars for Scottish sheep and it sounds like at least one famous joke to at least one person.
I have thought about this. Don't you think that the crowd at HN just goes too hard on anything Google does? Frankly i don't feel anything wrong is have a SSO for all google apps. There are always a way to hide identity if you truly want to be anonymous.

Agreed, there are some concerns as well. But again, aren't we living in an age where all our data is being sold to marketing agencies and companies. FB has been doing it since ever.
There's a huge demand for quality content.

Why not just hire a bunch of people with taste to choose the content?
All things considered, the charlatans receive disproportionately high results and representation. Never did I imply there aren't competent Indians in IT, but they do not receive as much spotlight.

Second, your insistence on me generalizing about "1 billion people" is erroneous. The ones high enough in the caste system and with sufficient income to pursue such endeavors (and then the ones actually pursuing them) are much lower. India's demographics are well known for being highly mixed when it comes to social status and involving lots of polar extremes.

Finally, your example biases are radical in comparison to the view that I point out.

Ultimately, there is an issue. Don't try to take this as the ravings of some biased madman.
I got the standard protective cover which makes the unit about three times as heavy, but I can stuff it in my bag that's choking full at times without issues. Never dropped it though, but I think the thick rubber enclosure should provide some protection against that too. And I like the magnetic on/off switch.
They're blue in Chapel Hill, though!
The drugs we are talking about are Bretazenil[1] and Pagoclone[2], which are more targeted than GABA agonists - they only bind to certain subtypes of the GABA receptor. They are also claimed to be partial agonists , meaning even at maximum capacity they only stimulate the receptor to a fraction[3] of a full agonist. One the other hand The potential of abuse of Pagoclone claimed to be similar to that of valium(how did they measure that ?).

On the other hand, there's some interesting work on molecules that decrease dependence/tolerance.For example there's work on reducing morphine abuse potential using calcium/magnesium in rats[4].There's also conflicting research results regarding the effect of magnesium, glycine and zinc on the effect alcohol has on the NMDA receptor(which is supposed to be the main cause of tolerance)[5].

So maybe there's a combination that gives most of the benefits of alcohol , with a small dependence potential. Let's not get discouraged from this noble goal yet.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretazenil

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagoclone

[3]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/Ago...

[4]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19658277

[5]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK5284/
There's this ISP in Belgium, Telenet, that does this. I've never understood it. Their code is some java enterprise crap, and when helping out helpdeskers I've seen it and I've had the opportunity to see some of the code. It's easy to point out 10 obvious errors in each of their (horribly long) functions.

The problem is that this infects all of their business processes. Even the quality of the code, which I'm sure costs them dozens of FTE-equivalents on an ongoing constant workarounds at least. There's also a constant workload for damage repair, whose costs probably go beyond merely the cost of the people doing it.

The real big problem is the complete and total disconnect between the business and the development side. The impact of this goes from prioritization problems (spelling fixes get precedence over database corruption bugs), to month-long projects having to be redone multiple times. It also means that there is a massive disconnect between the business policy and what the system will actually do (legal frequently freaks out over it too. On one hand it lets some customers openly abuse the telco, and it often disconnects people for a payment deficit of EUR 0.01 that was caused by that very system). And of course, the business has to cope in the meantime.

The government has assigned a "judge" (ombudsman, but with legal teeth) to do nothing other than override this system in ridiculous cases.

Why the fuck do (large) companies accept this sort of shit ? I can understand a startups' "needs to work right fucking now" attitude with uncertain market fit, but hundreds of millions of revenue depend on this software ...

Although this is partly why I've heard people leave Europe. In Europe, firstly, the money available to pay for a job is determined by "social order", not by value of the position. So a programmer makes $X (less than EUR 70k, and that's very, very well paid, and keep in mind minimum tax level is 56%). Even the one that when he makes a small mistakes crashes the entire network. If there's budget, they hire more programmers, not better ones. So you find 20-year old php monkeys doing those jobs, and constant outages. And second, sadly, this behavior is not at all limited to huge telcos.

Baffles the mind.