ColinCera

What is naive is to assume without evidence that the actions of a handful of companies that employ a tiny percentage of software developers had a significant impact on average salaries nationwide. In the absence of any such evidence, it makes more sense to assume it had little impact, which is what I do. The example you cite is mere speculation, and one could easily speculate about an opposite effect, i.e., companies that would not ordinarily be able to compete with Google et al could offer candidates more than they otherwise would have, that is, they might be inclined to stretch salary offers for star developers rather than shrink them. But, there's no evidence that either thing happened to any significant extent.

What "wage-fixing" are you talking about? Are you referring to the brief period in which a handful of tech companies colluded to tamp down salaries and cross-recruiting? Because that involved only a tiny percentage of the software developers in the US and had no significant impact on the national average salaries. Or has there been broader wage-fixing that you're aware of?

Every problem he mentions, except the timezone difference, is exactly the same when you're outsourcing to large IT consulting companies in the US. The only difference is the US companies charge 5x-20x more for their crappy deliverables.

How many people here have worked with a major IT consultancy in the US? How many were satisfied with the process and result? I would be astonished if even 5 out of 100 projects outsourced within the US turn out so well that customers say, "That was great, we can't wait to work with those consultants again."

As a veteran of half a dozen such projects using half a dozen different IT consulting firms, my experience was they were all terrible experiences, with rampant price-gouging (novice programmers billed at $300/hour, "senior" people at $600-1,000/hour), conflicts of interest, poor communication, etc., and the work products in every case were massive total failures (and no, they do not give refunds).

I don't put much stock in this article as a specific critique of India, but as an article about outsourcing in general it's dead-on accurate.

I believe they're attacking the challenge from the opposite direction: Gmail search can be described as "okay" and Google works tirelessly to make the main Google.com search experience worse and worse -- eventually they will succeed in degrading it from its former excellence to a point where its quality matches Gmail's.

Is "Stuyvesant High School" the new code name for Madoff Academy?

I don't believe this for a second. I considered believing it, for one second, but immediately realized it has to be bullshit.

There's quite a lot of disability fraud going on, some of it downright shocking.

Example #1: A couple of weeks ago, my brother, an orthopedist, had a 26-year-old man come in for an ankle sprain. In the course of working up the ankle -- mildly sprained, no problem -- he found that the patient doesn't work and is on 100% disability. Why? Because of acne. Yes, acne. Apparently when he was 19 or 20 he had such severe acne that someone deemed him unable to work and he was approved for 100% disability. Even though his skin now is perfectly clear, with some minor acne scarring the only remaining blemish, this man will likely never work a day in his life -- he will be drawing a disability check from the government for the next 60 years.

Example #2: Another brother is a police officer. Or was. He recently retired, at age 52, and now will draw a $70,000/year pension for the next few decades, which is a separate but related issue. But he tells me that -- even though he didn't personally take advantage of this ploy -- it is routine for retiring police officers and firefighters to go to "friendly" doctors and have those doctors certify them as disabled so they can get disability checks in addition to their pensions. It's called "taking the disability topper" or "getting DA'd."

A few things I can recommend:

(1) Switch to the Colemak keyboard layout -- it significantly reduces the work your fingers have to do.

(2) Vary your mousing devices/behaviors. I love Kensington trackballs, and they're much easier on my wrist than a mouse, but after awhile I get pain in my thumb (because with a trackball you typically use your thumb to left-click rather than your index finger), so I switch back to a mouse for a few weeks. Vertical mice are also nice and I occasionally use one for a change. You can also move your mouse/trackball to the other side of the keyboard and use your non-dominant hand -- it takes a few days to rewire your brain, but it's another good way to change up your mousing behavior.

(3) Consider buying a USB numeric keypad, placing it on the non-dominant side of your keyboard, and using macro software to program the keys for common actions (e.g., scrolling).

It's a good thing Chris Hughes likes to break things, because he's irreparably broken The New Republic.

The people who read TNR (myself included) do so specifically because it's been a bastion of traditional journalism, and moreover we read it for specific writers & contributing editors, and since they've all resigned now, TNR is dead.

Outside of a very small sliver of the population nobody's ever even heard of the The New Republic — it's not a brand name that Hughes can gut and remodel. The New Republic is not a brand that anyone cares about; we cared about the content, the writers and the editors.

I can see no way for TNR to carry on as a viable operation. As a TNR reader for more than 30 years, it makes me rather sad.

This is all so stupid and sad.

Here's another ideas site you might find useful: http://www.ideaswatch.com/

I'm so tired of whiny babies screaming because they can't have everything their precious little selves desire for free, free, FREE!

Now the whiny babies are also developing potty-mouths, which is not an improvement.

I look forward to this infant's continuing series of articles, including "Fuck You, Netflix," "Fuck You, Spotify," "Fuck You, Apple," "Fuck You, Every Business On Earth."

You can, via Google, but I wouldn't bother — it's an egregiously stupid and shallow piece of link-bait.

The one in the middle is 24", the two on the sides are each 22".

I do not limit line length intentionally, but it's quite rare that a line of code would go over 70 characters or so, and that's good enough for me.

>But I guess if you didn't count @mentions in the limit you'd find people adding lots of people to a conversation in a spammy way. I'm not really sure how to fix that.

Simple: cap the number of @mentions in a tweet at 5, or at 120 characters total.

Same for #tags — limit those to 5 or a total number of characters.

You're right. Now that I think about it, the majority of Twitter user probably happens on phones and tablets, where there is no out-of-feed real estate for advertising, and a smaller percentage of people on desktops use a native app instead of the browser site.

So the revenue potential is probably not as much as I'd imagined.

And I fully agree that I don't want to see an increased number of sponsored tweets inserted in my feed.

Yes, but my point is that ads in the empty space around the central feed would not be "overwhelming" to anyone except chronic complainers.

Ad blocking is a problem for all ad-supported web sites. There are heavy-handed ways to thwart it, and I personally wouldn't mind if Twitter used such tactics — Twitter is a valuable service and I don't have any objection to them making money to keep the lights on and making a ton of profit on top.

I've never understood why Twitter doesn't run way more ads than they do. When I view my Twitter timeline in a browser there's an enormous amount of unused space on both sides of the timeline and it would not bother me one little bit if they displayed some ads in that space. In fact, it would be much less distracting/detracting than sticking sponsored tweets into the middle of my feed.

Like most people, I find ads kind of annoying, but Twitter's an unusual case — I would be 0% less inclined to use Twitter if they put some ads in that totally unused space.

Twitter might lose approximately .01% of their users if they ran ads, but they'd be making billions in profits.

I'd pretty much given up on AWS for compute and moved most everything to Linode and some bare metal servers, but this service looks very compelling for discrete compute tasks.

The ability to pay only for the fractions of seconds actually used, and the ability to scale quickly without provisioning (or over-provisioning) EC2 instances, is awfully attractive.

Plus, Amazon has priced this pretty aggressively — i.e., it looks shockingly cheap.

Is endvr supposed to be short for Endeavor? I pronounced it as End Over, then instantly converted it to Bend Over, which actually seems like an excellent name for a job-hunting site...

From the employer/recruiter side, I'm curious how your service differs from LinkedIn's own offerings for recruiters, and if you're worried about intruding on LinkedIn's turf, given that they derive the bulk of their revenue from recruiters.

It's worth noting that Iceland is currently in the midst of a large ongoing volcanic eruption, its largest eruption in centuries. Large numbers of people find themselves having to hide indoors to escape dangerous gases depending on which way the wind blows on any given day.

The current slow-moving eruption and seismic activity is fairly likely to lead to a catastrophic explosive event and massive flash floods that could destroy a significant amount of hydroelectric infrastructure.

Doesn't necessarily mean Iceland's not a good place to build huge data centers, but it's something to keep in mind.

I was attempting sarcasm; I may have failed.

It's great to see Amazon using its huge profits to fund this kind of bleeding edge technology. (Maybe someday engineers will figure out how to squeeze this functionality into handheld devices.)

“We envision a system where the programmer writes a few of lines of code, hits a button and the rest of the code appears. And not only that, the rest of the code should work seamlessly with the code that’s already been written.”

I'm skeptical...

'Writing computer programs could become as easy as searching the Internet. A Rice University-led team of software experts has launched an $11 million effort to create a sophisticated tool called PLINY that will both “autocomplete” and “autocorrect” code for programmers, much like the software that completes search queries and corrects spelling on today’s Web browsers and smartphones.'

Interested, but very, very skeptical...

It seems extremely odd to me that this author would write an article lamenting the lack of a HyperCard-like development tool without mentioning LiveCode, which is basically exactly what he's talking about — a modern, thriving successor to HyperCard, based on the HyperTalk language and the exact same concepts as HyperCard, being used by thousands of developers to create applications that run on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.

I didn't think I'd find this kind of site very useful, but after playing with it for a couple minutes I quite like it. Once you've implemented a few more features (e.g., options for filtering, combining, hiding, etc.), I could actually see myself using the site and paying a small amount for the privilege — say, $5/year.

I don't know how many other people would be willing to pay for such a thing (probably not enough for it to be your full-time income, I'd guess) but you could give it a shot and see.

Those prior arguments are hardly "the exact same" and at any rate the fact that people have previously made similar arguments about other forms of technology says absolutely nothing about the merits of the present argument about a new technology.

But I do agree with you that it's not legitimate to expect content to be both free (advertising supported) and high quality. It's wonderful when it happens, but people can't really complain when it doesn't, much less complain not only about the quality of the content but also the quality of the advertising. If people want high-quality content carefully selected by human editors and presented in attractive ways then they should pay for it.

I wonder how much money The Simpsons producers have spent over the years responding to this type of utterly ridiculous nuisance suit. I bet it's probably greater than $50 million.

Has anyone ever legitimately/successfully sued The Simpsons?

Unluckily those laws are basically unenforceable and age discrimination in software development is rampant.

If you don't want to worry about database/server administration and scaling issues, I'd recommend looking at Cloudant. It's quite inexpensive, takes virtually no administration effort, scales automatically, and is fast and flexible.

You could continue to use Redis as a write cache, although a message queue or something like Kafka might be better for that purpose, and of course as a read cache, while using Cloudant or some other "real" database for permanent storage.

(On a side note, you described your application as "write-heavy" but you also said you get "about 3 Million individual customer orders on monthly basis" — which works out to just slightly more than one record to insert per second, on average, which doesn't seem "write-heavy" to me. I understand that you get orders submitted in batches, rather than evenly distributed, but it still doesn't seem especially write heavy. At any rate, a database like Cloudant can take as many writes as you want to throw at it.)

(Disclaimer: I don't work for Cloudant; I am a satisfied customer; I don't use Cloudant for everything.)

No. Fact: the insurance industry dislikes innovation, and innovators dislike the insurance industry.

Insurance seems ripe for disruption, but by its very nature it is extremely risk-averse -- and that's not something that will change, nor should it. It's also a heavily regulated industry with thin margins, which favors the enormously capitalized incumbents with years of actuarial data and armies of experts.

On the other hand, because insurance operates with thin margins yet deals with gigantic amounts of money, what seems to be merely an "incremental improvement" can potentially make you quite wealthy, and if you could somehow figure out how to genuinely disrupt a significant insurance market the rewards would be commensurately mind-boggling.

Have you talked to your VPS provider? They should be able to cut you a break; after all, that 40TB of traffic cost them only a small fraction of what they're charging you, so if they're reasonable you should at least be able to get them to reduce the charges to their actual cost.

You might also offer to suggest writing up a post mortem for them, that they can provide to their customers as a lesson/tutorial on how to protect a VPS.

Finally, you can suggest that they might want to implement (and perhaps help them implement it) some kind of warning system, i.e., if a VPS suddenly begins using exorbitant amounts of bandwidth, and far more bandwidth than it ever has before, they really should email/text the owner an alert within 24 hours — not let it go on for 6 weeks. I'm surprised that they don't cap/throttle the bandwidth once you go over your plan's limit, to go along with sending you alerts. It borders on negligence on their part that they don't already have such a system in place.