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.

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.