solutionyogi

If you want to experience true free market health care, you must go to India. Whenever I visit India, I make sure to get my teeth cleaning done. Person in my home town has a choice to get teeth cleaning done from 500 INR (7$) to 3500 INR (55$). On the low end, you get a clinic which is not in the hip part of the town, equipment is not the latest and greatest and the waiting room will be non air conditioned. On the higher end, the clinic will be fully air conditioned, serve you tea/coffee and will use the latest equipment. On my last trip, a real dentist (not a hygienist) performed my teeth cleaning and they took my teeth x-ray using those new machines where you stand up and the machine takes 360 degree scan. After the cleaning, the doctor took me to her office and reviewed the x-ray with me and then gave me a CD with all the x-ray images so that I can use them with my next doctor in case I decide to go somewhere else.

At my current employer, we are currently implementing Splunk. And it's taking forever and they do charge arm and a leg for their offering. I don't mind if a good product costs money but you shouldn't need a consultant on premise just to configure your logging solution.

I still remember the first time I read about Bingo Card Creator. I immediately dismissed the idea. But as noted in the article, it was a small brick and he kept stacking them and look how far he has come.

Thanks to his advice, I have also made decent progress in my own career. As a thank you, I wanted to get him a gift as a token of appreciation. And here's what he replied:

"Nope. I tend to just buy things that I want, considering my wants are generally small."

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/334333114912481281

Patrick, you are a role model and an inspiration. Thank you for everything and wish you all the best with your new venture.

I went to their website, tried to find non-trivial calculations and I couldn't find any. I really don't know why there is even a question of whether to raise funding or not.

It looks modern yet very readable thanks to great typography. Loads fast. Fully usable on mobile as well. E.g. Gets a hamburger menu on Mobile. The featured client animation is simpler. The spinning globe icon is replaced by a static image. They have absolutely top notch front end engineering talent.

This is in huge contrast to the current trend where they want to hijack browser's scrolling behavior for absolutely no gain to the end user.

I doubt if that will work. What if they were happy because they got quality output for less money? How would you now go to them and say that I gave you a discount the first time around and now you have to pay the full price? If you did not make it clear up front, you will have a very unhappy client.

I think it's incorrect to assume that everyone hires consulting companies to cut costs. Some folks hire them because they do not want to build IT team. Some folks hire them because they need some work done for the quarter BUT won't be needing them on permanent basis. In such cases, it's not about the cost but paying right amount of money to get their work done.

If they will use Github to develop Gogs, the potential audience may think why they should not use Github itself.

I am not trying to put them down, it's very difficult to dog food when your product is in its early state but their page suggests that they already support Issue Tracking. I think it is in a state where they can use Gogs to develop Gogs. This will ensure that they work on those items which affects developers the most.

I think there is a broad agreement that unit testing is a very useful tool in developing quality software. Because of the inherent limitation of C#, you can't unit test easily if you don't use DI. This often leads to a situation where you have tons of interfaces + each interface is implemented exactly by one class. This is because product like Isolator is not free. Hyptothetically, if Isolator was provided by Microsoft for free, I am sure that we will see reduced usage of DI.

Don't get me wrong, I think there are other scenarios where DI is a great technique in designing components which are flexible. However, those scenarios are not that many. Using DI to make your software unit testable is an overkill IMHO.

There is no doubt that people writing Java software loved abstractions.

One of my favorite examples: https://ptrthomas.files.wordpress.com/2006/06/jtrac-callstac...

2. I understand dependency injection completely but question if it's really required to write quality software OR is it a technique you use because programming languages are lacking.

Let me give you an example. In .NET world, there is a product called, Isolator by a company called TypeMock. It can let you mock any type/method by exploiting CLR.

In .NET, there is a type called System.DateTime with a static property DateTime.Now. I have seen code where people try to write interfaces to inject DateTime.Now. And I think it's an overkill. When I saw their example of how they can mock DateTime.Now without doing DI, I am personally convinced that DI is about addressing limitations of your statically typed language and is not an absolute must.

http://www.typemock.com/TypemockIsolatorExamples

To give my personal background, I came to the US in 2004 on H1B visa through Infosys.

Working in NY/NJ area, I have seen it first hand how H1B can indeed lower wages. Here's how. The H1B visa belongs to an Employer and not the Employee. This means that losing a job on H1B could have dire consequences if you can't line up a job right away. This leads to a situation where a person on H1B visa avoids jobs where there is a risk of getting laid off. This leads to tons of 'body shops' setup by Indian/Asian folks who will sponsor your visa and then you go do 'hourly consulting' for a multinational firm. (See this page: http://techjobs.sulekha.com/h1b-jobs-usa) The body shops will charge at least 20% for this benefit, 30% in average case and even 50% if the employee is not smart enough. The goal of these body shops is to bring in more folks from India where someone will happily take up job for 60k to come and work in NY/NJ. The guy in India is thinking: 60k USD = ~3,785,000 INR. This is a huge amount which they will not be able to get in India. (In Bangalore, you can expect to get paid around 700,000 on average). However, most of the time, they don't factor in the cost of living and it means that their actual savings are much closer to what they make it in India. By the time they figure all this out and want to make a move, they understand the visa restrictions and realize that they are stuck till they get green card.

To share my personal story, when I first came in 2004, I was making 60k in NJ. Kept making around the same amount for the next 3 years. Then I became friends with a person who worked as recruiter for COMSYS (now acquired by ManpowerGroup) (For those who don't know, it's one of the bigger staffing firms in NY). She gave me the inside detail on how much companies are paying, how much these staffing companies are keeping and how to keep more share of the money. She also told me that if I want to make real money, I should consult for Investment banks. Based on this, I started improving my technical knowledge, finance knowledge and interviewing skills. I started making more and more money. I got green card last year and I am now making over 200k. I have used this knowledge to help my friends but I have seen it first hand how folks are not able to get a better paying full time job due to visa restrictions. This ultimately leads to wage suppression.

Summary: If you think that H1B abuse is not rampant, you are living under the rock.

So, on one hand, I want H1B visa program so that folks like me can come to this great country and make good money. On the other hand, I am fully aware that businesses are strictly using as a way to lower wages. There are very few H1B jobs where the worker is doing a 'highly specialized job' that a local American can not do.

I really don't know what the answer is. One idea I do like is to do the auction of the H1B visas. That way employer who have the money and who really need highly specialized work done can hire the person from any part of the world. I think it's fair that in a capitalistic system, you let the money decide who should get the opportunity to immigrate. (The current lottery system means that a company may not be able to hire a candidate if they get unlucky.) The only dilemma is that if it worked this way from beginning, I would have never made it to the US.

I went to the website and didn't see anything special. It was not until that I watched the video, the idea clicked for me and I am able to see the value of this app. I immediately wished that it was available on Windows.

I would suggest creating a GIF demo for the website. Something similar to how Shortcat App does. https://shortcatapp.com/

And yes, you should increase the price. 9.99$ should be the minimum for the tool considering the value it provides.

If they are over budget by half a billion, what was the original budget number?

I completely understand that building such system is complicated, not just in terms of technology but in mainly in terms of coordinating all the moving pieces involved. But at no point, I can fathom how you need to spend close to a billion dollars to implement it. As Milton Friedman famously said, you are least careful when you are spending other's money. (i.e. Government spending taxpayer's money)

It's only applicable to those folks who have been on H1B over 6 years OR have an approved I-140.

For those who don't know, employment based green card has three stages

1. Labor Certification (PERM)

2. Immigrant Petition for Alien Worker - I-140 - This stage checks whether the company filing your petition is legitimate and there is no fraud.

3. Application to register permanent residence - I-485. This stage checks whether the person applying has a good character, is not criminal etc. etc.

Getting through 1st and 2nd stage takes 1 to 3 years. It's the 3rd stage which has a long wait, mainly for people from India or China.

See: http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy...

As per that link, USCIS is processing cases of folks who applied in 2007 (for EB2) and 2004 (for EB3).

This is definitely a huge relief for those folks who have decided to apply for permanent residency and have been stuck in stage 3 for many years.

P.S.: I know about this because I am from India and went through a grueling 10 year immigration process to get my green card.

My favorites:

Happily Never After Add JS file to the repo

Wrecking Ball Change more than 100 files in one commit

Never, Probably Use word “later” in a commit message

In Love with Work Commit on Feb 14

Write Once. Run. Anywhere Add Java file to the repo

For someone else, a gold plated watch designed by Apple is awesome. Everyone has their own taste.

We strive to win more of our members’ “moments of truth”.

Those decision points are, say, at 7:15 pm when a member wants to relax, enjoy a shared experience with friends and family, or is bored.

They could play a video game, surf the web, read a magazine, channel surf their MVPD/DVR system, buy a pay-per-view movie, put on a DVD, use a piracy service, turn on Hulu, or launch Netflix.

We want our members to choose Netflix in these moments of truth.

---------------------------------------------------

This nails it. When I get home (especially if I had a long day at work), I first go to Netflix and see what's on my list. This is because Netflix app is beautiful, it always works and they have my list of things to watch. As someone who loves to watch documentaries, I am happy with the selection that Netflix offers.

If I don't like anything on the list, I just watch an old Friends or Breaking Bad episode.

I think Netflix has absolutely nailed the user experience and depending on your taste/location, their selection is great as well.

I don't know how that makes sense. I would never pay 5k for a watch but I do wear shoes which costs 1300$. That doesn't make me a bad person, just that I like to spend money on shoes. I can completely understand that someone may want to spend 5k on Apple Watch.

Two questions:

1. Why is it an App and not a website? 2. As you noted in your other comment, it would be best if you can have my credit card on file and buy tickets on my behalf automatically.

I have done a fair amount of performance optimization work in .NET/C#, so I was curious as to what kind of optimizations are involved in Ruby.

One of the optimization was this:

https://github.com/SamSaffron/rails/commit/9aa2b2d7bf52c0f39...

Three lessons:

1. Always use profiler to identify code bottlenecks. I don't think I would have ever guessed that the string literal is costing memory allocations causing performance issues.

2. I find it sad that this kind of optimization is required in 2015. In any statically typed language, this would be completely unnecessary.

3. Performance optimization makes code less readable. I think it would make sense to add comment explaining why constant ID was declared.

Here's another:

https://github.com/SamSaffron/rails/commit/a668b09ee387bf241...

Same story.

If you don't know the git data model (DAG) and learn it by using commands, you have to explicitly learn the 'advanced' stuff.

If you learn the git data model and fully understand how everything is simply a DAG, there is nothing advanced about it. However, grokking the git data model may take sometime.

http://i.imgur.com/byfmzAJ.png

How did he make it work? I didn't think this would be possible.

Yes, extremely impressed with the tool.

EDIT: Looked at the code. He takes screenshot of the active tab when extension is clicked. And then parses the PNG in measureDistances function when mouse moves.

https://github.com/mrflix/dimensions/blob/master/extension/d...

For a mouse at position X, Y, it tries to find the farthest Top, Bottom, Right, Left points with same color/threshold. This is why it is able to see through 'transparent' Google logo.

https://github.com/mrflix/dimensions/blob/master/js/worker.j...

Great work.

1. Get me Home/Get Me To Work quick links. It takes your current location as starting point and tells you your options for going home/work.

2. You can configure it to monitor your subway line during commute time (7AM to 10AM and 4pm to 6pm) and it will notify you if the subway is delayed for any reason. I use line 6 which breaks down more often than I want and thanks to the App, I can take N/Q/R if Line 6 is down.

3. The way 'Get Me Somewhere' works. In addition to being able to type an address, you can move the map around to point the destination pin to a particular point in map. It's hard for me to explain but it works amazingly well especially in NYC where people often go by cross streets and don't have the actual street address.

I completely agree with author that Citiymapper has an exceptional UI/UX.