Icons (including free for commercial use) - <AUTHOR> http://www.iconfinder.com/browse

<comment><USER2> Be careful: some icons that have free licenses actually use elements of images that are not under those licenses.

Examples:

[http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7395/128/finder_mac_wi...](http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7395/128/finder_mac_windows_wine_icon) (XP wallpaper, listed under GPL license)

[http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7512/128/application_a...](http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7512/128/application_art_brush_file_pencil_ruler_icon) \- Apple's icon

<comment><USER3> Most of the icons in the "Futurosoft" set you've linked look like they were ripped from various sources (mostly from Windows 7, with a few from OS X). It looks like the set was syndicated from kde-look.org, and I've shot them a message about the situation.

<comment><USER4> They were syndicated from Futuresoft - I will look them through and remove those from OS X and Windows. None of the icons were specifically from Win 7 since Futuresoft was released many years ago.

<comment><USER3> Strange - looking at a lot of the icons, like the ones following, they certainly must have been designed to _resemble_ Windows icons, but I can't find the exact icons they're modeled after. I'm really not sure where these would stand, as far as copyright goes - a number of them have enough resemblance to real Windows icons (or other trademarks) that you'd probably get legal grief for trying to use them in your own product, for instance.

<http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7043/128/aim_icon>

<http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7121/128/sonic_icon>

[http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7175/128/folder_window...](http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7175/128/folder_windows_icon)

[http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7365/128/staroffice_ic...](http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7365/128/staroffice_icon)

[http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7394/128/users_windows...](http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7394/128/users_windows_icon)

<http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7563/128/lib_wine_icon>

[http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7609/128/mp3_sound_ico...](http://www.iconfinder.com/icondetails/7609/128/mp3_sound_icon)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've used icon finder hundreds of times. It's great.

I am also a fan of the Fugue icon set (<http://p.yusukekamiyamane.com/>) with over 3000 (!) super high quality icons. There is a licensing fee if you don't want to attribute but it is pretty affordable ($60).

<comment><USER6> The fugue set is great. I paid not so I didn't have to attribute but because the creator so clearly deserves it.

<comment><USER7> Weird, it looks very much like a remake of Famfamfam's silk icon set. Compare: [http://fugue-icons-src.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/all- preview....](http://fugue-icons-src.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/all-preview.png) to: [http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/previews/index_abc.p...](http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/previews/index_abc.png)

There are a lot of differences but there are also a lot of similarities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Posted by the founder a few months ago along with some Q&A:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1829255>

</comment><comment><USER9> Awesome collection.

I've used the IconSweet2 set for various custom UITabBarItem icons in iOS applications. They fit amazingly well with the System Icons.

<http://www.iconfinder.com/browse/iconset/iconsweets2/>

</comment><comment><USER10> There are some pretty nice icons there. My favorite are the credit card ones: [http://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=iconset%3AThemeShock- cre...](http://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=iconset%3AThemeShock-credit-cards- icons)

</comment><comment><USER11> Are the icons in this set actually usable? <http://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=iconset:social>

What are the legal issues there?

<comment><USER12> It says at the top: _License: Free for commercial use_ , but I also recommend going through the Readme to make absolutely sure.

<comment><USER11> I mean in regards to them being mostly trademarks of other companies.

<comment><USER13> You can use them for whatever you want. If you run into any legal trouble, just tell 'em shasta from the internet said you could use them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Iconfinder is great, yes. I also like Picons - royalty-free vector icons. Great for commercial projects. Cheap and good looking, check it out: <http://picons.me>

<comment><USER4> Thanks!

Agreed, Picons are great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> All you need for game design: <http://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=iconset:containers>

<comment><USER16> 3d Sokoban?

<comment><USER15> <http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Its also a great source for finding design metaphors, icon patterns etc.

<comment><USER4> Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was going to say: since when does stuff like this get on HN, but it's actually a pretty awesome site.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it's not the usual stuff for HN.

Thanks anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love The Noun Project. They have the simplest, most easily recognizable set. Just wish they had all the social media ones as well: <http://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=iconset:nounproject>

<comment><USER20> I'm in love with these icons... just simple and amazing. Will be using them in one of my projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> And still, I can't find an icon for macvim that's not horrible.</comment>


Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines - <AUTHOR> https://www.troyhunt.com/offshoring-roulette-lessons-from-outsourcing-to-india-china-and-the-philippines/ <comment><USER6> Nice article and on the spot.

There is a difference between offshoring and cheap-shoring (i.e what I call offshoring at very low costs). Most of the bad experiences you get from India are a result of cheap-shoring. You get what you pay for. Cheapshoring undervalues good engineers and overvalues a lot of bad engineers.

I have seen this for almost 15 years (from the Indian side), and I don't like it. While some people see Indian IT as growing with the likes of Infosys, TCS, Wipro, etc - I personally saw that as crippling good CS talent in India. However, all that is coming to an end - probably sooner than later. These biggies will either have to trim down significantly or collapse under their own weight

If you want equivalently good engineers from India (as of now), be ready to pay half(45-50%) of the pay in US. So if you are paying 120K in the US, the same should cost you 54-60K USD when the engineer is in India. This will also reduce friction. One may get lucky in the early days hiring at cheaper costs, but sooner or later the good engineers will see their worth and will most likely leave instead of asking for a raise. You have to do your due-diligence selecting a worthy engineer - that is like finding a needle in a haystack.

If somebody chooses cheapshoring, they are planning for a higher cost that is at least more than the 50% mark mentioned and in most cases if you analyze retrospectively - it would have cost lower if you did not cheap-offshore in the first place. The release may seem less costly, but the maintenance and operating costs will ultimately outgrow.

<comment><USER7> $60k puts you in the same order of magnitude as other western countries:

E.g. ~$65k gets you a senior developer in Berlin (=€60k) and similarly in Canada (=90k CAD), so a lot more competition in that bracket.

<comment><USER8> I'd say good programmers are relatively underpaid in Western Europe compared to the rest of the globe.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely - if they work as regular employees. In Munich a senior dev can be offered around 100k. If he's single and without kids, the government will immediately take more than half of that. Then the apartment will set him back around 1000 euro a month. This leaves him with around 3000€/month.

I can make that in less than a week as a contractor doing the same thing in literally the same place.

<comment><USER10> We don't even pay nearly that much on our total income here in Denmark - <USER2> chart says Germans don't either [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Income_T...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Income_Tax_Germany_2010.png)

<comment><USER9> Google "brutto netto rechner" and calculate yourself. If you're single and childless half your money goes to tax and social stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the things you might want to remember when outsourcing to India: most of the best developers tend to jump to product companies sooner or later. The best Indian offshoring companies tend to charge around USD 50 / hour, out of which the developers see about $3 (college grads) to $20 (10+ years) per hour. The rest of it goes to managers and overheads. And this is the best companies. The more mass market ones charge $20 to $30 an hour.

The better devs know that their possible value to the company is always capped, and because the country has a huge number of engineering graduates rubber stamped by a network of substandard universities and colleges, developers are usually very easily replaceable cogs.

So Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Flipkart, Freshdesk, Hike, and a lot of smaller not known Indian companies that develop specialized tech is where folks tend to go.

<comment><USER12> In my previous company (a very big, reputable US Consulting company), I was charged at 40$ an hour to my clients in the US, but I got only 2-4$ an hour out of it. My monthly pay was fixed at around 550$, and I would have to work 8-12 hours everyday. This is a typical salary for a college graduate from a fairly good (in the top 15) engineering college in India.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing that jumped out to me reading the article was the author's (or the organization's) aversion to writing requirement spec ("detailed documentation").

That sounded very worrisome particularly considering the fact that the development was for a domain like that of Pharma, where rules & regulations shadows heavily on what and how things are done.

I have some experience in developing software products for Pharma industry and it was quite an effort in keeping track of FDA updates which would impact the features that were under development or were planned for. Examples, basic and mandatory feature sets like Audits, Logging, Security, Access management, Reports etc. are heavily influenced by compliance regulations of FDA and equivalent bodies of Europe, Canada etc. And added layer of complexity is each regulatory bodies have different approach to regulation and compliance.

Considering the fact that Pfizer were outsourcing to 'code shops' who would never ever get into that complexity; well thought out requirement documentation which has taken into consideration current and future landscape should have been number one priority. I would have sleepless nights if I was coordinating a project where 'can do' developers start working from a basic one-pager from 'business people'.

I guess it was perhaps because the author was the go between the domain experts (he mentions them as 'business people') and the developers.

It would have been great if the author would have shed some light on what could client do from their end in terms of reducing ambiguity while working with teams where communication and loss in translation is one of the biggest risk.

I suspect that there is a whole missing dimension in this story.

<comment><USER14> The process of writing software involves some interpretation and making good small-scale design decisions. Think of things like checking for buffer overflows and error handling. If you completely specify how this is handled everywhere you've practically written the software already.

One trivial and silly real-world example: I'm currently working on a C codebase with a few developers in India. Sometime before I started the project, the American company I now work for contracted out a security audit of the code, and one of the obvious conclusions was that "safe string functions should be used" \- strcpy() had been used to copy user input to statically sized buffers such that it was vulnerable to classic buffer overflows, all over the place. Requirement set, requirement followed - <USER3> strncpy() and strncmp() etc were used _everywhere_ , but always either _uselessly_ (25% of the time) or _wrong_ and unsafe (75%). Most typical was to use the length of the source, calculated with strlen(). Now, I guess it was not specified "use strncpy() _correctly_ , with the size of the _destination_ ". Failure of specification, right?

For what it's worth, the root of the problems on this particular project are that the original American lead dev was not that great and set some bad examples, which the outsourced devs copy diligently and industriously.

(But then again, it's not enough to say "this is clearly wrong, it will overflow if (expr)" \- they tend to need explicit examples to copy. Sometimes they impress me by figuring the cause of a tricky bug. Sometimes they write smart but actually useless code, like using floats and log() to figure out how big a buffer is needed to print a uint16_t in decimal - 5 bytes will suffice, no float math needed. Sometimes they write 20 lines of code to calculate how long the string result of snprintf() will be, instead of using the size of the destination, right after I've lectured on what strncpy() is for. They often seem less thoughtful than a neural net. I've even seen "buf[strlen(buf)] = '\0'" \- I just have no words sometimes.)

<comment><USER12> Some of these examples made me smile. But this cannot be taken as a representative of all developers in India. I am an Indian developer, and have met several very smart people. Most of them are presently working for big US companies like Google or Adobe.

Often when I meet a programmer, I can tell if they are genuinely interested in programming, or just happen to be a programmer because of circumstances or because it's what they decided to do to make money. The latter when writing code for you would just want to somehow meet the specifications and head off for the next lunch. They would be the first ones to complain about their job on social networks. As sad as it is for them, you really don't want to hire them if your aim is to build high quality products.

There are still a lot of good, capable developers in India, available for hire and at affordable rates. You just need a good process to find them and filter out those without a genuine passion for writing code or for building products. Hiring random people without a thorough selection process is always a bad idea, no matter which country you hire from.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. It's not about India, it's about outsourcing. Good developers get better jobs where they are not a fungible resource. (And sometimes they move to the US or the UK.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> THIS! This is exactly what I hate about being an "Indian" developer living in Bangalore.

It really hurts me that when someone is working with an offshore team they are looking at me as a "cheap resource".

I don't expect the valley crowd to understand this, so let me suggest an experiment. Go to your best developer, and tell her that you are there in the company cause she is "cheap labour", and if it was possible in a fraction of second you would get an engineer from Google and would hire him to do your job! Repeat this constantly for 3 weeks and see if her productivity drops or if she is still around! Its really painful to spend so much time, understand your own workflow and identify shortcomings, being self critical, overcome shortcoming with tips from HN / Stackoverflow, to concentrate on the problem at hand and implement a feature and then have someone come in and call it cheap labor. Previously I was working with a team in US and was reporting to an American. I know he was happy with my performance compared with the rest of my team members in the Valley as a lot of R&D work would be assigned to me. I have worked with angualr, react, rails, java, chrome extensions, ios, android apps. I am definetly not the best in any of this. But based on my previous work I think I am fairly competent.

In enginerring its a huge challenge to bring down cost. SpaceX is celebrated cause they have brought down the cost of launching satellites, when ISRO does it, it hursts me to see the first person who says that they were able to do it cheaper cause of the labor cost in India. I respect my work, and take pride in having built it.

If you want to offshore work don't make them feel like that the only reason you are giving them the work is because they are "cheap".

I know this is not what the article says but I wanted to share this even though this is off topic.

<comment><USER16> I feel what you are saying but... that _IS_ the reason people offshore. Why else would they ship jobs out of the US, deal with funky hours, bad phone connections, and often times very thick accents (which when combined with bad phone connections often render conversations 80% understandable at best) if not to save money? I would feel like crap if I was in that position too but I don't know how you go about solving it and still have a valid justification for offshoring that outweighs the negatives.

<comment><USER17> Shortage of local talent might be another possibility.

On my team, about half the people are not local--I'm a remotee working from a different country, and a bunch of other folks are outsourced from India and Ukraine. I don't have insight into how much the outsourcing costs, but a figure of $50 per hour has been floated in this discussion. At that point you are pretty much back to local wages, so my guess is it's not the money.

This may not be your typical outsourcing story though. Individual people are actually hired like you would hire anyone local, with interviews and all, except it's a manager traveling there to do a series of interviews and not vice versa. The team is quite stable, the churn reported in the article doesn't seem to be a problem.

<comment><USER18> > Shortage of local talent might be another possibility.

Only shortage is, is a person at the price that they want to pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you are offshoring a project because you can't afford local prices then the project may not be feasible at all within your limited budget, even at outsourcing rates.

If you have a limited budget, realize that means your requirements will be limited. Never select the vendor with the lowest rates. Always evaluate the actual people on the team.

The idea of line items for features is unrealistic for software development. It's X hours, days or weeks for each person, which needs to be re-evaluated every week or two.

If you don't have a good developer you trust before aside from the outsource team to look at the code on a routine basis then don't bother making the software at all. If you don't have a budget that allows for automated tests to be developed (20 percent of devs will do this automatically anyway) then cancel the project. If there is no budget for refactoring then please cancel the project.

If you plan on using thinly veiled racism to blame foreign developers for your inability to specify coherent requirements or comprehend the complexity of software development, then please cancel your outsourcing project.

If you follow this advice, 8/10 outsourcing projects would never start and everyone could spend their time on better things.

<comment><USER20> 8/10 of all software projects should never start. It's not just about the outsourced ones ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> My experience (I managed a team of Chinese based devs for about a year) was that:

a) people are indeed leaving. thats cause the main selling point (at least at that consulting company was indeed price), so there was 0 commitment to employees from the employers side, so it's normal that the employees have the same and leave immediately when they get something they consider just slightly better offer.

b) trying to "adjust" the agreemtents to their benefit. A use case example is that the chinese org puts their better candidates as named engineers on their offer. Once the project is signed they start to swap them out under whatever bullshit. (Oh, we're very sorry, we have to swap John Holmes for Ron Jemery, etc.) On that point I woudln't be surprised if some of these people only existed on CVs and were totally fabricated resources simply used to try to win projects.

c) the need for constant supervision and very precise instrumentation. If you gave these chinese engineers a brick and said "see this brick here. it's nice, but I'd like you find out how to improve it somehow. Maybe make it more durable, cheaper to manufacture etc." Two weeks later the chinese engs will get back to you and ask, "what do we need to do?" However if you give them the blueprints for a brick factory and tell them to build you the factory and 1 million such bricks, that's a task they can do.

<comment><USER22> I'm curious. Have you tried asking a US engineer to improve the brick? I've had that experience, and the engg. team came back to me and asked me to improve the spec. I was an Indian product manager using engineers in the US (for a very very very large US software company) I had to specify the exact length of a text input field for a search box, because the team couldn't figure it out for themselves! Idiots exists everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Really interesting and well written article. I don't think China will be an outsourcing destination for long.

In India your slowly starting to see agencies that aren't merely code factories but places where you can do actual product development. Its early days though.

<comment><USER24> This is kind of frightening, our wages won't survive a world in which where there's a surplus of talent coming from developing countries.

<comment><USER25> I have seem _some_ talent, at various levels, some of which is even quite good. But I surely would NOT call it a "surplus" :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nothing was said about the security implications of outsourcing to people who are required to obey a different government. Are you going to open up your network to them? Are you going to expose your trade secrets to them?

When you find a strangely perfect clone of your product on the market, do not be surprised.

</comment><comment><USER27> > What I'd typically find is people would specialise in one discrete part of a > software component and that's all they'd do.

I work in pharma advertising as a dev but sometimes our client has their own offshore dev team. I've dealt with Wipro many times. This right here has been a common issue with them. Our account team will ask me if something is doable and I'd say yes but Wipro would push back saying they can't. And our sites fall into that brochureware category so these were mostly front-end trendy things using history push-state or what not. We usually found that they had a very limited scope and would not venture outside of it. I guess that's the difference, you get what you pay for. Usually if something is handed to me that I've never done before I do some research first and 90% of the time I figure it out. We've had better luck with eastern European offshore team in this regard. If I were looking for offshore teams I'd suggest there or South America first

</comment><comment><USER28> The article does generally reflect what I've seen - not only with outsourcing, but also reflects the general cultural predisposition of people that I've worked with, in the US, from those places.

A bit on India with the churn that was mentioned I've seen explained as that it is difficult to get a promotion within the company - you need to get hired by another company to move up. With one contract shop that I've worked with, over the course of 18 months (we worked with them for three years) every developer position was replaced with a new person (so twice across those three years). This resulted in a lot of loss of institutional knowledge of the product. You'd train up a person, they'ed work on it for awhile, and then move on to another company and train their replacement. That training process was always lossy.

The goal for a ((stereo)typical) Indian developer is to be where the pay is best. The way that the companies are structured (and note other comments to the effect of the pay scales) is that this is in management. One gets to that by demonstrating management potential rather than technical skill. The highly paid sr. developer path isn't as viable as the (comparably) highly paid jr. management.

Another major point that didn't appear to be touched on in the article is the intellectual property leakage and protection. Many managers here are afraid of that (rightly?) and take significant effort to make sure that overseas developers are strictly limited to what they are working on. Sometimes that goes as far as "you have access to _this library_ - not the entire application that it is part of" (or for that matter, even the integration test suite - <USER4> build breaks because of a library change... and you can't provide the full test to show how it broke) leaving the integration to the in house team. That can cause some friction in the development process that is often unaccounted for at the start of the project.

<comment><USER29> About churn, promotions are one of the issues, and the other is a good salary. Many companies are quite exploitative (that's one way of looking at it). If you can't play hardball with your HR, your freshly hired subordinate's salary might end up being much higher than yours. One way that HR can operate is to reward talent and productivity. The other way is to reward negotiation skills.

I can't empathize with the other points that the author made about India -- because I've never worked on an outsourcing job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > "In the markets I'm discussing here, they almost exclusively want to move to > a position where they're instructing others. There just seems to be less > interest - less passion - in code and inevitably that's going to impact > quality."

I think this statement misses the point completely, the difference isn't the passion about coding, it's obviously the salary!

If you are one of the juniors toiling away in the front-lines, your pay is still going to be really low. A programming role only allows to get your foot through the door, if you are to make a decent living the only way is to shoot for a promotion into management.

As opposed to "the West" where you can actually pursue a technical role throughout your career because the pay is higher and there are many more different types of roles you could be doing.

<comment><USER31> In my experience, also in "the West" managerial positions are, on average, better paid. Not that you don't make money on a tech role, but management will still do better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Loved the Indian head shake video! Watch it if you can.

<comment><USER33> I was _very_ fortunate to have a colleague familiar with this behavioral idiom in a developer training I was giving to a team from Hyderabad. He kindly interrupted me after I kept trying to explain a concept which it seemed to me they didn't understand!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I really wish there was a neutral unit of account one could use for comparing costs etc.

<comment><USER35> I like this idea. What do you have in mind?

<comment><USER34> Not quite sure. Something akin to the Bancor that Keynes suggested back in the day perhaps.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> 2001 I worked half a year in Pune, Maharashtra with Indian developers. In my personal experience Indians are hard thinkers but undisciplined and chaotic coders. This means they managed the mess they made rather well just because they still understand what they did. Perhaps it was the CEO who just let them do what they want provided it works after all.

The salary was one thirteenth of what I would get in Switzerland. The efficiency was about one half, but only because the Swiss CEO himself lived in Pune and later married an Indian woman. If he stayed in Switzerland efficiency would have crashed badly. In any case, don't talk about the code quality.

I also noticed the extreme churn the article mentioned. In my half a year about 5 to 10 percent of the people left and new people started.

</comment><comment><USER37> That was a great outsourcing article, except showing one picture of Manila slums and calling the country poor.

Here is my suggestion -- don't use outsourcing agencies (acknowledging, easier said than done.) With an agency you end up with invisible HR problems. When something weird is going on at the office, you won't know about it. If senior developers are slacking off and giving junior devs all the work, you will not know. Hire the developers directly, give them the full salary, listen when they ask for something, give them flexible time off.

If what they are working on is really important, take the time to fly and go meet them in person, or if you have a team fly everyone to the same spot.

</comment><comment><USER38> "But conversely, the Microsoft stack that I worked in and we were increasingly unifying around in Pfizer was simply much harder to find competence in"

That's probably because the developers that are strong in Microsoft stack were already out of the country most likely pirated by companies in Singapore or in other parts of the world. Majors banks in Singapore had been pirating IT people in Philippines from QA to Project Managers for years.

<comment><USER39> Did you mean "poached"? You can't pirate people...

<comment><USER40> Let's not tolerate the use of "poached" either; it implies (in a "ha ha, only serious") way that people are property, and it's been a long time since there was any excuse for tolerating that idea. The proper words are "hired" or "recruited".

<comment><USER41> It also implies it's somehow _wrong_ to offer an employee of another firm a better deal than they're currently getting.

Well-mannered firms don't do that sort of thing, you see. It drives the wages up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> the Philippines:

"one of the starkest patterns I saw outsourcing there was their strong affinity to PHP. This isn't intended to be a derogatory... the LAMP stack is really appealing to folks who don't have much cash... the Microsoft stack... was simply much harder to find competence in. You'd go to a vendor and their default position was 'Yeah, we can do that in PHP and MySQL'"

<comment><USER43> Java and PHP are traditionally the most popular introductory languages being taught in CS courses (CE students are usually taught C).

I see some schools switching to Python as an introduction course. But generally, the pace at which the educational system move to update their curriculum is glacial. Heck, I even see some schools still teaching VB6!

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> "Vendors don't build software, people build software"

Working with vendors is logical for big projects but an obstruction for small projects. If we eliminate the middleman, outsourcers would pay less and developers would be paid more. There'd be less bureaucracy. There'd be greater loyalty.

I hope there was an easier way for outsourcers and developers to find each other.

<comment><USER45> It's called «freelancing». It's way cheaper and worse than outsourcing.

<comment><USER46> Any reason why you consider freelancing worse than outsourcing? I think if you can build a good team of freelancers, you basically save yourself from a lot of the issues this article mentions.

<comment><USER45> If you CAN build good team of freelancers, you can start your own outsource firm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Interesting article. Is the code written in China considered open source for all practical purposes?

<comment><USER25> Yes, but it's a very specific "All your databases are belong to us" license :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> As I was reading this article and watching the head shake video, I clicked on this other video which I thought was hilarious: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k2W8aGgmn1A](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k2W8aGgmn1A)

</comment><comment><USER48> Well written and balanced. Clearly steered away from conflicting topics.

</comment><comment><USER49> The flow of capital tends toward a low hydrolic potential from a high end. When the potential is lost, things turn to medicore, people just look around for an exit.

</comment><comment><USER50> Very nice article n much on the mark!

</comment><comment><USER51> I can't believe he skipped over the real elephant in the offshoring room - <USER5> time difference. All of those countries have almost no overlap with any part of the United States. If we schedule an 8 AM CST meeting with India (which is super early for some of the people here), it's already 7 PM at night there, and they're completely exhausted and ready to go home. And that's _if_ you can schedule a meeting far enough in advance that somebody else hasn't already taken up that precious 8 AM spot... usually you'll have to go out later in their day, sometimes as late as 10 PM there. Which really hurts when you consider how many of them rely on public transportation... which stops running before 10 PM. I've been told that some people have ended up sleeping in the office rather than push back on a very late meeting request.

<comment><USER52> Here's a question. You're in the US and your employer has decided to out source some work.

Why are _you_ , the American worker, tolerating your employer's request to stay late to talk to their outsourced lackeys? Whenever I've been asked to stay late for a time zone crossing meeting with outsourced employees, I've refused. _WE_ are _THEIR_ customers, not the other way around. They can damn well get up at 3am and WebEx-in if we're going to have a meeting. No way am I going to stay late in the evening and miss my family so I can chat with our offshore labour.

<comment><USER53> Well, in some cases people will do it because otherwise their employer may fire them. Living in the US most of us are at will, and don't have that much luxury to give employers the finger.

<comment><USER52> What's your value to your employer?

If you're not willing to stay late to do a cross time zone meeting then I agree that you're worth a bit less to your boss than you otherwise would be.

Personally I would rather accept a bit less pay to be rid of a nuisance like a boss who thinks I'll inconvenience myself and my family for stupid shit like adjusting myself to his outsourced labour's schedule. I _do_ stay late when shipping a release or working on an urgent bug. But stay late so some delicate flower off in India can work 9-5? Fuck that.

<comment><USER54> So you Americans now are embracing being full-time assholes after electing trump.

<comment><USER55> You seem to be asking if we're joining you?

The USA is a country of some 300 million people, and if you think the 20% of the country's population that voted for him somehow represents everyone here you're completely wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> His writing is God awful and a huge bore. I'm interested in the topic but loathe his writing.

</comment><comment><USER57> What is he talking about? Indian with good english skills?? What? Good with computers?? When people will end all those prejudices ???</comment>


Ask HN: volunteering/giving back? - <AUTHOR>

I'm wondering what other HN folks are doing in terms of volunteering and giving back to the community at large, and how technology is affecting your choices? Generally, how do you approach the issue of helping the less fortunate?<p>Myself, for example:<p>* Made some microloans through kiva.org<p>* Looking into volunteering as a math tutor, found through volunteer-match.org<p>* Joined a "random acts of kindness" Meetup group <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=190467>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=57298>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Assume six months is a reasonable amount of time to have passed for me to dupe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm a second year student and all my programming experience has basically been volunteer work either for my LUG, or more recently as part of the <http://fedoraproject.org> The latter has been especially rewarding both in terms of knowledge acquired and the fun involved in participating in a FOSS project.</comment>


Capitalizing on Capitol Hill: Informed Trading by Hedge Fund Managers - <AUTHOR> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1707181 <comment><USER2> All I can think is "insider trading", you know, the crime that if we plebians were caught doing we'd be in jail, but Congresscritters and those in their ecosystem can do with impunity. Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER3> My favorite part about this is the now widespread Hill euphemism "political intelligence". It has ecome de rigeuer that this is simply a "thing that is done". I know a few people who do it as a living.

</comment><comment><USER4> Crickets.

<comment><USER5> No kidding. Pretty weird to see a post on the front page with non-zero upvotes and no comments.</comment></comment>


Trump Administration Is Rolling Back Rules Requiring More Energy-Efficient Bulbs - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/climate/trump-light-bulb-rollback.html <comment><USER2> Last night I stayed at a hotel with horrible blue lights. The hallways were too bright and too blue. The parking lot was lit up with "daylight" blue-white LEDs. It looked like someone decided the lot wasn't bright enough, and they added supplemental LED floodlights (not even compliant with state law, let alone city code) to the poles to fill the lots with extra light.

The free standing lights in the room had proper shades and pleasant 2700K "warm" CFL bulbs. The ceiling light at the door was blue, the bar light above the bathroom mirror was blue, and the light over the toilet was blue.

The hanging lights in the lobby were fine, but the spotlights in the ceiling were obnoxious.

I wonder if the hotel got ripped off by a fly-by-night energy efficient retrofitter.

Science has determined precisely how blue lights hurt people. It's too bad the country replaced safe light bulbs with fundamentally defective bulbs prematurely.

I'd like the legislatures to protect the public from blue-white LEDs.

<comment><USER3> This is a good point. While there's no real logical reason to buy non-LED bulbs anymore (thankfully we have mostly transitioned so this silly change by the Trump administration won't gave any effect), the fact that LED bulbs came in so many temperatures has resulted in a proliferation of blue light everywhere.

Hopefully as the effects of it in our sleep patterns etc become more apparent, more people will buy lights with 2700k or lower.

<comment><USER4> Here is a logical reason to buy a non-LED bulb: you prefer black-body light to narrow-band light. Even if the LED is rated at 2700-3000K, it has spectral peaks. Even the "high CRI" bulbs-- CRI only tests eight spectra!

At night, our home is lit with tungsten halogen when entertaining, and red LEDs when it's just us. I would like to reduce my carbon footprint, but I refuse to do so at the expense of my sleep and health.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a theory that at this point there exists a subset of decision makers who _want_ massive climate change to happen and are actively pushing for it. I assume they want to be ready to take advantage of the new world we'll all be living in. To be king of the ashes, as it were.

<comment><USER6> Sell me on this. How do you see this shaking out?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Incandescents should never have been banned. Electricity is already a commodity with a price tag. Halogens get labeled as energy efficient even though they use a lot of lower and produce a lot of heat. LEDs are great, but the light isn't the same. Phillips unsurprisingly lobbied to get bulbs banned. Making certain light bulbs illegal solves nothing. People can make their own decisions.</comment>


Engigogo Digest – A weekly newsletter of links and product suggestions - <AUTHOR> http://digest.engigogo.com/issues/1 <comment><USER2> > Engigogo Digest is a weekly newsletter full of interesting, relevant links, > product suggestions, curated in spare time by @kantbtrue & @savydv.

Who are these people and why should I care about what they find interesting? What makes them stand out as a currators of interesting topics and articles that I would give you my email address and have you email me a newsletter ?

(Reading that back I don't intend it to be offensive or insulting, I just don't know how to express it better...) You want to collect peoples email addresses but I see nothing on that site that explains why I would find your newsletter interesting. OK, you have a section for developers and I'm a developer, so why should I subscribe?

Who are you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Your questions are not offensive, in fact, I find it essential to add this to the faq on our site. Maybe it is right time to share who I am and why I have started it.

I (Saurabh) and my brother (Shashikant) are full stack developers. We had started our carrier as the freelance front-end developer and website troubleshooter. We had worked for 3 years before starting a small web studio (1.5 years back). Throughout these years we have maintained a spreadsheet of interesting and essential resources and tools. We have also frequently used start up stash and similar sites to find what is best. But we have faced a number of problems during this period like to find which tools are better, what are the latest tools and which are the tools that others are using. And also the problems regarding frequently updating the spreadsheet.

So simply we thought it is a great idea to make a community-curated resource and tools directory where users can suggest latest tools, share their views/discuss and upvote the tools that they have used and satisfied with. That's why we have started Engigogo.com as a small side-project. Engigogo is at its initial stage and only a few weeks old.

From the day we have started working on Engigogo, we have encountered with a number of interesting resources, tools, and links that are awesome but unfortunately don't directly fall into any of the Engigogo's library. We thought it could be better if we share these links and tools with other similar thinkers. That's why we have started Engigogo Digest.

As you can see on Engigogo Digest's website, it is a publication type site where everyone can read the newsletter and don't even need to subscribe the newsletter. We have made it that way because our purpose is NOT to grab your email id, instead, we just want to share what we have found interesting.

If you find it interesting then you can visit the site every week and you don't need to subscribe it. The subscription part is just to make it easy to have the latest issues in the inbox instead of visiting the site every week.

I hope I've answered all your questions. And thank you for asking and giving us the opportunity to introduce our self and motto.

<comment><USER2> hi, good reply. I geninuely did not mean offense with my post but my writing is poor and I sometimes don't recognise that I'm being insulting and I might come across a bit dickish sometimes when I didn't mean to (people tell me this). I'm working on it though!

I think having a bit of a background on who you are is a good idea. So, right now it's just you and your brother but you plan on having other contributers submit potentially interesting posts?

Do you feel you are competing with blog sites like Medium.com (which I find really hit or miss or when it comes to quality).

I probably won't give you my email address (I'm fussy that way), but I'll bookmark your site and check in every now and again and see if there is anything that interests me.

Anyway, good luck! I probably should have said that in my original reply and sorry again if it came across badly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The problem with these things is often they end up becoming irrelevant product pitches by startups and as someone who has something to advertise I find neither the business nor the readers really benefit. How do you intend to make the content relevant and high quality? That is the key to success with something like this I think.

</comment><comment> yoz-y Kudos to also producing a functional RSS feed so one does not have to leak their e-mail address. I just wish that websites would advertise RSS more.

</comment><comment><USER4> If this newsletter interests you, you may also like [Changelog Weekly]([https://changelog.com/weekly](https://changelog.com/weekly)).

</comment><comment><USER5> How old is too old to be part of the new generation of developers and designers?

</comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly, email breaks this type of content for me.

Whenever I subscribe to any "digest" in email form it piles up and sits unread in my inbox (well, in a subfolder, but still clearly visible until I "mark as read" without reading it). Maybe sometimes it's because it's just too long and hardly anyone manages to post enough interesting links (for me, on a regular basis) that I find the time to click through them. I also don't really follow blogs that primarily post links anymore. TLDR: Complaining because I'm a weird person, I guess.

Quite the hypocrite, been doing this myself for years, with a readership that borders on a dozen :P ( [http://f5n.org/stack/](http://f5n.org/stack/) ) but I've never sent out emails and don't plan to.</comment>


Why is medical software so bad? - g-garron http://fletcherpenney.net/2012/12/why_is_medical_software_so_bad

<comment><AUTHOR> As someone in the industry, I can say that medical software is so bad because hospitals want lots of features and medical specialties are niche markets.

small market + high complexity = low quality

</comment><comment><USER2> > Your inspiration for interface design is MS-DOS rather than Apple, OS X, or > iOS.

You know, there _are_ other good sources of design inspiration besides Apple.</comment>


Introducing Docker Content Trust - <AUTHOR> https://blog.docker.com/2015/08/content-trust-docker-1-8/

<comment><USER2> I don't get the point of creating yet another signing framework. Integrating GnuPG would have saved them time and money. Also, it is used on virtually any linux distro package manager (which is about just a bit more critical than docker)...

Perhaps I missed something though? ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at72dhg- SZY&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at72dhg- SZY&feature=youtu.be&t=4873))

<comment><USER3> This integration is built on The Update Framework, which has some distinct advantages over GPG's model.

First, TUF allows you to have freshness guarantees over the content. In GPG's model a MITM or malicious mirror can serve you old, known vulnerable content that you'll accept as valid because the signatures verify. This is not possible with TUF as metadata is additionally signed with a timestamping key.

Second, TUF has a property called 'survivable key compromise' which basically means that there are a hierarchy of keys involved in the system, each with a different responsibility and security requirements. There's a root key that's kept offline, a target key responsible for signing actual content, a timestamping key for freshness, and a snapshot key to tie all the other keys together. GPG's model does allow for signing subkeys, but it is rather clunky to use and many of the Linux package managers don't support using signing subkeys, sadly.

Finally, GPG's usability leaves something to be desired. Docker makes pushing and pulling of images extremely easy, essentially making everyone a publisher of content. GPG works when publishing software is more rare and you can take the time to use a new utility in order to get security guarantees, but we wanted to make it extremely easy so that anyone can do it.

For more background, this paper does a good survey of existing package managers and where they fall short: [https://isis.poly.edu/~jcappos/papers/cappos_pmsec_tr08-02.p...](https://isis.poly.edu/~jcappos/papers/cappos_pmsec_tr08-02.pdf)

<comment><USER2> > Finally, GPG's usability leaves something to be desired. Docker makes > pushing and pulling of images extremely easy, essentially making everyone a > publisher of content. GPG works when publishing software is more rare and > you can take the time to use a new utility in order to get security > guarantees, but we wanted to make it extremely easy so that anyone can do > it.

A wrapper would have done an awesome job at that... I use GnuPG daily, enter a passphrase once and boom. Mails are signed, my password manager unlocked. Where is the "unusability" in this?

<comment><USER3> You're right, wrappers can abstract away complexity. That's effectively what TUF is: a wrapper framework around low level crypto primitives that achieves a secure content distribution system. GPG alone would not have given sufficient guarantees around freshness and survivable key compromise.

TUF should be understood as a higher level concept than GPG. There are additional features of the TUF spec that we'll be implementing in later versions, such as threshold signing (k of n signatures required for verification) and secure delegation.

For what its worth, TUF could be implemented on top of GPG just fine. If folks have an appetite for that we'd welcome contributions here: [https://github.com/docker/notary](https://github.com/docker/notary)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand why we don't make the container ID a hash of the image contents, have the docker CLI verify it, and let people use conventional means to trustedly pass around the correct container ID.

This seems like a lot of extra infrastructure and process in a space where there is already a lot of infrastructure and process.

<comment><USER5> In that case updating a container to a new version would require everyone to change the container ID they are using. This introduces friction that either causes people not to update, or to develop wrappers that do something similar to this.

Granted, this doesn't always apply to packages you build yourself.

<comment><USER4> Having signed images to allow trust does seem valuable, but easily verifiable images, without the need for crypto, seems like a more fundamental building block upon which more complex processes can be built.

<comment><USER6> You are right, they are not mutually exclusive, and we are working on both in parallel. We are working on specifying a standardized way to 1) hash a container in its runnable form, and 2) attach arbitrary signatures constructed from that hash. That will allow using your favorite existing tools (eg. gpg) to create arbitrary trust and verification systems. This is part of the OCP project, and will be implemented by RunC which we donated last month. See [https://github.com/opencontainers/runc](https://github.com/opencontainers/runc) and [https://github.com/opencontainers/specs](https://github.com/opencontainers/specs) .

As a rule of thumb, end-to-end trust and naming is most useful to developers ("How do I know I'm building on the right dependency, and using the latest and most secure version?"), and low-level hashing is most useful to ops ("How do I enforce a whitelist of containers allowed on my production cluster based on home-made PKI and policies?")

Another distinction is that you can use Notary (and Docker Trusted Content) with any kind of content - for example Compose files, source artifacts, system packages used to build the container, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would docker make a good sandbox or can applications break out?

<comment><USER8> It makes a good sandbox because it uses a chroot/pivot_root + unshares pid/net/uts/mnt/ipc namespaces, but it doesn't use user namespaces so root in the container is root on the host which is a bit scary.

<comment><USER7> Thanks. Have there been documented breakouts or it more theoretical?

<comment><USER9> Not in recent versions.

<comment><USER10> [http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss- security/2015/07/22/7](http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss- security/2015/07/22/7) is three weeks old and would allow breaking out of Docker. Bugs like this (in Linux) are found regularly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk will leave Trump councils if U.S. withdraws from Paris agreement - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/31/elon-musk-will-leave-trump-councils-if-u-s-withdraws-from-paris-agreement/ <comment><USER2> This is the point where I could (in principle) accept the idea of "conditional collaboration" \-- as in, "OK, I'll loan you, generally destructive and disreputable person that you are, the appearance of credibility, as long as you refrain from taking deeply harmful actions X, Y, and Z." That is, at least where there's _some_ significant leverage exercised. And where "deeply harmful" means just that (e.g. backing out of the Paris climate deal, invading Iraq for no particular reason, etc -- something on that scale).

I'm still not sure I would have the stomach for it, myself, if I were in their shoes. But at least I could see how that could be drawn as an ethical position.</comment>


Show HN: Test and improve your typing speed in the terminal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cslarsen/wpm <comment><USER2> Nice idea!</comment>


Show HN: WhatsMyTenantID – Website to quickly get your O365/Azure TenantID - <AUTHOR> https://www.whatismytenantid.com <comment><USER2> What is this for?</comment>


Ebay will match Amazon's, Walmart's and others' prices on over 50K items - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/21/ebay-will-now-match-amazons-walmarts-and-others-prices-on-over-50000-items <comment><USER2> PRO TIP eBay: people don't use your site not because of prices but because you are a horrible company to deal with.

<comment><USER3> I don't agree. As a buyer I have never had a problem they did not settle to my satisfaction. I did make sure in each case to have my facts in order. I tend to buy mostly antiques, glass and china, and have had three bad purchases which were fraudulent in some manner. This out of nearly three hundred purchases.

I also purchase consumer items like batteries, dog toys, beef jerky, a DJI drone, and whatnot off the site.

Now as a seller I have no clue, but I have no clue what it is like to sell on Amazon either. I do find ebay easier to navigate by leaps and bounds over Amazon. amazon fills my pages with more trash than I ever want to see.

<comment><USER4> As a buyer you're more than protected.

As a seller, I'm exposed for 30 days, because you can, for any reason, choose to return the item with a full refund, and just say it doesn't work. Ebay does not take evidence from the seller that this patently untrue. I've been burned twice this way and lost hundreds trying to sell two laptops.

<comment><USER5> > As a seller, I'm exposed for 30 days, because you can, for any reason, > choose to return the item with a full refund, and just say it doesn't work.

This is simply how eCommerce works. You have to accept returns... and 30 days is just about as short of a period you can reasonably make.

> Ebay does not take evidence from the seller that this patently untrue

Neither does Amazon, or Walmart marketplaces. This is simply standard for there marketplaces. Buyers get peace of mind, which encourages more purchases.

This "scam" works on Amazon too - so it's not just eBay or something about how eBay has done things.

As a seller, it can be a pain sometimes - but it's a cost of doing business and must be accounted for, and planned for before you sell the item.

If you're trying to just sell something and walk away, CL or your local classifieds section is the place to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice, I finally get to do work by having to find similar items and write an email to be able to save exactly.. well, nothing.

Are they seriously expecting anyone to put effort and wait just to buy something from their place? Granted, I hate how Amazon doesn't support Paypal, but last I recall ebay doesn't do 1-day shipping, let alone 1-day replacement when opening an RMA.

Besides, they don't even actually lower the price to match the competitor, they just give you a one-time coupon with the difference. They're not even trying.

<comment><USER7> > I hate how Amazon doesn't support Paypal

This might be the first time someone has been upset that paypal support is lacking. I am surprised by this considering the general distaste for paypal typically.

What makes you wish paypal was supported if you don't mind me asking?

<comment><USER8> I understand some people prefer Paypal because Paypal can assist with disputes, i.e. if something doesn't show up. At least that's why some of my friends prefer to use it.

However Amazon has always resolved problems to my satisfaction. I don't imagine it would be necessary in this situation.

<comment><USER7> I thought credit cards provide the same protections that Paypal does. Any time I run into trouble I can call my credit card company, reverse the charge and move on with life.

They are no questions asked easy and my credit card company cannot hold my money for 6 months for arbitrary reasons without providing proof. I see no benefit to Amazon using Paypal and only a less than good customer experience.

<comment><USER9> This is true. Lots of people don't know you can do stop payment. You also can do it 60 days on one rule or more than that if you tried to resolve it with vendor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What I don't get about eBay is they found initial success in being an auction site then they almost immediately decided they wanted to be an online retailer instead. Why not just be the best auction site you can be rather than be yet another Amazon wannabe?

Interestingly Amazon has done the same thing except they want to be Google (Android) and Netflix (content bundling with Prime).

I get the desire to grow but honestly more often than not trying to do too much just makes you mediocre at everything.

<comment><USER11> > What I don't get about eBay is they found initial success in being an > auction site then they almost immediately decided they wanted to be an > online retailer instead. Why not just be the best auction site you can be > rather than be yet another Amazon wannabe?

I recently read a book [0] that outlined some of the reasons why that happened.

Two of the main reasons outlined were: (1) As more and more people started selling on the site, items started to become commodities with fixed prices. So even old antiques started to have a fixed value. This encouraged more people to just buy it now. (2) Even by the mid 2000's, when ebay was still considered mainly an auction site, only a very small fraction of sales were made by auctions. Something around 90% of sales were buy-it-now new items. This meant that their real success was in buy-it-now and they started to focus on that. (Don't quote me on the numbers in the second part, I will try to get more accurate ones later).

So they had a lot of initial success in being an auction site, but there isn't really much of an market for a general purpose auction site. And once you become a succesful auction site, you basically stop being a auction site.

[0] I cannot remember the name right now and I cannot find it. It was about providing real world examples of famous economic papers. It covered wide ranges of topics about used cars prices, trading in prison camps, ebay. It was released in 2016.

<comment><USER12> The one about used cars could be 'The Market for Lemons' by George Akerlof. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Finally, get paypal scammed at competitive prices! :)

<comment><USER14> Paypal is in the business of screwing merchants, not customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reasons I use ebay for: 1\. Discounted gift cards, 2\. Cheap imports from China.

As a buyer I have been happy with ebay, things take a while to come but are generally well before the estimated time and a lot of stuff is much cheaper than Amazon.

As per returns/bad goods, Sellers are generally willing to send a replacement item if the original has an issue

<comment><USER16> > Discounted gift cards

You got me interested. How deep of discounts are we talking here? And for what businesses? And have you gotten screwed ever?

<comment><USER15> 10-20% discount. Mostly from the daily deals section. I mostly buy Lowes gcs, some restaurants gcs along with Dominos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This doesn't make sense to me except as a marketing move.

For new items eBay's advantage is that you can buy in low volume straight from china (if you don't mind waiting a month) or from an importer who's running their operation out of a storage locker or basement. The prices are reflective of the decreased overhead compared to selling on Amazon (or some other "less flea-market like" option).

If you're shopping for something and don't want to wait for it to ship from China odds are you could already find it on eBay cheaper than Amazon in the first place.

This move is just publicizes and existing advantage.

</comment><comment><USER17> >Found it for less? Here's what you do: (... list of too much work ..)

Why would i go through all that work for just a match? If I'm only going to get the same price, I'm buying from Amazon/Walmart where I dont have to 1) contact someone, nor get the difference as a "coupon".

</comment><comment><USER18> Pretty weird. I sure wouldn't buy food from Ebay. Or mainstream electronics, or razor blades, since almost 100% of the stock on Ebay are counterfeits. That doesn't leave a lot, mostly just durable goods, like tools, lab equipment, etc.

I've only spent single-digit hundreds on Ebay in the last ten years. Not because the prices were too high, but because I didn't trust the goods. This is a big splashy initiative solving precisely the wrong problem.

</comment><comment><USER19> Definitely read that title as "Ebay will match Amazon's, Walmart's and others' prices on over $50K items" or put another way "Ebay will match Amazon's, Walmart's and others' prices on items over $50K".

But I don't buy on Amazon only because of price. I buy for 2-day shipping, peace of mind on returns, and a consistent experience across the app and website.

</comment><comment><USER16> That's cool. I still won't buy or sell anything on ebay as long as scammers are so prevalent.

I had a sealed collector's edition of StarCraft II that I wanted to sell a few years after the game came out. I knew that there was a very significant chance that if I sold it on ebay, some scam buyer would get it, open it, redeem the codes for all the in-game loot, then file a claim saying the item was not as described and that the codes were already redeemed.

Instead, I sold it through Amazon, using their Fulfilled by Amazon service. That way, Amazon will have verified that the game was still sealed and refuse a refund. It cost me a considerable amount in fees (IIRC, I sold it for $350 but only received $300), but it was worth it for piece of mind.

Though FWIW, some people have told me I still could have gotten scammed, it just became a little less likely.

</comment><comment><USER20> I have found eBay to be the best way to get the maximize money selling stuff. If you can wait the auction week, just let it run and get the most money. I have sold the most random stuff on there and found buyers. I only use eBay to buy used cell phones (Android testing), but for selling it pays off.

</comment><comment><USER21> Ebay is usually cheaper than the alternatives. Does this mean the price is going up?

<comment><USER22> When has it ever been cheaper than the alternative?

<comment><USER23> Phone cases and batteries are usually selling _much_ cheaper on ebay than Amazon Marketplace. A lot of them are obviously fakes, but even the real ones are a good 20-30% cheaper.

<comment><USER24> _" A lot of them are obviously fakes"_

Amazon is even worse, because sometimes there's no way to tell if items is original or fake and end up getting fake for same price as original. On eBay you can mostly safely assume it's fake, so at least you get what you pay for.

<comment><USER21> Well you can source ebay items from reputable, name brand, stores, and you know they didn't mix in fakes from chinese companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's what I don't get. Why do a price match guarantee? Why not just price your items lower? Or do a "match" where you guarantee every item for 10 cents cheaper than your competitors?

<comment><USER26> > _Why do a price match guarantee? Why not just price your items lower?_

MAD [1]. Price-match guarantees are meant to deter price competition. If you cut your price below a price-matching competitor's, the time you have the best price will be short. After that, less profit for everyone (assuming similar cost structures). If, on the other hand, you match, everyone keeps their market share and margins.

Price competition in a price-matching market happens when someone has lower costs. It also happens when someone uses cheap capital to buy market share, intending to make up for lower margins with volume, _e.g._ to cover fixed costs.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction)

<comment><USER25> Don't we want companies to engage in price competition though? Especially in a market with network effects which is dominated by a few large players.

<comment><USER26> > _Don 't we want companies to engage in price competition...?_

The literature is mixed on the effects of price-matching guarantees [1][2]. The most compelling resolution I've read says "price-matching guarantees can facilitate monopoly pricing only if firms automatically match prices. If consumers must instead request refunds (thereby incurring hassle costs)...any increase in equilibrium prices due to firms' price-matching policies will be small; often, no price increase can be supported" [3].

In any case, enforcing an automatic price-matching ban would be difficult. Would you prohibit firms from lowering their prices to match competitors'? If not, it would just take a few turns of the ratchet to send the message to would-be competitors (and consumers). Whether the consumer surplus from those ratchet turns are worth the enforcement cost is an open question.

[1] [https://www.bauer.uh.edu/jhess/documents/10.pdf](https://www.bauer.uh.edu/jhess/documents/10.pdf)

[2] [http://people.tamu.edu/~sjain/papers/published%20pmr%20paper...](http://people.tamu.edu/~sjain/papers/published%20pmr%20paper.pdf)

[3] [http://www.simon.rochester.edu/fac/SHAFFER/Published/Hassel%...](http://www.simon.rochester.edu/fac/SHAFFER/Published/Hassel%20Costs.pdf)

<comment><USER25> >In any case, enforcing an automatic price-matching ban would be difficult. Would you prohibit firms from lowering their prices to match competitors'? If not, it would just take a few turns of the ratchet to send the message to would-be competitors (and consumers). Whether the consumer surplus from those ratchet turns are worth the enforcement cost is an open question.

Couldn't you just make a law saying "price-match guarantees are illegal"? Firms who explicitly move prices to match each other is fine with me, but the match guarantee is problematic. It seems that your conclusion is that companies use matching guarantees to implicitly collude but that even if we got rid of this they would still collude. But we should still stamp out collusion wherever we see it even if that puts us in a whack-a-mole situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We sell on eBay and have seen a slight uptick in sales with their last media campaign. However, I still question the company as a whole. For instance, I wonder if eBay will ever enforce their "prohibited goods" policies.

[https://medium.com/@datafacts/why-ebay-is-allowing-e- cigaret...](https://medium.com/@datafacts/why-ebay-is-allowing-e-cigarette- and-tobacco-products-to-be-sold-regardless-of-their-tos%C2%B9-2a7abedc5148)

</comment><comment><USER28> I find this interesting.

There is a huge market for "discounted" lego on eBay and the bulk of these are probably "stolen" (from Walmart to boot). If you don't believe me just google stolen lego and read up.

I think this is going to lead to some interesting pricing conditions in the market, ones that don't work well for retail locations like Walmart.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if heating up competition and shakeups in the retail sector means that margins have gotten so thin that the only way to survive going forward is through massively-scaled automation and innovative presentation and delivery that limits real-estate footprints as much as possible. Another factor I've been unsuccessfully trying to nail down is if disposable income and velocity of money has declined for a broad enough swath of the population that we're seeing a gradual collapse towards an increasing percentage of incomes going towards essentials over time.

All this excitement in online retailing reminds me of yield chasing investors; the excitement appears as growth- and margin-chasing, and in the meantime the "plodding" sectors (and their associated populations) are overlooked. For example, I don't see a shift to online with dollar stores.

</comment><comment><USER30> Walmart has been stopping price matching (except their own.com) this and last year across the country in its stores

</comment><comment><USER31> The only reasons I even think about going through the ebay process is because either their price is significantly better than I can get on Amazon, or it is an unusual thing I can't get at Amazon (mostly used stuff). Most of that irritation comes from their desire to get me to use Paypal.

</comment><comment><USER32> RIP for Amazon to Ebay arbitrage.

</comment><comment><USER33> yeah sucks to be ebay: No innovations for auctions over the last 10 years, got more and more expensive to put stuff on and with trying to be also a 'marketplace' it is sucking more and more.

</comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if this will change the Amazon/Ebay arbitrage markets?

</comment><comment><USER35> They lost me at "...call customer service..."

</comment><comment><USER36> Second-hand items now price-matched to new items?

I don't get it.

<comment><USER21> Ebay has a lot of new stuff. Often cheaper too because the fees aren't as high as other retailers.

<comment><USER36> Does Ebay have the same problems with authenticity as Amazon? There are a lot of fake items being sold on Amazon.

<comment><USER37> It's a lot easier to see the quality of the seller on eBay. Items are not grouped like they are on Amazon.

<comment><USER38> And, just like Amazon, disputes are basically a guaranteed win for the customer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> eBay?</comment>