theyeti

Looks quite interesting. This could perhaps give Turkers a much needed alternative to Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

As an Asian male new to the Bay Area, this has been something that I can relate too. At workplace and coffee shops, restaurants and almost any place, I've struggled to answer the question "How're you doing ?". The author summarizes it quite well.

Nepalese national here. While I can confirm that most of the stuff in the NY Times article is true, what bothers me the most is how helpless is the Nepalese government with this regard. Tourism dollars and oversea migrant workers' wages make up for a sizable (and growing) chunk of Nepal's GDP. Every day hundreds of migrant workers leave for the middle east in search of better work. A few of them come back in coffins, others come with disease or a youth wasted in foreign land. Now, don't get my prospective wrong, but the situation of Sherpas is better compared to the migrant workers. While its not the most desirable job, its better among the ones available.

I've somehow always found Ruby to be opposite to the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. While Ruby may seem trivial and fun in the beginning, it tends to be cumbersome and maintainable as the size of the repository grows. Coming from a Python world, my first reaction to Ruby was that it was more like Perl where there are many ways to achieve the same thing, and no it was not really helpful if you inherited poorly written code.

Update: We are beginning to see recovery in error rates and latencies for Amazon S3.

It seems to have come back now for me. Could someone else confirm the same ?