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blindwatchmakeron Users Abandon Facebook After Cambridge Analytica Findings

Whatsapp is also owned by facebook.

blindwatchmakeron Aadhaar: India's Flawed Biometric Database

> In January 2018, a journalist working with The Tribune in India did an exposé about how anyone with WhatsApp and an online wallet could buy unlimited verifications for a paltry 500 Indian rupees ($8). Instead of launching an investigation inside its own ranks, the UIDAI filed a police report against the journalist and her editor.

Does this entity have any accountability at all?

blindwatchmakeron The Rise of China and the Fall of the ‘Free Trade’ Myth

China succeeded because it was in the prime position to take advantage of western manufacturing looking to move production facilities elsewhere for wage arbitrage. Right place, right time to reap massive export surpluses - and they were smart enough to use the opportunity to have built up a domestic market/technical knowledge base when wages inevitably started to raise and manufacturers began to move elsewhere again. You're going to see a lot less 'liberalization', and probably some reversals, in China in the coming years.

blindwatchmakeron A Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz (2012)

The Soviets were not bent on world conquest, but on securing a ring of buffer states around them as security for their country. Witness Stalin's betrayal of the communists in Greece as horse trading for influence elsewhere. Stalin's socialism in one country policy set against exporting revolution was in fact a huge point of contention with other factions of the Bolsheviks.

While the Soviets did harbour imperial ambitions against neighbouring states (Poland, Finland), this:

> had Hitler not attacked first, Stalin would probably just attack Germany within a short period of time

is blatantly false, and insultingly so given the millions of Soviet citizens who paid a bloody price for Stalin's total lack of readiness at the German border or mobilization against the Nazis.

blindwatchmakeron India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year

Wow. I'd fire anyone who used these people to assess candidates.

blindwatchmakeron India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year

One of the articles linking from this one (https://qz.com/964843/less-than-5-of-india-engineers-are-cut...) made me laugh:

> More than two-thirds of the candidates from the top 100 universities in the country were able to write “compilable code,” or that which does not throw errors when compiled into machine-readable code.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean? Most devs make typos or errors when writing new code at some point; the compiler spits out the reason (or your IDE helpfully points it out), you go back and fix it.

> One reason for the poor performance is the dearth of good instructors as well as misaligned college curriculums. “The school curriculum focusing on MS-Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc., rather teaching programming using elementary languages such as Basic and Logo is also the culprit,” said Varun Aggarwal, the co-founder and chief technology officer at Aspiring Minds.

Basic and Logo? What in the world?

blindwatchmakeron Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring

Tunnel costs aside, I hadn't known that Musk's idea was to dig this for car use. I honestly feel that money would be put to better use just making a subway.

blindwatchmakeron E Pur Si Muove

> since I realize many conservatives would do the same about issues they care about if they had the power and numbers

This, in fact, happens as the move to criminalize speech against Israel on campuses and eslwhere shows.

blindwatchmakeron Why Wages Aren’t Growing

This is ass backwards. Central bank/fed policy in the US, Europe, and Japan has consistently been to keep inflation low on behalf of the investor class for a long, long time now.

blindwatchmakeron Learning Elixir: My side-project

Picking up new languages is fun.

I have to say things like this tickle my funny bone though:

> def backlog(board_id) when is_integer(board_id) do

What happened to good old fashioned function foo (int bar) :)

Is there an equivalent to typescript for elixir?

blindwatchmakeron The World Economic Forum predicts a USD 400 trillion pensions shortfall by 2050

I don't think it's axiomatic that individuals should be funding their own pensions. I feel a lot of these problems that keep popping up have the same fundamental root cause: governments (and the non-wealthy) have less resources, as more of those resources end up concentrated in fewer hands over time which has certainly been the case in first world countries over the last few decades.

Proposed solutions of austerity and cutting and degrading services even further for the lower classes are exacerbating this tendency. I'm not sure what the endgame here is supposed to be.

blindwatchmakeron The World Economic Forum predicts a USD 400 trillion pensions shortfall by 2050

A lot of solutions for budget shortfalls seem to be focused on increasing burdens and reducing services for the lower classes. Maybe some of these shortfalls could be made up for by bringing the tax rates on the wealthy and corporations back up to pre-Reagan era levels, and also recouping some of the trillions in tax avoidance money hiding in offshore shelters?

This seems more preferable to me than nickle and diming the elderly.

blindwatchmakeron Aadhaar isn’t progress – it’s dystopian and dangerous

> I would rather communicate with those who don't label people and jump to conclusions.

Physician, heal thyself.

I love HN and have been reading it for a long time, content to browse. There's very little that jolts me into actually commenting, but your comments since registering did because it's reminiscent of a pattern anyone that's been involved with Indian/South Asian communities or discussions online have seen over and over again - a topic that's critical of the Modi government or the BJP being injected with insults and invective over constructive discussion by sudden newcomers.

The only thing missing to complete the BJP bingo is the traditional cries of 'anti-national'.

blindwatchmakeron Aadhaar isn’t progress – it’s dystopian and dangerous

> Don't spread fake news like the communists.

> mostly anti current government (it spreads fake news most of the times)

Do you consider views from sources that disagree with your own as 'fake news' ? A lot of what you've posted here sounds a lot like the hyper partisan BJP trolls that seem to pop up wherever there's any criticism of the Modi government.

You should try to do better on HN, because I would prefer not to see that particular virulent strain of the internet in relatively sane places.