lnkmails

> not as individualistic as the West is

Why is America representative of the west? It's a sample point. I have many European colleagues who have similar values as Indians. Collective mentality is prevalent in many western societies too. Reason Americans are individualistic is because of foundations of American democracy which glorifies individualism. It's not necessarily bad.

>It is also corrupted and racist. The thing is, even the victim doesn't realise s/he is a victim of racism or sexism and so on.

This is rather a naive statement. Victims definitely would realize if something is sexist/racist. They might not be in a position to fix it. India has pretty significant legislation (Prevention of Atrocities Act) protecting minorities. Problem is enforcement.

>Like the author said... You're reading viewpoint of exactly one woman in tech in India.

I could argue the same about the opposite viewpoint derived on a society by reading isolated rape cases or corruption cases in India. I don't want to trivialize the problem of rape or corruption but I think it is unreasonable to think that every woman will be raped if she walks alone in India which is what the western media mostly portrays. My undergraduate class in India where I studied engineering had 40% women students. Most laboratory work was in mixed groups. My advisor was a woman. There were 40% woman lecturers. So I am definitely used to seeing women in Engineering. My mother is one too. If you will, this is an observation of society I grew up in.

>For eg, to get into IIM or IIT (equivalents of Harvard or MIT in US), you need more then just knowledge to get selected amongst hundreds of thousands.

This is untrue. They all have competitive examinations that are open to anyone. There is affirmative action after admission which is the only non-merit part of it. Generally in India, there is age discrimination when it comes to enrolling in schools. There are age limits. Of course examinations are not indicative of actual potential but then we need a quantifiable way to select students. I am also Indian and have participated in these examinations. Also, I never thought IIMs/IITs are Harvard/MIT. Year over year rankings of universities around the world indicate they are nowhere closer. So let's get real there as well.

Last time I said this I was down voted. This kinda transparency needs to be there for citizens and residents too who don't have to go through LCA process.

This confuses the hell out of me as an Indian living in America. Mostly it's me wondering if I am included in the stereotype or not. Otherwise I don't really care.

There is a privacy issue in government releasing the H1B salary data publicly. If you are a H1b worker working at a small startup, your privacy is pretty much violated. In the interest of long term, I think it is vital that salary information is available publicly but it should also include citizens' salary information so employees can negotiate better. I kinda feel sad for a lot of H1B people and their salaries.

I am from India and one of the major broadband providers is BSNL. It used to be core part of the government (Department of Telecom) but was made a corporate in 2000 (but still owned by Govt. of India which is confusing). Anyways, BSNL is the reason a lot of remote villages in India get mobile & broadband connections. If it were left to private companies, they would never expand the infrastructure beyond urban centers where they could cover a lot of people per square area. BSNL also has a lot of fiber optic deployments that private companies rent in suburban areas to provide service. They get it at a cheaper price and don't have the problem of maintaining them. So I can see how municipal internet can help people. OTOH, there is a huge cost load on the government and people in remote villages don't use Internet much. I wonder if private companies were regulated to mandatorily have presence in all areas and are allowed to borrow government/municipal owned infrastructure at competitive rates, would the situation be better? This way there is both competition and better connectivity.

I second this. I was trying to understand the reasons and your answer helped me. It saved me a few hours. Thank you!

Recently, I was researching about moving back to India and continue working for my employer from there and get paid in USD. In theory, this should be possible. My employers might agree to this (they do it to other colleagues of mine in different countries). However, the taxation laws in India are not straight forward around this. You can explore to see if this is a legit option for you. If you have a solid profile as in open source contributions and you can pull off working remotely (definitely not easy), this is the most lucrative option for you. Trust me, living in USA is not what it used to be. The whole political climate with so many wars, government snooping, highly variant economy and things like Ferguson make it less attractive. If I were considering a move today, I'd definitely think 10 times. Plus the stress levels here are amazingly high. Everyone seems to be lost in their "careers". Of course there are positive aspects of living here. It's definitely a trade off like anywhere else. Good luck. I hope to bump into you someday and hear your story of sailing the boat ;).

In similar vein, it would be neat to compare this against Blueflood http://blueflood.io/. Disclaimer: I used to be a committer.

Personally, I never had a problem with my salary because I am good at what I do and I project my skills honestly. Salary negotiations involve negotiation skills that a lot of fellow immigrants don't have or don't care about. But when I see their work outperform local workers who are paid more but actually complain a lot about salary, I really get pissed. I have worked with really smart local workers who have all told me they don't feel threatened by immigrant workers. Likewise, I never have felt that someone can exploit me because I am on H1B. But honestly I have far less flexibility in moving jobs which unfortunately seems the only way to get more money in America. So long term I lose. Unlike you, I do think there is a thing called over paid. It is when your value/dollar ratio is exorbitantly high.

From the other side, I see a lot of over paid "local" workers that spend a lot of time talking and doing no work. Why don't you take your honesty to your bosses and tell them that they are abusing the H1B system to save money? This is my biggest problem with honesty that comes with anonymity. Look, I am not saying there is no abuse of H1B. That is not the government's problem nor it is the problem of the immigrants. It is the American corporates that you work for that abuse the system. You are diverting all your anger towards people who want the experience to live elsewhere. Regarding us not assimilating into your culture, I have no idea what that means. On one hand, I see a lot of people moving to SF just for the variety in ethnicity so you can all be pseudo liberal and then start complaining about ethnic divide.

As much as I hate it, I think in the case of India, preventing religious conflicts is best compared to defending free speech. The amount of police force needed to protect people who in the name of free speech offend religious sentiments and the community that gets affected because of the speech would be prohibitive. Plus, Indians are in general too sensitive about religion in general though that is slowly fading away. We need more success stories of satellite launches and corruption free bureaucracy to start believing in science, democracy, judiciary more than religion. Even now, there are different family laws based on what religion a person is hailing from. This is done so people can still apply their religious morality when it comes to family matters. For many western folks, this can be confusing. I for one have long wanted a uniform civil code in India. When I was raised, I was not told about the indian judicial system and what it means to break country's laws. I was taught about not breaking the hindu code of law. So religion is part of pretty much everyone's upbringing. I know very few strong atheist Indians. (I am transforming from being a theist to an agnostic.) With religion and God, there seems to be a constant hope. With other things, especially in India, people do not have that hope. As far as the modi example goes, supreme court of India did not find Modi guilty. So as per the country's laws, he is allowed to contest elections. He did so and won. People voted for him because he gave them a hope of development. He has been elected chief minister thrice in the state of Gujarat even winning elections after the riots. There is also a number's game here. 80% of Indians are Hindus and only 15% are muslims. The media coverage often cited the burning of Hindu pilgrims in train as the starting point of the riots which probably swayed the voters. What happened in Gujarat is completely wrong but I'd say it happened because some religious fanatics decided to throw propaganda speeches (in the name of exercising free speech) worsening the problem.

I do believe however there is in general liberty to free speech as long as it doesn't involve religious flame wars or speeches filled with national hate (You may want to read up on arrests of pro-LTTE speakers) . The isolated examples quoted in the original article can be argued case by case and as far as I know convictions have not been obtained. So the law is taking it's course. The very act of arresting them is violating civil liberties but there is no strong organization like the ACLU in India (there is PUCL but it's pretty dormant) to help citizens. And common people do not want to spend the money on lawyers and courts. So police force will continue to abuse their powers because no one keeps them in check. I've personally faced police excesses and it was more of a taboo to explain it to your family that you were picked up for questioning. In India, the very act of you being questioned by police is seen as a character issue.

Long story short, when I see first world struggling with civil liberties (I live in USA now), I do not expect India to do better. It is also unfair to compare a much younger democracy with an older democracy that still hasn't figured out civil liberties in digital age completely. I also do not expect India to lead the world in terms of civil liberties in next 20 years (either digital or regular). I do hope the remaining humanity in Indians don't vanish. Otherwise, we'd implode.

I just want to remind everyone that India is already a democracy and has been like that ever since her Independence from British colonialism. In general, I can understand the speculation that US is pushing money to India to balance China. US's perception of India has changed recently after their unsuccessful collaboration attempts with Pakistan. But in this particular case, I think the successful launch of a Mars orbiter at a budget price is a story that NASA would like to emulate too. I don't see political motivations behind this collaboration.

As someone who worked on writing protocol specs as code for simulation purposes, I can see how much fun this is. A pure python network simulator (ns2 is C++ and painfully hard to debug) would actually be nice and encourage a lot of theoreticians to get into real programming. I've spent a reasonable amount of time in the industry building distributed systems and I can say with confidence understanding low level protocols improves your thinking.

I would not "require" people to know Markov chains but I am usually surprised how many programmers have no idea what it is and how it works and how it can be used. It is a very powerful tool to model queues which is something most distributed systems deal with :).

Please tell me where you work so I don't apply. It's just that every time I think about Tannenbaum I'll remember your posts. For me, that's not good.

IPA is a fantastic idea. Some questions:

1) I am actually curious how IPA is deployed to the ramdisks. Any pointers?

2) The turn around time for provisioning is now dependent on download speed etc. When provisioning batches this could be a problem, right?

3)Did you use any kind of CDN (for image persistence) when dealing with provisioning in different availability zones?

4) Does IPA also implement SSL/Auth?

Can we look at the 67 commits and review them? </troll>

You made my day.

I really enjoyed reading this. <3 post mortems. Geoff and Matt are awesome (partly because they play foosball.)!

I think you have most of it right. The rollups are not configurable currently. However, we did give some thought into those pre-configured rollup granularities.

The query today is very simple. You can query data points for a metric you know by name. Look at retrieve metrics section of this guide: https://github.com/rackerlabs/blueflood/wiki/10minuteguide

I'd like to clarify that this is not a monitoring tool. This is a metrics aggregation engine for data collected using monitoring tools. We haven't benchmarked OpenTSDB. We have a lot of operational experience with Cassandra and one of the devs is a Cassandra committer. We are seeing good performance in terms of reads and writes from/to Cassandra. If you have other questions, please join #blueflood on freenode. I am one of the devs and I am in that channel too.

We (Cloud Monitoring @ Rackspace) have built a time series data store for persisting metrics on top of Cassandra. Check it out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6257401