870 karma · joined July 26, 2011
If you have a problem with how your government's aid money is being spent in India, please go forward and lobby for the aid to get cut off. How we spend our tax money is a decision that we should be allowed to make.
Honestly, I am surprised that HackerNews has the sentiment of pointing out expenditures on science to be extravagant and unnecessary by using social conditions as excuse, while there is so much more we could save by changing our military, social or economic standpoints. US's military budget was $663.84B in 2010 [1] while United Nations budget was just around $5.2B during the same time [2] and it's not that United States is all free from hunger or food insecurities [3]. So please, whichever country that you belong to will have issues just like us. We probably have a lot more of those than you do, but we have the right to decide which of those do we want to tackle now at the expense of being behind in our long term goals. And I request you to keep your preferences to yourself and stop forcing your morality/ethics/logic onto us in such private matters.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
[2] http://www.un.org/en/hq/dm/pdfs/oppba/Regular%20Budget.pdf
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger#In_the_United_StatesWell then how does the author knows that his assessment is the correct one? I agree with the GP for three reasons: (1) I am not a super intelligent, 140 IQed, childhood prodigy who can learn so much faster than most if not all of my peers that I find the courses in my university program slow/unnecessary. (2) I fail at keeping myself motivated for months without direction, peer support and proper schedule. I am more likely to slag off in a side project that I am doing than in a course project that I have to do. (3) I am also more likely to learn things that are absolutely necessary but I personally don't find interesting (Logic Design, for example was one such topic).
> people who are just as hungry and passionate and brilliant as I am
I think that is largely a function of how good the university is and how likely you are to identify motivated people. I was lucky to find some really motivated people around me who would challenge everything they encounter. I am much more passive than they are during sleep and just observing them struggle to tackle the weirdest problems was worth it. I am of course, not from a US university. My 5 year program (B.Tech. + M.Tech) would have costed me not more than $20K as a large part of my academic expenses are subsidized by our government. But all I can say is that at a good university, neither is this behaviour unusual or is it rare.
Oh and people who have praised the word 'jugaad', in most cases it is a illegal-immoral solution. I hate it when people glorify the act. It is a reality and it is present everywhere in India - but I hope that we grow out of it.
You can divide the country into three parts: (A) The Powerful (who are always rich) (B) The not-so-rich and not-so-powerful (C) The poor and powerless. People of class (A) are leaders, businessmen and politicians who are also lawmakers. Class (B) is the middle to high income families who think political dialogue is a stinking business to be a part of. Class (C) is the overwhelming majority who vote and get paid for it - either directly or through improper political practices from caste/region/religion based arguments.
We have a huge population with few resources. We don't have enough fuel to dump our waste, not even enough ground to dump them on. We have very high unemployment and low literacy. Even the education system that we have is largely of very low quality. Cross Border Terrorism that is so not a daily part of western life is now too boring to be covered on Indian television. North India is so accustomed to it that people have even stopped demanding action - we don't think our government can take any. We also face Naxalism [1], a reality that a lot of us don't understand as it is largely based in Southern/Eastern India.
We regularly see large scale corruption ($1B+), as frequently as once every year. The culprits come back to power in a few years (An example: [2]). And people vote for them, because there is no better choice. This is unlike say USA when similar things would have been ends of political career for people involved.
BUT, please stop commenting on India as a comparison to the US and the rest of the western world. We get it, you have cleaner cities, healthier people, lesser discrimination and no unhappiness. We know it well, we live by it every day. These commentaries just seem unnecessary. We are innately handicapped in the race of development. We have started off late [3]. We have started off behind [4]. It is also very arrogant to impose your morality to the ancestors of others [5] as even if they may agree to what you say, they cannot comment on the situation in the previous era as they are unaware of the context themselves. It is very rude to use it as an argument against the present.
And let's make it clear. India is no more spiritual than any other country on earth. We just have a lot more temples and monasteries than most places. And they are also old and diverse. These exact things that attracts most westerners to India - the ancientness and the abundance, are also very closely related to what westerners hate about India. You cannot have orthodox, untainted and non-commercialized establishments without the perils of unorganized, corrupt and ill-managed institutes. Remove both, and you have a country that is working just as vigorously towards modern (and very western) ideologies and standards of living.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fodder_Scam
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Independence
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#Economic_impact
[5] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4214998 [Sec: Sati]Isn't what this about? Motorola is not looking for a third option - it is pressing on the first itself.
1. Microsoft had initially asked for $15 per Android device sold [1]. For some devices, this was as much as 7%. I am not sure how related these cases are. It seems as if it is hard to find if the involved patents [2] are FRAND.
2. The definition of fair is relative. I see less absurdity in 2.25% than you do, probably because of my biases. Given that some of these patents are primary to connectivity (wireless patents), their licencing to competitors (especially when competitors have charged upto 7% on your phones) is going to be high. In fact, it seems that Apple and Microsoft have an upper hand here.
3. And yes, Apple has asked for a ban on sales based on "Universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system". In other threads, it was pointed out that not only was it obvious but prior art might be available. Now, I am not commenting on the validity of the patent, I am trying to see how such a feature about search interface becomes so paramount to the success of Samsung Galaxy Nexus device? And how will it cause irreparable damage to Apple, for that is what they have claimed? I don't see it at all. To me it is the least defensible argument of all.
4. Morality - it is a strange concept. Apple going all guns blazing over Android, was immoral to me. Worse was the case when Microsoft did so to much smaller OEMs. Apple is considered to be a pioneer in technology, and they have argued that Android is nothing but a copy of their designs. What it has also done is to patent the hell out of every design - moral or not (deliberately not seeing the obviousness of some of the patents also seem immoral to me). They used this against Android and they have every legal right to do so. And while they do so, they have copied some features from Android, Notification System is often given as the only example. I don't own an iPhone so I cannot comment on this. They could copy it because it was not patented. It makes it legal but not moral according to their own standards. Having double standards, is least moral to me.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/06/us-samsung-microsoft-idUSTRE7651DB20110706
[2] http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/070611-microsoft-android.html
1. Google had a huge advertising campaign to promote Chrome. It was unique and nothing like has been done for any other browser ever.
2. Majority of internet users in India are young. The mom's, dad's and grandmother's browser, I hypothesize, doesn't contribute as much to the stats as others. Many might have not even seen the pre-Chrome (or pre-Firefox) world.
3. Orkut was huge in India, Gmail and Google Search are bigger. Google has been pushing users to move to Chrome for a better experience for a long time now. That would have seen significant clickthrough especially because internet speeds have only recently started to pick up in India. Making the need for a 'better experience' more paramount.
4. Not enough business machines. Indian corporate world is not as highly computerized as North America or Europe. Indian Governmental Offices are way behind. While machines in western offices may bring about a significant increase in IE usage there, they will have lesser weight in India.
I think viewpoints differ largely at this point. While I agree that Apple has every right to use any and all legal ways to defend itself and potentially harm competitors; given that everyone is aware of the absurdity of majority of patents, it does seem wrong to use them offensively. There is no law against being douch-stupid-ignorant; laws are not always moral/right - they follow morality only slowly and caters to only the most easiest morality questions. Rationality allows Apple to do whatever it can, only the current morality doesn't.
I don't think this argumentation is correct. There are two things that you are assuming -
(1) The authors would not have been capable of expressing their view with similar levels of 'feel' if they were not born to an English Speaking language hence imparting the 'feel' to English and not just to the authors
(2) You are not feeling the 'feel' more intensely because you are not a native English speaker hence the language and wordplay are less obvious to you as those who speak English primarily.
Secondly as beautiful as the description of multiple languages it may be in GP, I fail to see why won't people adapt the one single language to have extensions - words that describe feelings, emotions and expressions not available originally. Any modern language is, in fact, not the same as it was say a 100 years ago. It has been modified to add newly invented objects like for Computers and Televisions, or newly discovered ones like Idli and Dosa. I think that our desire of saving languages is not pragmatic but aesthetic.
I think its both. Extensibility is obviously an issue. But so is extensibility, I will give two reasons for it:
1. Easy reproducibility is necessary for extensibility. Firstly, academia is not very good at publishing their tools or their codebases. We have given so much weight to the concept behind the implementations and not the implementations themselves, that most people skip publishing implementations. What it means is that the next research group now has to start from scratch in implementing the concepts before they can think of extending the work. Reproducibility is not only to verify previously reported results, but also to create a starting point for further work. Secondly, given that the tools that the researcher is using is proprietary, the trend is to make it closed source. It may be because the tool is not ubiquitous and hence the researcher sees no point in distributing his/her implementations - or because he had not followed any guidelines (or in case of Matlab and Mathematica - they didn't exist/were-not-popular). He might not be sure about his implementations, and hence cannot publish them.
2. Reproducibility has always been the base for science. I don't need to trust the work a random researcher that I don't personally know. I can just verify his/her findings myself. The requirement of commercial software creates a huge monetary barrier in this. It is wasteful of me to buy a licence for a simple verification that I am not planning to extend. Given that non-academic licenses of most of these softwares are insanely expensive, it makes this verification to be confined to researchers from big research groups in large companies.
No, but I will celebrate a decent open source alternative, which is what the root was probably suggesting as well. Mathematica is great as an entry software - much like MS Word for word processing. But having LibreOffice is good.
I doubt that the author is using 'sheep' and 'wolf' to refer to the herd behaviour of the former versus the self decision making ability/nature of the latter.
I cannot give a very well analyzed comment on the seriousness or the _wolfiness_ of this initiative by Google, I haven't given it a deep thought yet. I am, however, unable to understand the arguments of why what Google is doing, is bad. The author elaborates the possibility of Street View feeding Driverless Project and the latter increasing efficiency of the system. The reasoning behind this being vicious is missing.
"A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing is an idiom of Biblical origin. It is used of those playing a role contrary to their real character, with whom contact is dangerous." - Wikipedia. Role contrary to real character, possibly. Dangerous, I can't see how.
* Buy latest iPhone.
* Take photos and videos on iPhone.
* Tap a couple buttons to select photos and videos to share.
* Choose who to share them with, press Send.
* My family gets sent an email link to a webpage with thumbnails of the photos and videos sent, with a one-click way to view each of them. Could even be a native app experience if the recipient is a Mac or iOS user.
Edit: typo
I cannot upvote this enough. I feel sad when people forget that most of the history has been rewritten to suit newer regimes, newer philosophies. And the practice is still very dominant. Howsoever informed we may try to be about past, especially past that we haven't lived through but heard about in books or media or discussions, we are still aware of only part of the story. The part that survived, the part that dominated. And what is worse, we often tend to classify some leaders as well as their supporters who have failed and then replaced by their antitheses, to have this innate evil - while forgetting that they may very well be not 'evil' in their own morality; and hence ignorance not evilness causes their evil actions.
Philosophically? Can you please elaborate on this? Technically, I don't think there is any unsoundness in OOPs as compared to functional programming (or procedural or generic). Technically, there are paradigms available for all requirements. It might end up being messy or boring or bloated, but that is not a technical issue but more human. OO code on the other hand is incredibly easy to grasp and the ubiquity of OOP fuels itself. May be we would have been at a higher level in our enterprise codes if we had chosen a superior language like Haskell, Scheme or Python for everything; but we don't it for sure. Code is as much an art as it is science, and sometimes better art is possible with outdated paradigms likes paint and paper than touch interfaces and brilliant applications.
They have already opened up enough APIs to allow for decent third party clients - if they make a policy to withdraw it, developers and users who have already bought a smartphone will not only panic but probably revolt as well.
Alienating existing userbase, when alternative platforms like Quora are just starting to get very popular would be suicidal. In fact my university is already seeing a mass migration from Facebook to Quora and reddit (and HN).
I fail to understand why registration is required. The action (putting script in website code) is to be done by users.