sidm83

Redis can do far more than just caching.

However for your specific use case, considering a typical MVC web app with RDBMS data storage, you would add a check at the beginning of your Model method to return cached data if it exists, else go through the method execution and write the data to the cache just before returning it back to the controller. This way the cache would be 'warmed' on first call and data will be served directly from the cache (memory) next time till it is cleared, saving expensive disk I/O.

Nobody here seems to have heard of Rebel Foods from India, which is (as per its own claim) the largest cloud kitchen company in the world. They now have their own 'brands' across multiple cuisines, leveraging the delivery services provided by Zomato and Swiggy (both unicorns). Ref : https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/31/rebel-foods-which-operates... https://rebelfoods.co/

This was the case earlier but not so for a while. Current use of gold is mainly for jewellery, especially in weddings. This is a typical bride in South India - https://www.bookeventz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/x...

Since about 2-3 decades, apart from use in jewellery, gold has been at best an 'alternative asset class' here. Unless of course one needs to hide cash income from the tax man.

I completely agree with your POV. Hoping corruption will go away is a fool's game indeed. Just trying to highlight that compared to US system of 2 party rule, India is a true multi party system since the 90s (from a faux one earlier when Congress dominated). The BJP lead coalition appears to be reversing this but its dominance is still far below the levels enjoyed by Congress from 1947 to late 80s. And there is good possibility of its dominance reducing starting from the state elections scheduled later this year.

There is also a clear change in the sales pitch. 4 years ago the pitch was about "investing". Now its about "end use". Clear sign of ending of investor fueled bubble.

Its not quite out in the open yet, but it is happening when you sit on the table and negotiate. A prime builder in the most prime location (BKC) is offering nearly 30% off on initial quote after a few rounds. There is humongous over supply in areas like Goregaon and Worli/Lower Parel. As per industry sources there is very little movement for properties north of INR50m which is essentially every apartment >=2br south from Bandra onwards. Builders like Oberoi have still not managed to sell flats which have been ready for 3-4 years in Goregaon, resulting in the recent 25% * 4 years scheme. It's a matter of time till they capitulate. Even otherwise, if they stay at old rates, they're effectively falling on account of inflation every year.

The government at federal level is still a very "noisy" affair. The ruling coalition though enjoying significant majority in lower house is far from simple majority in the upper house which holds elections once in 6 years. You only need to watch a few minutes of a session in action to realize it is well and truly a very noisy affair.

India saw the rise of regional parties with the parallel fall of the Congress party since the 90s. There are many states now where Congress has only namesake presence. This resulted in coalition rule at the federal level which was finally reversed in 2014 when BJP came to power with simple majority (though also as part of the NDA coalition). Subsequently it won most state elections, effectively gaining power in 19/31 states/union territories. But due to the bicameral nature of Indian parliament, it is far from majority in the Rajya Sabha (Upper House, where the MPs are indirectly elected). Because of this they have not been able to introduce many legislations.

Not good. I've been tracking the prices in Mumbai which has the most expensive market with the least supply in India and prices have not moved since 2014. There is potential for drastic fall as per the unsold inventory which may take over 7 years to sell based on current sales numbers. The Delhi-NCR market has seen drops of 20-25% as its a much bigger market and developers do not have the financial muscle compared to the ones in Mumbai.

Not surprising to see such an article in Guardian, known for its left of center leanings. Most of the billionaires in India have public listed companies, and have multiplied their wealth with the resultant growth in the stock markets, hence also contributing to wealth of investors. India's stock market is far superior and far open, to the ones in China, helping in faster monetization of their business. I do remember reading here about the crazy patterns in stocks in China last year, hitting the circuit every day for weeks and months, because they were allowed to list at a much lower value with very low circuit breakers, growing at 5% everyday like clockwork. The same happened in the opposite direction earlier this year and the Chinese market regulator actually stopped trading in many stocks trying to prevent their fall.

The much maligned demonetization exercise carried out in end 2016 had at least one major positive - people started putting their money into mutual funds rather than buying gold. The size of Indian funds has grown manifold since then, and their contribution has bypassed that of foreign funds. With growing number of people entering the middle class with disposable incomes, this is only going to go up.

As for the people like Nirav Modi and Vijay Mallya, an Insolvency and Bankruptcy code was introduced in 2016 which has started showing results. Previously banks would spend years trying to get loans back from defaulters with very little coming back. This law allows quick bankruptcy and sale of assets while they still hold value.

There is certainly no harm in rise of billionaires if there is reasonable trickle down effect. And comparing the numbers with China is a bit apples to oranges as its a far more closed society with potentially many more unknown billionaires in the ranks of the Communist Party.

Oh OK. My setup is dual boot but I've never had patience enough to spend enough time to test on Win. Just crappy hardware/drivers from Realtek then!

I use a TP-Link TL-WN823N. Did not require any 3rd party driver installs, just plug and play.

Yeah that's what I wanted too but unfortunately the supplier for my company did not have one.

That's not the case always. My first cheap thinkpad worked great, but the 2nd expensive one (T440p) has bad driver support for Wifi (on current and last Ubuntu LTS). Connections are unstable and throughput is ~0.3x of the dongle I use (both 2.4Ghz 802.11n). Hardware - Realtek RTL8192EE PCIe.

Nope. Flipkart's entire setup is in Netmagic's (An NTT Communications company) datacenters as per my knowledge.

This is great news. I work at a major ecommerce player in India and we use AWS extensively, mostly from Singapore region. There have been internal discussions multiple times to move to a provider within India to prevent downtimes in case of an undersea cable cut or to gain the extra few fractions of a second in page load times but we always chose AWS for the flexibility it provides. Been waiting for this for a while!

Most of the points you have made here are grossly incorrect. Here is the reality :

Flipkart is a local company

No its not. The VC money invested in it is counted as FDI, and even its holding company is based out of Singapore. So it does not enjoy any such advantage. Its been several years since Flipkart stopped operating on the inventory model, it operates on the same marketplace model as Amazon/Snapdeal.

The article claims Amazon is "nipping at their heels".

It's true, but the gap is much wider than you might think. Amazon pushes how they surpassed Flipkart in traffic, but in actual sales, Flipkart has a pretty large lead.* Nope. The difference is in the range of only ~20% now. Flipkart does not have a magical conversion ratio that it sales can be a multiple of Amazon despite lower visits. You might have been misleaded by considering the figures of the seller side as well. Need to consider only marketplace revenues.

Anyways, I wouldn't count Flipkart out yet. Amazon is spending money like crazy, and they have deep pockets, but so does Flipkart.

Flipkart does not have pockets of its own. Its running on investor money, which comes with conditions unlike Amazon which can invest its own earnings from US and elsewhere, well justified owing to earnings growth potential.

The real current winners are Indian consumers, getting heavily subsidized goods.

Can't agree more with this point. FYI Amazon and Flipkart are nowhere close to the magnitude of cashback offered by Paytm (backed by Alibaba).

Yes, but this mainly holds true at the lower end of the pricing, starting from as low as INR 899 going upto a few thousand per day. He has managed to get such rates by aggregating a good number of guest houses which cost much less, which are otherwise out of the purview of typical hotel aggregators. The room detail page provides you a good description of what to expect in terms of feature list as well as realistic photographs, eliminating the "surprise" factor as much as possible. Instead of searching for a Hotel A/B/C when visiting a new city, you just book an "OYO Room" of your desired category in your desired location.

What he has done, is standardize the experience in a hotel based on which category it fits (standard, premium, deluxe) and ensure you'll get a certain minimum standard of experience on your stay in any "OYO Room" across India. This is a huge problem in India especially at the lower end (sub $100). Also, what he has been very smart about is that his app/website provides the only interface with the hotel so you have to book it through OYO Rooms only, unlike other websites where you usually just discover hotels and book directly by calling/mailing the hotel itself.

I discovered this link a few weeks ago while writing an internal 'howto' wiki to help our developers move to git from svn and linked to it right away. Really well written and constructed article.