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vikascoder

247 karma · joined May 18, 2016

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vikascoder··on Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator
my whole Bosch line of washing machines and dryer have these buttons where i have to press my fingers awkwardly, sometimes slide it side to side for it to register a simple thing as "Start". Cool looking? i dont know but hey, put some LEDs on normal plastic buttons man.
vikascoder··on Programmers who want to change how we code before catastrophe strikes
Thats how most Medical Device software is written :)
vikascoder··on Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search on iOS and Mac Spotlight
We must remind ourselves that Apple is a closed social network based on hardware whereas lets say FB is software. So Apple plan to monetize this walled hardware/software garden for its own needs
vikascoder··on America’s First Meat-Free Fast-Food Restaurant Is Getting Ready to Expand
As an Indian it always amuses me to see folks in western nations tying themselves in knots over the vegeterianism debates. The possibility of eating a 100 percent veg diet never raises the kind of reaction that I see around here since its a way of life for a huge number of people in India.

There are a wealth of lentil protiens, plants and fruits supplemented by milk based side items like yoghurt and cottage cheese which provide for the possibility of having a vegan only lifestyle. This is more driven by meat centric recipes and food culture prevalent here and the subsequent lack of vegeterian food culture. There are bazillion recipes involving yellow, green, black lentils of all kinds, chickpeas, beans, dried peas, okra, eggplants, multiple gourds, there are tons of veggies I barely remember the english names of and then the whole gamut of wheat breads. naans, rotis, flaky fried pan breads coupled with all kinds of rice preps, basmati rice, biryanis, the pilafs and pulaos, coconut, maize etc etc. So not only there are tons of vegeterian options, there are all great tasting options. Here eating vegan is like "meh tastimg food".

In my home backnin Delhi, cooking chicken was reserved for special occasions once or twice a month and the daily diet was all Vegan. It was only after I moved abroad was the need to have a "meat protien" daily became part of the conversation. Everytime I hear this debate I go like, "you guys have no idea how good tasting vegeterian food can be outside your country". I see that its driven historically by availability of meat recipes only and meat has played a central part in western cuisines. For me, I can easily glide into full Steak and Pork chops chowing mode from pure vegan recipes for a full month without skipping a beat just because I have exposure to a larger set of cuisines and recipes. or it may just be an Asian thing.

vikascoder··on Uber’s C.E.O. Choice Faces a Question of Ambitions
Via just started in NYC giving out 5$ rides, International markets have a lot of competing apps such as Ola,Rapido and OyeTaxi in India, Russia has Yandex, China has Didi amongt others etc etc. Uber's business model does seem like its on thin ice and the edge it has in the market is mostly price driven as of now. That was what the article is emphasizing on I guess.
vikascoder··on Ask HN: Is Georgia Tech's Online Master in CS Worth It?
I was on the same boat. My references were my previous three managers.Two of them were PhDs leading R&D teams and one was a very senior Director. So it depends on the quality of your recommendors. Anyway the recommendations are just one part of the application package. Since it is an online MS, there is an understanding that the applicant profile would lean more towards working professionals and I am sure they factor that in.
vikascoder··on Ask HN: Is Georgia Tech's Online Master in CS Worth It?
Agree, that's why I said its "for a US Masters". There have been other traditional offerings from CMU, Stanford and JHU etc which are all in the 40k USD range. Most of the international students would normally get more out of a residential MS in the US but 100k+ investment is sometimes out of the question. The other view is that the coursework lets say in a country like India will leave a lot to be desired and even an online MS such as from GaTech is a window to the outside world where they can interact with a wide variety of students and immerse themselves in a nearly international study experience. So the cost factor is just right. Also admissions to the Gatech cohorts are very competitive now, so its not also a cake walk to get in these days :)
vikascoder··on Ask HN: Is Georgia Tech's Online Master in CS Worth It?
Correct, the availability of courses is limited and there are four specializations available but its still early days in online education space and as I understand, maintaining, editing and publishing a course is a huge effort for a public university such as GaTech. They are adding courses every semester as of now and there are enough general purpose courses in core computer science like Operating systems, compiler theory, algorithms etc and current ones such as Machine Learning and various AI related topics.
vikascoder··on Ask HN: Is Georgia Tech's Online Master in CS Worth It?
Current working professional and an OMSCS student here. It highly depends on the context. Biggest pros are: 1. This is perhaps the cheapest Computer Science masters in the United States from a premier school. The degree is exactly the same as offered to the residential program and the credits acquired are all legit and transferable to other universities. I had friends who transferred from OMSCS to a regular school and skipped one full semester due to the credits earned. 2. An OMSCS qualification holds way more water than if you do random MOOC qualifications on Coursera and others. 3. The coursework is the same as the residential program. So if you dont believe in studying an MS at all, then this program is nothing special. Its a Masters in Computer Science. So It's pros and cons are the same as a regular MS. 4. If you are international, then having an OMSCS degree is equivalent to having a Gatech MS degree. It is a superb add-on to your profile and also qualifies you as a graduate level tech specialist for future Visa processing. 5. If you are international and looking to stay and work in your own country, then your mileage may vary depending on your circumstances. OMSCS provides no visa support and no career counselling. It does have an online portal for jobs but its more geared towards residents. 6. Other than that, it forces you to think and study new areas of research while you work so its extremely enriching. 7. The program is more or less extremely well run with regular assignments, proctored exams, 1-1 sessions with professors and what not. 8. Some companies reimburse your tuition, so its virtually free (at least for me)

Cmon guys, a US Masters for 7000 USD? Are you kidding me? Its totally worth it. In fact I feel blessed that such a thing even exists. GaTech has been a trailblazer in this regards.

vikascoder··on What Sets Successful CEOs Apart
What sets successful CEOs apart? : Luck
vikascoder··on Hedge Fund Uses Algae to Reap 21% Return
isnt there already research to show that the stock and bond market behaviours are theoretically impossible to predict?
vikascoder··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
As easy or hard as any skilled tech immigrant from anywhere else. We are all in the same boat and I am not aware of any special agreements between Europe and US in terms of easy transfer of skilled migrants (as Canadians have under NAFTA). So you a) study in the US and get in line for H1B b) work for a multinational in Europe and get transferred to US on L1 visa c) If you are a well published researcher, O1 will be good but it is very difficult to obtain.
vikascoder··on Hard Questions: How We Counter Terrorism
What does flight check-in times has to do with extreme vetting? US visas are already granted after extreme vetting and pre 9/11 ease of moving around is not coming back anytime soon. Concordes are not flying purely for safety and business reasons and not terrorism and sot com bubble and the 2008 market crash happened because of corporate greed which is what affects many more lives than fear and paranoia.

Our country already extremely vets, tracks the movement and stay of Pakistani nationals inside our borders. I know of a few people who have married Pakistani nationals and stay in Mumbai. They undergo the most inhumane scrutiny. You want an ankle bracelet on you when you live in the US? Terrorist attacks in India have seldom been committed by visa travellers. It has either been disgruntled natives like Tiger memon colluding with corrupt Indian officials or poor security infrastructure which leads to ttacks over water. I am sorry but you have no idea what you are talking about.

vikascoder··on Why do Nigerian scammers say they are from Nigeria? (2012) [pdf]
Or if your most stupid con act works on a particular set of people, you have struck gold. This is very deliberate on their part. They are not looking for someone possessing any iota of critical thinking skills (the IRS scammers in contrast look for the most easily "scared" demoraphic). They are phishing a different kind of fish.
vikascoder··on Coursera raises Series D
Current Gatech online student here. This is a very very successful course not because of Udacity, but because of the army of TAs and professors who work diligently to make the courses execute smoothly. Udacity just gives the platform for online video access, discussions happen on Georgia Techs internal portal which uses Piazza forum and TAs hold face to face Office Hours on Google Hangouts, assignments, quizzes and resources are all provided on the internal board. Udacity provides no such feature to support the whole gamut of needs that running a massively online course such as this requires. In fact Udacity had the clunkiest UI of all the MOOC providers and have just recently upgraded to a better looking Coursera clone.

Further Georgia Tech allows residential students to watch lectures online in lieu of attending classes and its still the cheapest MS available for just 6000 bucks tops. Its a pathbreaking achievement in online learning.

vikascoder··on Alex Honnold Scales El Capitan Without Ropes, and the Climbing World Reels
So is Formula 1 / NASCAR driving, deep sea diving and even innocuous things such as Sky Diving carries a lot of risk of death and injury which we casually ignore. Alex and other free soloist climb the rock multiple times charting the route, memorizing it, studying the environment and weather and then attempting the challenge. Alex had climbed El Capitan multiple times in the prep for going free solo until the time he can do the climb literally blindfolded. Folks sometime read these stories and assume he just walked to that rock for the first time and started climbing. That's not the case. Risks are there no doubt but it's no different than risking your life Base jumping or White Water rafting.
vikascoder··on At Amazon’s Bookstore, No Coffee but All the Data You Can Drink
I sometime have Old timers nostalgia and think about all the video store owners, postal staff who delivered telegrams, phone switch operators, dusty mom and pop stores, ceiling fan companies and encyclopedia sellers who have been put out of business by rampant corporate greed of Netflix, Gmails, Skypes and Amazons of the new age. At least Coal Jobs are coming back. Yipee.
vikascoder··on Why Juicero’s Press Is So Expensive
Take out dinner in itself is not a thrash concept. Something like Blue Apron is. A thrash concept producing thrash. You don't have to cook with takeout. You have to cook with Blue Apron, spend extra money on groceries and produce extra thrash when the entirety of it is avoidable. And if you are nearly a good cook and follow the instructions on a prepackaged thing, you surely can go and shop groceries and cook better meals. So this kinda solution is not for the lazy (take-out crowd) and neither for the home chefs.
vikascoder··on How much money doctors actually make
You would be surprised how this doesn't apply to many software companies out there and how the hospital environment is exactly the kind of culture existing. There is no one thing fits all fact.
vikascoder··on The Joel Test for 2017
Nah.
vikascoder··on Teach Yourself Computer Science
Another Indian guy here. Can we limit the broad paint brushes here and realize that the circle of developers you may have exposed to is solely your experience? I think you are leaning on to some assumption that other "Indian" developers are like this. Well if you are located in India you can say the same thing for "all" professions right? And whose fault is it that mostly all the developers you come across seem to you like feet daggers? Maybe you can work in a better company than you are in where you actually see great developers? It just grates on my senses when someone just paints a whole section of people with one huge ill informed paint brush. I am sure you have your reasons but also realize that you haven't met a huge amount of people to make that assumption, or have interacted with people in other great places to work or there are vast number of great Indian engineering talent working in a lot of countries. An ill informed opinion only makes the quality of information degrade on this forum. And seriously unless you are a Nobel prize winner yourself there is no point in judging others.
vikascoder··on H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms
So has Germany, the foot in the door is tied to an employer but you get a clock based PR.
vikascoder··on H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms
I am sorry but your token Indian is not entirely wrong but also not entirely correct. First of all regarding your broad hypothesis,(which comes with a good dose of judgment on the side), "why do a good portion of Indian Developers suck". To quote a similar question, I would ask you "Why are great portion (50%) of Americans turned racist in 2017?". But I won't ask that question because as I know, things in life for which you have a high confidence in having a fantastic one line explanation usually turns out that those are crappy theories. Hence I don't believe in one line explanations to complicated questions.

Putting that aside, there is a Fundamental Law of Incompetence which says, "In any random sample of a group of people in any country, the amount of incompetents is a constant". We have a lot of so called incompetent people because A) you may probably outsource to the cheapest bidder/contractor B) We have 1.3 billion people, of course a large number are incompetent. I have worked with outsourcing teams in Romania, and the law still holds, I have worked in Germany and the US, and the law still holds. It has yet to happen that I have walked into a country and observed, "Holy shit, so many geniuses are around here, what kind of Cola do you guys drink?". Now you may know that there are other "legit" multinationals who have captive R&D Centers in India which are awesomely working cause hey each country has a thick creamy layer of talent and those companies employ them. Case in point, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Google, Adobe's big campus near Delhi, Amazon etc etc. Plus a whole slew of startups popping up in India. So your token Indian thinks that all of those people are retarded?

What irks me about your guy is not that he is spouting what is the common understanding of the lot. But you are possibly talking to a regular uninformed guy with pet peeves about family and caste system. I know quite a few of those. What those kids need is a spinal surgery.

Did he mention how crap the infrastructure is in most of the Universities in India? How shoddy the teaching is? Oh it all starts with the School system, which is the base factory of parent/caste/society oppressed individuals who just blame everything else than their own free will to progress and learn in life. That's the reason why so many smart people tend to migrate in order to do a Masters or a Phd program because University Research does not exist in India (even in the top 10 universities).

The boom in IT sector in India circa 1995 was a god send for so many impoverished but educated Indians who could now afford to literally have a decent work environment and pay and that brought so many of us out of poverty. The much derided call centers brought employment to a range of blue collared workers who put their balls to the walls and attempted and mastered not only fluent English to some extent but to copy the American Accent. Now all these whiny newly born Indians with their trust funds piss all over that fact. I know you may think outsourcing is bad and call centers sucked, but hey market forces will decide that. No one asked any US multinationals to make your underwear in China, they all did by their own free will. The world economy will shift focus to something else.

I by no means want to engage with you harshly, you have a genuine curiosity about the subject but I would implore people on hacker news at least to think about the World in a more refined way.

vikascoder··on H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms
This is because H1-B is the "only" way for an international fresh grad to work in the US. This is a direct result of US immigration policy which ties up the visa process with the need for an employer sponsorship and more importantly the ability to acquire permanent residence is also tied up to employer sponsorship which leads to "indentured" servitude as many folks around here point out. Compare it with let's say Germany who has a "Blue Card" visa program which gives an international (or intra european immigrant) 18 months to find a job and then if you manage you work for an employer for another 22 months (only) you get a permanent residence. This does not need any sponsorship from the employer. It's just a clock. Same is the case with Canada and Australia.

All countries which attract foreign students in their universities give some sort of a time period for them to use the acquired skill and if prevailing conditions are right, to stay in the country and work. Imagine you want to move to Germany, what will you do? A) Search for an employer sitting in the US and hope they file a Blue Card for you (equivalent to getting an H1-B filed from outside the US) B) you plan to study and then stay there based on your studies (OPT leading to H1-B in the US). Now if you study at University of Erlangen and immediately after graduating you are told you pack up your bags and leave, then what do you do? You can institute such a policy saying no international students will ever get to stay in this country, then it's fine. The only thing would be a tremendous drop in in coming students who are also paying through their noses and investing dollars into the University System. That's how it works worldwide.

The problem here is most of the people here do not understand what Visa options are there, how they work, what kind of extreme vetting takes place to get a student visa in the first place, most folks would have never ever applied for a visa in their lives, would have never seen the inside of a consulate, would not know how visa systems work in the rest of the world and then arrive at a conclusion which is based on shaky foundation.

H1-B visas are not only for Tech, they are also for other streams of education or workers like MBAs. There are two kinds of complaints here which prop up constantly. A) H1-B applied by these "outsourcing" Indian companies which treat their employees shabbily (in fact its the US corporations which use and initiate these), so off with their heads. Sure, make H1-B attractive to maybe people who have invested and studied in the MS/PhD grad system. B) But.. now people moan about H1-B Masters and Phd getting "starting" salary lower than what they "think" should be offered to a regular US Citizen. Anyone who has ever interviewed or worked with the top Tech firms (or has managed to clear their interview rounds hahahaha) or have been part of the hiring groups would mostly say that these companies offer very competitive salaries and make NO discrimination at all in terms of talent.

Which side are we debating on or are we moaning the influx of ALL immigrants as unworthy of the job market? All jobs are ours hahahaha Microsoft can't take 10 rounds of interviews anymore since there are only US citizens available for these jobs. We won!

vikascoder··on Ask HN: Why do companies outside the US pay so much less?
All great points. Just to put in the "con" perspective: 1. It's good money, not insanely great money for software engineering field. You can not hope to earn 200k USD as a senior engineer ever and hence even a few folks from Germany seem pretty keen to have a 4-5 year stint in the US to earn some quick bucks. (also the exchange rate nowadays is killing it for Euro). You can see the effect in terms of how much you percentage of your salary you pay as rent and from my personal experience it was a lot (close to 30-40% of your entire paycheck, some germans in not so blessed fields pay almost 50%). The social security aspects covers for it as far as you enjoy it. 2. Jobs are secure as soon as you sign a permanent contract and get over the "Probzeit" period and there are seldom any "at-will" employment contracts. The flipside? startup culture never really kicked off until recently, hiring is slow and firing is even slower(harder) leading to plenty of dead-beat employees hanging around in corner offices in some organizations. You have copy-cat IT companies like Rocket Internet whose sole business model is to copy ideas from the US and implement them in Europe. So the variety of jobs are definitely not more than what the US provides. 3. As a result, the general lifestyle is living "frugally". If you like that it's fantastic. But everything is comparatively "expensive" than the US apart from certain things like Beer. e.g. Branded clothes like Timberland, Levis etc are sold at a premium where you can get those for 40 bucks in an outlet mall in the US. So buy IKEA/H&M/C&A with your software salary.

You do have countries where salaries are high like Switzerland but you also have insanely high living costs.

vikascoder··on Should gifted students go to a separate school?
You could look at an actual implementation of such a system in Germany. They have a three tier structure and divide students on the basis of their "ability" at a very tender young age of 10 or so ( 4-5th grade). http://www.economist.com/node/5465005
vikascoder··on Ask HN: What's the state of the job market in data science and machine learning?
It's a bug on chrome, works fine on Internet Explorer. The check box and the radio choices on the "Disability" page don't play well together on Chrome.
vikascoder··on Ask HN: What's the state of the job market in data science and machine learning?
I would recommend to check the adp application page. It does not allow the application to go beyond the "Personal Information" tab because it keeps saying "Select a Disability status" even though I have selected it. Tried all options to check uncheck the boxes. Nothing works. I have latest Chrome on windows 8.1 :)
vikascoder··on Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective
I dont think its about white males and brown females. Such behaviour in any corporate setting or any workplace setting is vile. No one has to go through harrassment of any kind and thats why big companies at least invest some time in setting up HR policies to prevent such kind of culture to develop but as we see its never perfect.
vikascoder··on Magic Leap goes to Finland in pursuit of VR and AR talent
Suffice to say the tech that Magic Leap has is so much leaps and bounds better than Hololens that it will derail Microsoft's AR train completely once its launched. The hype is very real and so is the tech.
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