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RandomCSGeek

168 karma · joined December 14, 2017

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RandomCSGeek··on 7 Things I Did and I Didn’t Get from University
The problem with universities is they create a self fulfilling prophecy, one that most students graduating from their will support, willingly or unwillingly, for their own benefit. If I go out and tell that XYZ uni I graduated from is not worth it, I would also be decreasing my chances of getting a job.

I know the 4 years I spent in my college were not worth it in an industrial perspective. Yes, I made friends, I learned how to learn, and I also got a degree to show to potential employers. But going back 4 years, would I repeat my decision? Absolutely not.

It's hard to accept what you did. But then again, you never graduated, so it might as well not affect you.

RandomCSGeek··on In Chile, border collies are sowing seeds, bringing life back to forests (2017)
I guess they meant 3km through uneven ground in a forest.
RandomCSGeek··on Mumbai bans plastic bags, bottles, and single-use plastic containers
Mumbai is one of those places where the sea dumps all it's waste. Of course, a lot of it must have been generated by Mumbai itself, but some must also be coming from elsewhere.
RandomCSGeek··on Mumbai bans plastic bags, bottles, and single-use plastic containers
Doesn't matter if it's 1 y/o or 10y/o. All plastic bags are banned.
RandomCSGeek··on Mumbai bans plastic bags, bottles, and single-use plastic containers
A few clarifications,

1. It's not Mumbai banning plastics, the state of Maharashtra has done so. I live in another district of the same state.

2. Maharashtra is the 18th state to do so. So this is not as much of an unique law.

3. The State has also made it compulsory to utilize plastics waste in road construction.

RandomCSGeek··on Bay Area man must pay $136,000 in tech-support scam against elderly
Extradiction would be unlikely for such crime(even cases of terrorism can take years for extradiction, or may not even take place). But it would be possible to get them arrested in India.

That said, there are literally millions of people in India who have graduated with whatever degree/certificate, can speak English, and are willing to work in any kind of scam, as long as they get money to buy food. You can setup a office in Noida/Mumbai/Pune/Bangalore etc, and hire these people for dime a dozen. Things getting risky? Close everything and start anew in another city.

Problem lies in poor law enforcement in India, and lack of awareness among old americans.

RandomCSGeek··on On paying for software
I can buy apples at a somewhat objective price by comparing the price provided by other sellers in nearby stores. Also the price will be mostly affected by supply vs demand.

OTOH, softwares prices can be affected by too many parameters.

Then again, IT industry is a child when compared to say, mechanical or Civil industries.

RandomCSGeek··on The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
Never heard of any bias towards phone. If anything, people prefer email as it leaves a trail.
RandomCSGeek··on The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
I have heard of another proverb, which translates to "If you throw peanuts, only monkeys will gather".
RandomCSGeek··on The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
TLDR: The best go to US, the next best to MNCs and startups, the rest are the ones you get when you pay peanuts.

Here's how Indian engineers get jobs.

The very top(maybe 0.01%) get directly hired by US MNCs. This gives some people the "Indians are smart" stereotype.

The next top(0.01% - 1%) work for US MNCs in India, or the few top homebred companies. Foreigners will rarely deal with them, as they are working on products, not services.

The next few go into startups and some good service companies. These service companies are costly, after all, they have to pay much higher than what Infosys or TCS would do, to maintain these people. I don't know how many american tech workers come across these people, but a few must be. These people are probably the source of few comments saying that "some Indian workers I worked with were good".

Now, the lower ones, will get into likes of TCS, Infosys and hundreds of small service companies that work on basis of "hire enmasse, at cheap, and sell at little higher cost". Now if you are paying peanuts, it is very foolish to expect people like Linus Torvalds. This gives people the, "Indian engineers are shit" stereotype.

RandomCSGeek··on The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
Indian here. We don't lie. If you ask me if I am a female, I'd obviously won't answer yes to that.

The problem is that it's considered rude to say no when asked to complete a task by a senior. So when you'd ask an Indian developer if he can complete a project in a week, he might say yes even though he's not sure if he can do it. What he would do is say yes, and then give his best try to complete it in a week. Only when he has failed to do so, he'd report his failure.

Basically, saying no is considered as insubordination/cowardice.

RandomCSGeek··on The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
There are 3 different movements. One is for acknowledgement, other two are for yes and no.
RandomCSGeek··on How to get rich without getting lucky
I think a better strategy than trying to be rich is,

1. First decide what is the median lifestyle that you want to live. Then decide how much it costs.

2. Next decide what are the tasks which make you most satisfied. Consider doing those tasks that would earn you at least what is required as per above criteria. As a rule of thumb, the most satisfying tasks(ex: world tour with your spouse) will earn the least.

3. Invest, so that you could switch to doing more satisfying tasks, as your threshold of money to be earned via job will go on decreasing.

There's no point in working hard, doing a job you don't like, to earn millions/billions, when you won't be spending most of it. After all, you might get hit by a car today, and you'll never know how those millions of yours got spent by your kids.

RandomCSGeek··on Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
I think you are confusing between specialization, and a degree in sub-branch. A degree in CS is always valued more than a degree in say IT.

On the other hand, a degree in CS with specialization in Networking, would be more valued than a plain degree in CS.

I'd say if you want to specialize, do a master's. A degree such as above would put the holder in really bad position if that field goes into ice age. In case that happens to master's degree, you always have your bachelor's degree to fall back to.

RandomCSGeek··on The world split into 7 equal areas of population
You can use scatter plot to check that.

Maybe copy the html, convert to csv (http://convertcsv.com/html-table-to-csv.htm), map the corresponding values and plot.

R should be able to do this.

RandomCSGeek··on Ask HN: What is the future of publishing in the age of Ad Blockers?
The "you are the product" model might work, but given that most ad-blockers also block trackers(or dare I say, most people want to block trackers, ads are just collateral damage), you might have to come up with self made analytics/advt tools.

Donations + sponsored content might work as well. Some good youtube content creators use it(eg: Kurzgesagt). But this will work only for very small teams. Even better if you live in cheaper countries with a worldwide target audience.

RandomCSGeek··on Walmart Beats Amazon in $15B Flipkart Battle
Before 90s with all those protections, Indian companies had become sloths. The economy was in bad shape and the govt had no option but to open up for foreign investors/companies.

If anything, foreign investment/companies have brought better days for Indian customers, even though it means more money draining out to US.

Those industries that are still protected(eg. There are no foreign universities) are still in bad shape.

RandomCSGeek··on Walmart Beats Amazon in $15B Flipkart Battle
> This deal is the result of commonly shared desperation. I get that Walmart is desperate to get into Indian market, but what's the issue with Flipkart. Even though they aren't doing as well as compared to Amazon, from the founder's pov, why would he care if the company goes to Walmart or amazon? After all, he gets the money, and he gets to make a exit(from what I've heard)
RandomCSGeek··on Hello Qt for Python
Why though? Is there some useful benefit that python offers over C++, or is it just another language support so that people more comfortable with Python could use it?

If I were ever to write a desktop app, which one should I choose, given I'm equally comfortable with both languages?

RandomCSGeek··on GCC 8.1 Released
If anyone wants to try this release for C and C++ languages, I have created a Docker image based on Alpine Linux, which you may use. https://hub.docker.com/r/infinitecoder/gcc/tags/
RandomCSGeek··on Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits
Keep treatment free only for accidental injuries or harm caused by third parties.

If a country has cheap treatment though, they could earn a lot through medical tourism.

RandomCSGeek··on Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
It's not about anonymizing, it's about hiding under the mask of some other entity, without their(other entity's) permission. AWS's other customers and various governments won't be happy about aws allowing Signal to do so.

While they could white list Signal, I don't see why they would want to go through this trouble. It's not like any of these public companies care any more about supporting people under oppressive rules, than profit.

RandomCSGeek··on You know how HTTP GET requests are meant to be idempotent?
The problem is not that your endpoint had side effect. Rather, it didn't have any side effect(it is supposed to unsub, and it does exactly that).

The problem is with lack of authentication. Slack's ability to unsubscribe people on their behalf, without their explicit permission seems to be the real issue here.

Even a "I'm not a bot" check would provide some protection.

RandomCSGeek··on Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention
Why wouldn't they do this on their own? Keeping their reputation good with all countries(even the oppressive one's) is an important part of business. After all, amazon has stakeholders to answer to.
RandomCSGeek··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2018)
The ordering for interview process seems to be wrong, or is it an unordered list?

Also, I'd like to know what "Social Economic Justice Round" is. Is it a round where you preferably hire people belonging to socially and economically backward classes, and only hire otherwise if no people from aforementioned categories are available?

RandomCSGeek··on France seizes france.com from man who's had it since 1994
I guess most <country_name>.com domains are not owned by the governments, as .com is quite old, and geeks would have got them long before govts thought of having a website.

To add to the list, brazil.com(website inaccessible), russia.com, india.com(news website), china.com, southafrica.com

RandomCSGeek··on In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis
The problem is not with the exams. When millions try to get past the bottleneck with width of 10K, the competition will obviously be intense. And a developing country like India cannot afford more institutes like IITs, even those that currently exist(the newer ones) need a lot of improvement, especially funding for research.

IMHO, the problem lies with the parents who push/force their children into a race that they don't want to be a part of. Then it doesn't matter if they excel or not, they feel lost and hopeless. The number of classmates I had during engg who had no interest in engg/CS was huge.

Solving this problem would solve a lot of issues. It's getting solved as people are getting disillusioned from Engg == Money. The number of students applying to engg is gradually decreasing every year (80K less this year).

RandomCSGeek··on Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook
I used a aws spot instance to compile GCC for Alpine Linux. It's a decent idea I think, especially if you already know what you need to do.

I had to do a lot of trial and error stuff to get it right, but anyway, I was having that spot instance sitting there almost idle, while using up the credits I got for free, so I had no issues with it.

The C5 instances are great for this kind of stuff.

RandomCSGeek··on Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks
The main issue is with demand-supply difference. There are too many people out there in need of blue collar jobs, and this means companies like Amazon have a chance to push the criteria to get the job much higher, as long as it's legal. This happens in other sectors too. Here in India, there's oversupply of candidates in almost every field, with the exception of those which require highly specialised/costly knowledge(eg: PhD in AI, neurologist), so a lot of companies exploit people by making them work for long hours and at a very low salary.
RandomCSGeek··on Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?
How to make Package Managers cry by Kenneth Hoste. https://youtu.be/NSemlYagjIU

It's funny, but still useful.

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