adityab

I often say that a "scientific temper" is something we should all strive towards - the scientific method is possibly the greatest achievement of civilization - but there are an inexplicable number of people (who have never heard of it) that simply claim that enlightenment ideals are Eurocentric and that my subscription to those (as a non-white) would count as internalized oppression.

By some, nuance is denounced, absolutism is glamorous. Some others cannot be argued with; they grow an argument for every exception to their blanket theories until the entire ideology is a tangled mess of patchwork, at which point the application of this monster to any real-world situation becomes intractable and the evaluation of new observations strongly correlates with in/out-group membership.

It is incredibly sad to see this dynamic being played out by otherwise smart people that I respect.

That you and I have to explicitly advertise our non-white status when saying this for it to hold any water is a travesty, and demonstrates how bad the environment has become.

And should we change our morals and flush away decades of cultivated ethics about juvenile justice because organized crime groups recruit underage people?

Creative suggestions and covering those in detail is a media propaganda

Here's an MP from the upper house of parliament, saying:

"Hands and legs of the males who commit rapes should be broken. A law for this should be enacted in this House." [1]

That's not propaganda. This is happening openly - because this time it's okay for people to show their worst sides.

[1]: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-make-law-to-break-hands...

India should:

1. Not pass knee-jerk laws, it takes a long time to undo the damage.

2. Do away with the death penalty.

Mobs of 'concerned citizens' always turn into sadistic assholes when they know their anger is righteous. But once the punishment of death is off the table, there would be one less way to cause serious damage.

You should see how the discourse in India has become, with good people suggesting more and more creative ways of torturing the rapists; disembowelment, chemical castration, and reversed re-enactment of the original rape have all been suggested.

A national exercise in revenge is sickening. Good, kind people braying for blood is sickening.

1. It applies only to OBC (not even SC/ST)

2. You need to declare your family's total gross income to be entered into the creamy layer. If you declare such an income, you need to pay taxes. And we know how rampant tax fraud is everywhere... The incentives are all wrongly aligned.

Background information:

What is happening is not a religious issue or in any way related to the communal riots 15 years ago.

From Wikipedia:

In India, the Other Backward Castes (OBC) status invokes affirmative action which provides reserved quotas in education and government jobs. In Gujarat, 27% of seats are reserved for OBC (Other Backward Castes), 7.5% for Scheduled Castes and 15% for Scheduled Tribes for a total of 49.5% of all seats. The Supreme Court has capped the maximum reservation at 50% in their 1992 judgement.

What decides if you are OBC, SC, or ST? Your surname, and the community your family belongs to. Note that membership to one of these segments used to strongly correlate once with lower economic status (and therefore opportunities), but in recent years this correlation is significantly weaker.

The agitation is a result of the unsustainable caste politics quoted above. 49.5% of people getting in through a quota is absurd. Now I think that elevating downtrodden sections of society (through economic incentives, or even a reasonable quota) is a good thing. but when half of all seats in universities and stable government jobs are tied to a quota, the playing field for the "general category" is significantly shrunk, and people are going to get frustrated.

The community that is protesting are the Patels. They are huge in Gujarat; they're all over the strong middle class spectrum, and parts of the upper class. What I mean to say is that they are not even remotely an oppressed downtrodden segment of society. They happen to be an entrepreneurial and dynamic class; if you're in the UK or the US, you probably are aware of Patels because they constitute a huge percentage of Indian immigrants/expats. My point being: Patels asking for reservation is ridiculous. I guess only in India can a community demand to be labelled as "backward".

But when the playing field is so small, is it a surprise that everyone now wants their own space carved out?

I hope this protest will die, because animosity between such a large segment of society and others can become a source of problems in the future. But I also hope that it will force the government to rethink the crazy huge reservation system.

People in Ahmedabad are feeling scared and angry right now. Just outside my parents' home, protestors/vandals lit three buses and a bus terminal on fire yesterday. Then there's the police, here's a video of the them going on a power trip: https://twitter.com/ndtv/status/636808983131525120

PS: Not all Patels are asking for reservations, there are a number of dissenting factions as well.

That would require declaring an Emergency AFAIK.

The Indian government is not "banning" Google from doing anything.

> You are saying that he world's poor should become rich enough to pay for Internet, before they can get access to Internet?

In several ways, India has arguably more widespread and affordable internet infrastructure than Europe or the US. And it is getting cheaper all the time.

So the motivation of zero-rating is NOT about helping the poor. It is about the huge market that India represents and the boost in market share that companies with subsidised traffic get.

They've launched a vaguely worded and misleading campaign, abusing their reach to get people's support for Internet.org, phrased in such a way that it is hard to say no to it, see this screenshot: https://twitter.com/prkvs/status/628405660326084608

They profess the need for neutrality in the US, but not in India (or when they do, it is a doublespeak version).

The same goes for Google: http://scroll.in/article/717663/double-standards-facebook-an...

Thanks for the kind words! :)

http://webodf.org/ https://github.com/kogmbh/WebODF https://adityabhatt.wordpress.com/2013/12/16/bringing-opendo...

A js library that renders OpenDocument Format docs in the browser, and lets you edit them collaboratively in realtime - with lovingly, meticulously crafted OT.

We worked on this with 2 years of active development - it is HARD to build a full richtext editing engine from scratch! - but it has recently been suffering from a lack of enough funding to keep the work going. I no longer get paid to work on this, so now there is only one person working on it full-time.

It deserves funding and support. As far as I know there isn't any other project that comes this close to building a full blown FOSS Google Docs text editor replacement.

:)

There are people who care about privacy. They are not 'nutsos'.

Also, a couple of months ago, Xiaomi phones uploaded adsressbook information to their servers without user permission. After the backlash, they issued software updates to ask for consent.

On a general note, one wonders how many instances of arbitrary data uploading they - by which I mean pretty much every 'cloud' integration provider - get away with.

Gather any data, upload it to an IP otherwise publicly known for benign purposes, over an encrypted connection with a closed-source sync daemon, and cover your ass with some vague and easily glossed-over clause in the privacy policy that no one reads. I hope otherwise but I am almost certain something like this exists in every commerical mobile OS today. :-/

ISRO is a totally non-commercial, purely research-oriented organization.

[1]: www.drdo.gov.in/

https://twitter.com/MarsOrbiter/status/514618412417302528

  Location: Germany
  Remote: Good to have
  Willing to relocate: In/around Berlin, yes. Otherwise, depends on the offer.
  Technologies: Javascript (frontend and serverside), C++, Qt, browser APIs, MongoDB (more in the CV)

Email: aditya@bhatts.org

Looking for companies that write technologically interesting software. If you are writing a collaborative text editing system, for example. I have deep knowledge of the quirks and features of modern browser APIs.

I am a generalist and most of my work is reviewable and open source, some of which is on Github [1]. I do not marry myself to a specific framework or stack, but currently use Javascript primarily. I can occasionally do the long hours stretch but prefer a good work-like balance and enjoy my time off. I can work without ego issues and with a cool head.

I have a bunch of good experience in designing document editing systems from scratch, and have special experience in writing eventually consistent collaborative editing tools using OT, being one of the primary developers of WebODF [2].

I can write a rich collaborative editing engine for you, but cannot properly live-code in a collabedit interview session due to performance anxiety - writing software should be a craft and not a stage show. If you can understand that and trust my open source experience, email me and we can talk.

[1] http://github.com/adityab [2] http://webodf.org/

1. The NSA exploited the firmware of a Syrian core internet router, and bricked it by mistake. This was an "oh shit" moment (sic). So in it's eagerness to scoop up all digital communications, it killed the majormost way for citizens to communicate while in the midst of a civil war. Great.

2. There is a project called "MonsterMind", which 100% automates adversarial hacking in retaliation to detected attacks. Very Strangelove-ian, as the article says.

EDIT: Typo, thanks to not having had coffee in time.

@Joepie: Consider contacting organizations such as NLnet (http://nlnet.nl/) for advice or support in these matters if you are in need of it. They support free software makers - the Unhosted (https://unhosted.org/) project comes to mind.

For example, PDFy does not require an account or registration; there is a refreshingly honest ToS page if you care to read (I suggest you do) - https://pdf.yt/tos

I may not agree with all of his political ideas, but it is clear that the hacker spirit - writing code that is unencumbered by copyright and patents and other essentially restrictive BS, that simply accomplishes a certain task effectively, is something worth applauding and supporting.

There are few people in our 'industry' who are so ideologically motivated to write genuinely free software (many of his projects are under the WTFPL). Consider supporting him.

Or do you dismiss anyone who strives to make things better as "false utopian" and "acolytes"?

This is true for most people on Github, unfortunately. There's even an oft-repeated name for this phenomenon: "github monoculture".

The alternative to using the CLI is not Github. He dislikes the fact that a large % of new users of git are wholly dependent on a proprietary service.

This is a very understandable attitude if you are involved in the 'older' open source communities, where people still care about free software in the freedom sense, and do not simply treat open sourcing as a PR advantage.

Understand this: If you require contributors to your project to use Github/similar services, these users are filtered by those who are willing to accept an unreasonably coercive ToS - and yes, most ToSes of American cloud companies are coercive.

It is not a condescending attitude towards people. It is a deep caring for the principles of software freedom - freedom for both users and the people who make the software.

Your website, http://whisper.sh, is slow to load, and only displays a blank white page.

Also, the name is uncomfortably close to https://whispersystems.org/ which focuses on private communication.

However a cursory look at the source reveals that it actually uses the diff-match-patch technique and not OT, which is fine for plaintext, but ultimately a bad choice for Quill...

To be fair, I have not investigated the implementation more.

Why do these interesting OT-powered projects never live long enough? Notable exception being Etherpad... /rant

Questions to GoInstant folks:

1. Quill is a good project. Will it live on? I remember noticing Quill when starting work on a very similar product (not yet released) with the same working name. ;)

2. What happens to the OT API? Will you open source it for the benefit of the public?

Shameless plug: The WebODF [1] Editor is a very powerful but rather underfunded project that aims to surpass Etherpad in terms of features, which is possible due to it's technical design. Funding would ensure that people would get something that could one day approach Google Docs' word processor, feature-wise. I've been working hard on it with three other developers for the past two years but money is always required. :(

[1] http://webodf.org/

Ah, damn. The "text" version of the page which I tried to read does not contain that phrase at all. Bad OCR, I guess. :/ In any case, I do not see how it significantly alters my indignation at it; if some 3-letter agency decides to wink, wink nudge, nudge and label an inconvenient person as a known terrorist as per the aforementioned broad definitions of the word, that person is likely screwed.

> Also, you chose not to include the following sentence which described how such a presumption could be overcome if the investigative body in question had credible information to the contrary.

That subsequent sentence adds absolutely nothing that is contrary to what I pointed out. It only says that the investigative agency has the power to judge someone as guilty, but also to later change it's mind if it finds evidence of non-guilt. It can blacklist me. It can remove me from the blacklist if it so chooses, but I don't care about that, I do care that it can blacklist me though. Therefore I do not see how not including that sentence changes the meaning in any way, let alone 'totally'.

> Finally, you overlooked the fact that 'nominators' in this context refers to other government agencies, relying on existing procedures for designation of someone as a 'known terrorist', and that said procedures form the due process in question.

Procedures, procedures, procedures...

My purpose was to highlight that nowhere in this thing that you call "due process" is a judge or the target kept in the loop. Just the existence of a "process" does not mean that it is due process

> Such designation is presumptively valid in that situation because the FBI itself is subject to law.

You seem to be assuming that if there is a process, it is due process. If an agency is officially subject to law, it will never act contrary to law.

> Essentially, you're demanding that trial precede investigation.

Not exactly... I'm demanding that they get a warrant. Getting a warrant != having a trial.