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chdir

1,825 karma · joined June 17, 2014

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chdir··on Show HN: The actual registry price of 246 TLD's
what's the reason for tld price variation ?
chdir··on Indian government says citizens don't have absolute right over their bodies
This account live tweets the proceedings from Supreme Court : https://twitter.com/gautambhatia88
chdir··on Indian government says citizens don't have absolute right over their bodies
> That was an excellent move by the govt

The jury is still out on this one. Any hard proof or statistics that say otherwise ? Wish there was more transparency.

chdir··on India's Misguided War on Cash
Some stats on Income tax payers from India :

"Data shows only 1% of population pays income tax, over 5000 pay more than 1 crore ($145K USD)"

Only "six individuals fell in the high-end earning bracket of Rs 50-100 crore (7-14 Million USD) of salary income."

Wow ! Just 6 individuals. India's got NO shortage of millionaires & billionaires. The abysmal income tax collection clearly indicates a gaping problem with rules & their implementation.

- Source : http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/data...

chdir··on India's Misguided War on Cash
The modus operandi (of loopholes) is nothing new, it's second nature to many businessmen. I wonder why there weren't enough checks in place when the plan was announced.
chdir··on India's Misguided War on Cash
"It’s like the PM is cleaning a pond to kill the crocodiles, forgetting that crocodiles can survive even on land. Big crocodiles have survived. Small fish have died." [1]

The immediate reaction of the common man on de-monetization of higher currency notes (followed by replacement with newer ones) was euphoric. A popular thought process was that people can tolerate inconvenience for a few days because it'll invalidate the "black money" [2] and thus rein in inflation, property prices and corruption to some extent. However, the moment this was announced, people have been brazenly finding loop-holes to convert their currency notes through unofficial means. Example : back-dated receipts for expensive items (gold, cars, property), fake accounts, hiring poor folks for conversion via official channels, bulk purchase of coupons / cards for essential items that are permitted to accept older notes, etc..

[1] http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/demo...

[2] Untaxed money, undeclared income, ill-gotten money via bribery, fraud etc..

chdir··on Postgres full-text search is Good Enough (2015)
> For anything serious or consumer facing it's crap

I've run consumer facing products with real-time autosuggest using postgresql's search. Calling it crap is hyperbole.

chdir··on Pokewalk
On-premises version : https://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=treadmill
chdir··on Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
I know you are a very talented developer so I'm curious :

Why another uptime monitoring service ? There are about 20-30 existing services [1] with a wide variety of features. I agree you've got a great interface and you'll get there feature-wise too. But are there any significant technically sound reasons to switch to your service ?

P.S. My question sounds blunt but I don't mean to belittle your effort.

P.P.S. Here's a list of services that do performance / uptime monitoring in various forms. Some might be incorrect / irrelevant, but just to convey an idea of the crowded space :

[1] pingdom , site24x7, statuscake, statuspage.io, status.io , runscope, opsgenie , newrelic , datadog, Librato, Scout , Skylight , Server Density , Stackify, OpsDash , Boundary, Netuitive, Keymetrics, Appsignal, Appdynamics, copperegg , stackdriver, xmatters, uptimerobot, AWS route53 health check , nagios, t1mr.com, Visualping, diff.io, Obvious.io, Stashboard, Cachet, updown.io, Pingometer , stillalive, alertbot, vigil, AWS Cloudwatch, Cloudability, StatusGator, CloudCheckr,

chdir··on NASA Data Shows Toxic Air Threat Choking Indian Subcontinent
I think you are missing the point. The protest should be against polluting the city to power a non-necessary activity by not going to the mall.

AND if the government purposely delayed an electricity connection by months or years, then you should protest against them too. The above problem doesn't seem to be an issue of supply & demand of electricity, but more of a power tussle between the builder & authorities for possible kickbacks.

Related, it seems like India is almost power surplus according to these sources : [1] [2] [3]

[1] http://www.businesstoday.in/magazine/features/we-can-tell-th...

[2] "By the end of calendar year 2015, India has become power surplus country despite lower power tariffs" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_India

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=india+power+surplus

chdir··on NASA Data Shows Toxic Air Threat Choking Indian Subcontinent
Amenities !

You may not get your favorite loaf of bread, although you'll get fresh organic eggs. You may not be able to watch the latest movies in a theater. A good gymnasium probably won't exist, but you can always run in a grass field. There are countless other differences. People are materialistic & not everyone can make that compromise :)

chdir··on NASA Data Shows Toxic Air Threat Choking Indian Subcontinent
A related story : There's a mega mall in Chandigarh, India that wasn't given approval for a power connection for quite some time (politics / corruption).

Real estate is super expensive & the owners couldn't afford to sit idle and play games with the government so they decided to run the mall from morning till night on diesel generators. That's ~ $4500 of diesel each day, probably 6-8k litres. This is an example of a pollution source that's completely avoidable. I'm not sure for how many years this continued on.

What's worse is that there was no widespread public outrage. Why didn't people boycott the mall that's polluting their city and at the same time put pressure on the government to set things right ?

For a perspective, the city I'm talking about is a modern affluent city, close to Delhi (~ 160 miles). Home to a lot of politicians & celebrities, one of the most well planned cities in the world [1] & one of the cleanest in India [2]

[1] http://www.indiatimes.com/culture/travel/9-most-well-planned...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanest_cities_in_India

[3] http://www.tribuneindia.com/2013/20130407/cth1.htm#5

chdir··on NASA Data Shows Toxic Air Threat Choking Indian Subcontinent
Vehicular pollution, construction dust, diesel generators are a common problem in almost all big cities in India.

However you are looking at the advantages of villages as a visitor with a point of view towards being closer to nature. There are other problems in villages that you probably won't encounter unless you live there on a day to day basis. Finally, grass is always greener on the other side (holds true for both villages & city dwellers).

> A large number of people need to die due to cancer for it be taken seriously

Cancer isn't uncommon in villages and city pollution isn't the only cause.

chdir··on A Tragic Loss
> automation encourages carelessness

Is that a hypothesis or are there statistics on accidents & fatalities to back it up. Curious, not denying what you say. I don't have statistics either.

chdir··on A Tragic Loss
If autonomous cars can lead to a significant reduction in road fatalities, then we aren't we in the right direction ?

I was hoping that the discussion here would consider the outcome of autonomous vs non-autonomous cars in totality instead of having an emotionally charged outburst against a big corporation.

Yes, maybe this is not the right time for Tesla to go all defensive but that's expected & that's how almost any company would respond. Why waste all the energy discussing that only.

Yes, people will get careless with autonomous cars, but don't they do it with regular cars too ? Cellphone, coffee, makeup, etc. So I disagree that autonomous cars have to be perfect.

An automobile is like a weapon in the driver's hand. If they aren't careful, they can hurt someone including themselves. Autonomous systems are there to help reduce the chances of mundane accidents due to the driver being distracted or less than capable. They are not their to replace a human yet.

My point of view is that if a human can't avoid a collision, don't expect the autonomous system to fill the gap. It's their to catch "some" of the errors that a human might make, it's not a foolproof safety net.

chdir··on Show HN: “OK Google” – Explore Google Now voice commands
Kudos to a clean & useful design.

As a side note, it makes me wonder that with all the brainy AI, it's we who are still learning computer's language instead of the other way around. I hope that'll change in the next 3-5 years, where we don't have to memorize the syntax & limitations of voice commands.

chdir··on Show HN: Wallarm – Protect your web apps or APIs with fast Nginx-based instances
MVP it may be, but taking pictures of your screen with a camera creates horrible artifacts. Why not use screenshots for your banner images ?
chdir··on Show HN: Bookmark and Annotate Webpages with Others
I've used various bookmarking / annotation services for the past 7-8 years, some as bookmarklets, others as extensions. None of them ever evolved into a great community.

What's different about this one ? It looks like an MVP but without a mention of how it stands out.

Here are a few from the endless list ...

https://www.diigo.com/

https://hypothes.is/

http://annotateit.org/

https://annotary.com/

https://www.scrible.com/

http://genius.com/web-annotator

chdir··on Finding an ATM Skimmer: It pays to be paranoid
Takeaway : Make an Uber/AirBnB/<Unicorn> for ATMs
chdir··on PayPal Restores Seafile's Account after File-Monitoring Row
Hate them. They've burned charitable events, humanitarian fundraisers. It'll take a while for their momentum to die down, but I pray they disappear eventually.
chdir··on Mark Zuckerberg Covers His Laptop Camera. You Should Consider It, Too
The odd thing is "black" tape over mic & "clear-ish" tape over camera. Shouldn't it be the other way round.

Oh, and I try to find a tape that matches the laptop color so my paranoia isn't visible from a mile away.

chdir··on Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay
I think of these practices as "Hoarding" & "Price Gouging" rather than business sense. More like taking advantage of people without adding any value to the trade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_gouging

chdir··on More awful IoT stuff
> If I choose to expose this over the internet, great!

And I can't even control which of my apps should not connect to the network. There are lots of fun apps e.g. games, photo editing etc. where internet connectivity is solely needed for ads. I'm OK with that. However I don't want them uploading any personal information to their servers. I wish I could stop that.

chdir··on Scammers Game Amazon A-Z Policy By Replacing iPhones With Clay
> bought 10 extra copies and sold the CD keys on ebay for about 3x retail pricing

> ebay withdrew the money from my account and refunded it to the buyers

Wicked karma :)

When Nexus 4 was launched, I ended up with multiple devices (automated parallel purchases). It gave a lot of joy to sell them at cost (on craigslist) rather than cancel my purchase or pocket the premium they could've fetched.

chdir··on Ask HN: Microsoft Computer Vision API or Google Cloud Vision API?
A request to those suggesting "why not X" or "consider X" : If you could mention a reason or two favoring X over Y, that'll help OP & future visitors.
chdir··on Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B
MS : "If you don't upgrade to Windows 10, we'll create a linkedin profile for you."
chdir··on Google Street View banned in India due to security concerns
This thread seems like a release valve for all the pent-up anger against the government & its policies. On the bright side, we are all on the same page. Any ideas on how we can channel this into something constructive to take a step towards fixing the system ?
chdir··on If no-one helps you after a car crash in India, this is why
> - Want a train ticket to travel within India? Login to the IRCTC exactly at 8 am, and pray that the next 5 seconds is your lucky time.

This if incorrect. Train tickets are available online round the clock (almost). It's the "tatkal" (last-minute / emergency) bookings that opens at 10 AM. The system is under immense load, and despite that the availability has improved over the past 2 years.

Indian rail network, despite its shortcomings, is pretty amazing I think. It moves the nation. It's also one of the largest employers in the world [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers

chdir··on Man sued for $30K over $40 printer he sold on Craigslist
Does it help to have a generic boilerplate contract (jurisdiction-wise) signed by both buyer & seller for such transactions, where the buyer would sign that they have inspected the item to their knowledge and assume full responsibility of the purchase, and that they won't hold the seller responsible for blah blah. At the same time, the seller assumes that they have given up ownership of the said item for whatever money they've received in this transaction ?
chdir··on Google stores voice searches
Spooky, because I'm conscious about privacy & regularly check that my tracking is limited to only the things that I explicitly allow. Yet, somehow Google managed to flip it on for a few weeks over the past 2 years.

As someone else pointed out, 'app updates' or 'adding a new device' resets these settings. If I had one of those "always on" devices, it would have a lot more conversations stored, some that don't even start with the hotword.

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