harichinnan

Coming from India, I would see lobbying as an essential part of democracy. At the end of the day, businesses need a way to get to law makers and get laws passed that favor them. The alternative is in India. There are no real lobbyists like you have in America. Companies find it hard to run perfectly legal businesses in a left leaning country. They resort to bribing even to get things done, something that would be trivial in US. Here in US, you have law makers like Gingrich who take up a job as a lobbyist/consultant for companies while taking a break from their day job. In India they take bribes and continue to work as law makers to perform the same thing. I would take lobbying any day vs. bribing. I think of it like this. Left leaning parties oppose lobbying and eventually end up taking bribes. Right leaning parties OK lobbying and play it by the rules by setting up lobbying companies and declaring themselves as lobbyists.

I feel really sorry for her parents. However your sympathy stems from ignorance of the Indian sub-continent. Middle class kids in India, and I assume Pakistan have the opposite problem of what you say. They are pressured into achieving academic success come what may. The Indian IITs select .5% of the applicants. Delhi university sometimes rejects applicants getting 98% in school because there are many who get even more. Many of them go through multiple "coaching/tuition" classes in addition to going to school. Celebrating someone for obtaining an MCP certificate in addition to grueling coursework actually has a negative effect on already over-burdened kids.

It's not a lie when I say I need 1.5 Y. I'll be super happy to get that. However I might settle for Y reluctantly. There's no lying involved. Besides I have no way of knowing what they got approved.

Any suggestions for a book on Discrete Mathematics with Software.?

Beginner Haskell Solution:

pascal 1 = [1]

pascal 2 = [1,1]

pascal n = [1] ++ sum' (pascal (n - 1))

sum' [] = []

sum' [1] = [1]

sum' (x:xs) = [x + head' xs] ++ sum' xs

head' [] = 0

head' xs = head xs

Couldn't resist using my new Haskell skills.

show' :: Int -> String show' x

|((rem x 3 == 0) && (rem x 5 == 0)) = "FizzBuzz"

|rem x 3 == 0 = "Fizz"

|rem x 5 == 0 = "Buzz"

|otherwise = show x

main :: IO ()

main = putStrLn $ foldl (\acc x -> acc ++"\n" ++ show' x) "" [1..100]

In India such people are branded "street peddlers" and you generally avoid them if you can read English. In US, you call them entrepreneurs and get a news story published in NPR!!!

Happy new year from Houston.

This is the joke of the century. LOL

The choices are very binary. A right choice would be option 2 with right to die if things don't turn out as planned.

This is like I paid for an iPad clone made in China and concluding that iPad's made in China are of low quality. You need to be an Apple or Google or Microsoft or you should have enough money to afford Wipro, Infosys or TCS to successfully get work done out of India.

The awesome ruby developer following all tenants of Martin Fowler vs the curious Joe who hacks with nosql and clojure.

The story ends with OMG!!! Ruby is still awesome.

It's not entirely true in Indian tech industry. Every year most companies lose up to 20 percent of their workforce because they move to higher paying jobs and better companies. This is a serious issue that managers are usually at the mercy of their talented engineers.

The whole point of having such a weird system is to make it "difficult" for you to book a ticket. Think about the "common man" standing in a queue for 4-8 hrs trying to book that ticket when you could ideally book using your coolest newest gadget in seconds. Now that would cause a riot at the railway station booth. In Indian you never have enough resources available for the 1.3 billion people. So everything is rationed, including the online train tickets. It's like the IIT's or IIM's conducting the world's toughest entrance examinations only to select a statistically insignificant 1% of the applicants. Great Indian politics demands badly run government services. Private services are still banned in a number of areas including private universities, public transportation, power, Aeronautics ....

This is the best solution I've heard so far that kills two birds with one stone. You could create a mini housing bubble thereby solving the unemployment and also offer a legal route for immigration for hard working folks. This should also offer a chance of amnesty for all illegal aliens when they buy a house worth 500,000$. Buy a house and get legal status/amnesty for trespassing into the country.

Just one condition. H1B's would be given out only in areas where there's a skill shortage in US. IT jobs are always on the list and that's why H1B's are easily given out for IT. However for other industries, say agriculture, or most factory work, it's impossible to take the H1B route.

The real difficulty is in recognizing that you are stuck. You might be working on 10 different things. You may be making or ogress on 9/10 things. However the one thing that gets stuck may be holding you back on milestones. I've noticed in the past that I would put more effort to get the other 9 things going faster than put an effort to recognize that I'm stuck on a task and that's really important to achieve the milestone. I would be avoiding the task without even being aware of it. A personal project plan helps me notice the lack of progess on a task. I've been reading "Getting things done" by David Allen. Listing out things you need to get done and inventorying them periodically helps me to a certain extent.

Pity no one wants to discuss this. HN readers would've jumped on if this Was a story about Indians getting H1B visas or Indian community in Edison, NJ

Bring on some nice visual analytics on Indian students in US.

It's usually not the patent trolls. It's companies like Apple that they need to protect against. I guess patent trolls don't want you to go out of business as long as they get the "protection money". Besides you have a situation were a country as a whole declaring war on a patent troll. That could create good PR and a favorable judgement.

Think about this.

The first cell phone was developed in 1947 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones

The Internet starts in 1950 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

Tablet computers were prototyped in 1968 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

It's the economic improvement since that created the iPad. iPad is not in anyway comparable to the technological innovation in 1960 that put a man to the moon.

It's like someone using VS2010 and C# 4.0 seeing the SICP book for the first time, or a chance encounter with LISP. And you would know we didn't improve that much since the days we put a man on the moon.

My question is what does that buy me? Switching from an established bank to a mint.com like interface + an unknown bank that holds my deposits. There's no killer app to sign up for your service. Killer apps that I could think off are, (Holding deposits in multiple currencies, Savings account like interest on my checking. Right now the funds I park in checking for immediate expenses don't accrue interests till I move it to savings, Free payment gateway integration, so I could transact with anyone having a credit card like paypal, Free money transfers to any third-party bank in any currency in any country(you could kill western union with this)). Saying that I could grep through my statement more efficiently and visualize the data doesn't cut it as a market disruption.

How is BankSimple different from mint.com searching through my Bank of America account statements? Alerts? Goals? I can do all that in mint.

What matters to HN readers is 10% of Indians own 52.9% of the wealth in India. http://www.livemint.com/2010/10/13203814/Distribution-of-wea...

So even though the country at large is poor, 130 million people could become your potential customers, spending on par with other wealthy nations in the west.

I don't see the chicken and egg problem. The company has lots of money to spend on R&D. So they can spend money on competing ideas and choose winners. Not all companies have money to spend on R&D.

Alternative Fee Arrangements used by law firms could be adopted for this. The following are most commonly employed. 1. Fixed Fee 2. Capped Fee 3. Volume Discount 4. Early Payment Discount 5. Fixed Rate 6. Blended Rate 7. Retainer

The idea is you have a lawyer draft a complex agreement with multiple fee arrangements, most involving some math. And provide an invoice with pre-agreed work descriptions. Lawyers use UTBMS. You should be able to come up with something that you and your client agree. This makes your invoice look more "professional" and easy for the accounting departments of your clients.

I'm an Indian and a hindu. I've been to that temple. It's really sad to think that there would thousands of people around that temple who would go hungry as we speak and this temple has wealth that will pretty much stay locked up for the rest of humanity. It'll never get invested. No next google would come from thiruvanandapuram because of this. People would go on their lives living in terrible houses, driving terrible vehicles on atrocious roads. And Hindu fanatics would organize protests at the first mention of using this for any practical purpose.

You should look at the H1B numbers. Close go 120000 people apply for it and uscis selects 65000 people by lottery. E eery single person who makes it through has at least a degree in the areas they work on. These people leave their homes and friends and everything they know back home in hopes of making a better living. Does that ring a bell from history? However the h1b visa restricts them to one company and the same job till they get a green card which may arrive after 8 years. Once they get a green card many folks start companies of some sort.

Folks who don't get h1b or green cards often apply for Australia, U.K or Canada. Recent additions to the list are Germany, Scandinavian countries(petroleum), Dubai, Singapore, brazil. Many of these countries offer a comparable standard of living, and government incentives for immigration and establishment of businesses. Also some cities in india and china are fast becoming vc magnets. There may be a day soon when venture capital too gets Bangalored.

You could use plink for setting up reverse ssh tunneling. The documentation on putty and plink has more details.