iliekcomputers

If you read the history books, people in the West have been predicting the death of India's democracy ever since Independence.

It hasn't happened, our democracy is as strong as it's ever been, with a much higher voter turnout than most western nations. We also have a myriad of political parties in power in different states, from communism in Kerala to right wing governance for years in Gujarat.

The US, in comparison, has very low voter turnout even for their presidential elections and extremely popular candidates like Bernie Sanders can't even fight the election, because apparently, a true democracy doesn't allow you to choose from more than 2 choices.

India has its flaws, but all countries do. Doomsayers will keep predicting death, while the people working towards betterment know the flaws and will try to fix stuff instead.

I'd have expected HN to have more of the second view, and I'm pretty disappointed to see that that's not the case.

Payment apps are very popular in India, especially in urban India. Most people have one of Paytm, Google Pay or PhonePe installed.

These companies have too much control over public discourse.

I'm not that good at articulating why I think a lot of what's news these days seems mostly irrelevant to me, but I was very influenced by Aaron Swartz's blog post [0] about how reading the news is a waste of time very often.

[0]: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

Thank you!

I've decided to host a Mastodon instance for usage among my friend circle. I'm hoping that that brings down the negativity a fair bit.

I have found taking notes to be very helpful for a sort of spaced repetition. It helps me retain more from the books / articles I read.

The main benefit that I'm trying to get is well explained in one of Andy Matuschak's notes. [0]

[0]: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z6UDDkom8Aifg6mLdjT1sPtbMBwe...

Thank you!

Could you link said paper?

I would assume most engineers would like to spend time building stuff instead of migrating already built stuff to a different but kinda similar language.

I don't think it's unreasonable to not want to do a CoffeeScript to TypeScript migration full time for an entire year. It's basically the equivalent of creating a "tech-debt" team and giving them only tasks which pay down tech debt. Sure, there are situations where tech debt needs to be paid down and you could make an entire team do it for an year, but the engineers will probably not _like_ being on the team.

It's just basically me taking notes on the book that I'm currently reading (consciously limited this to 1 book at a time). I underline interesting things while I'm reading and then try to write up notes every weekend. This basically means that I go through the things I read again (some sort of spaced repetition), but this time I know what the interesting parts of it are already. Then it's just a case of going through them randomly some times over the week for more spaced repetition.

The implementation is just a bunch of markdown files in jekyll. (https://github.com/paramsingh/paramsingh.github.io)

I've personally had the feeling for a long time that most of the things I write don't feel very worthy of entire blog posts. That meant that I just didn't write anything. However, writing stuff up is a really great way to actually absorb what you read / study.

So I decided to start taking public notes: https://paramsingh.github.io/notes/

I don't hold my notes to the high standard of a blog so they can be works in progress or just random things.

I'm a contributor to the MetaBrainz Foundation (maintainers of musicbrainz.org and other projects) and have written a few blogs about my contributions [0][1]

[0]: https://paramsingh.github.io/2018/moving-acousticbrainz/

[1]: https://paramsingh.github.io/2017/gsoc-2017-hacking-on-liste...

Could people just join via phone call? Is it possible to get the meeting specific phone number from the meeting ID?

What does filing "Confidentially" mean? How are buyers supposed to see what they're buying?

In this day and age, who thinks that "homos" is a good label to use? And this is at Google, holy crap. How does a place that I'd expect to be filled to the brim with forward thinking techies even hire a person who thought this was a good idea?

You can feel good about a workplace and still leave (need a change, better opportunities elsewhere etc)

Not to ruin the joke, but I'll just clarify that "mitron" is actually Hindi for "friends" and is used by our Prime Minister a lot (especially in speeches).

If you want to read a book about India, you could read "Delhi" by Khushwant Singh, it is a pretty cool book about India's most interesting city. =)

We wanted to take our own shot at building a reliable open service with new tech. We're also much more focused on providing open and easy access to the data we have as conveniently as possible, so that people can build cool stuff with it. Right now, we provide a Google BigQuery dataset [1] that you can run any queries on. It has around 70M listens from 1300 users.

[1] https://blog.musicbrainz.org/2017/08/05/listenbrainz-data-is...

I worked on two cool open source music technology projects called ListenBrainz [1] (basically an open source version of Last.FM backed by the MetaBrainz Foundation, the people behind MusicBrainz) and AcousticBrainz [2] (a project trying to crowdsource acoustic information about music and release it as public domain). We released a beta for ListenBrainz over the summer and I've been working on data dumps for both ListenBrainz and AcousticBrainz for the past few weeks.

[1] https://listenbrainz.org/

[2] https://acousticbrainz.org