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kops

194 karma · joined March 8, 2008

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kops··on GoAngular - build realtime, collaborative apps with AngularJS and GoInstant
WebSocket book(oracle press) at the beginning of this month, TogetherJS a few days ago and now GoAngular/Instant. For me the timing couldn't have been better. TogetherJS has references to hosting your own server, but I couldn't find something similar on GoInstant. I am still digging around on their site though.

BTW, what did you end up doing? Did you build something of your own? Any gotchas you would like to share? I am investigating if Nginx will co-operate with the websocket connections and what will be the price of maintaining live connections to a bunch of clients. I am kind of inclined to build and run my own server...

kops··on How to lose $172,222 a second for 45 minutes
Despite the gun brandishing, that conversation looks too polite to have ever taken place on a trading floor :-)
kops··on Is Wikipedia for Sale?
Same here. HN still requires some energy on my part to parse the information as there is a significant amount of noise on account of self promotion/PR. On wikipedia my hit rate is almost 100%. I usually get what I want...
kops··on Is Wikipedia for Sale?
Surrounding yourself selectively with intellectuals, is a luxury only super rich can afford(or can they?). I can live with a little bit of bias, PR or bullshit here and there. Of course, I assume, probably incorrectly, that I can tell the difference ;-)
kops··on Is Wikipedia for Sale?
I look at wikipedia as a cafe where intellectuals come and chat.

Do I want to continue listening to this chatter? Hell Yes. Nothing else comes even close in terms accessibility.

Will I stake my life on the information taken from wikipedia? Absolutely not. I wouldn't even cite it as a reference anywhere.

kops··on GehriRoute – Create and share routes (Beta invitations open)
I am from north India, but I didn't get it either. If it were spelt as "Ghera" I might have had some luck, but the moment you swap 'h' and 'e', I am lost.

As someone else suggested, stick a sentence somewhere right on top indicating what this site does e.g. "Claim and share your favourite route maps with friends" or some such thing.

Good luck

kops··on Ask HN: Making a living selling software components, not SaaS?
I get your point and fully agree with it.

But it makes me wonder when exactly we start to call something over-engineered. The same function will be implemented differently depending what you are going to feed into it i.e. if the numbers are sufficiently large then you need to worry about integer overflow etc. Probably a function definition should be considered incomplete without pre/post conditions.

kops··on LinkedIn's Series B Pitch to Greylock: Pitch Advice for Entrepreneurs
Not that I like the design either, but a successful guy has taken a non-trivial amount of time to share his experience/wisdom, so the only think I can say is "thank you".
kops··on Ask HN: Thoughts on our MVP that helps people find a better career?
As I said college degree is a good starting point. Next you could collect a few other pointers such as the optional courses a student has taken, their interest in particular industry or field, the people they admire, the place/country they would like to work in etc. All of these can serve as signal to what this person wants. You can even collect these attributes, and some data about the people who are already successful in the industry and build a neural network or some other algo that predicts the most fruitful path for a graduate. All this will give you signals where to concentrate your efforts w.r.t. an individual.

As for reading my mind, that's a little more involved and probably unprofitable/unscalable venture. But just because you asked, i will take a shot. I have always thought about a placement agency where I am not the one being sold but I buy the services of this agency to be on a lookout for jobs/opportunities for me. If this agency manages to become reputable, then companies will seek their help to staff their projects. Once the project is over I move to next interesting thing regardless of the company. I imagine this sounds like a very good consulting firm, but in my version the agency is to be honest to make its money purely from me either as direct fees or retainer or whatever. I should not have an iota of doubt that they will sell my resume to xyz company for a bunch of money and shaft me. The customers of this company will be people like me who are introverts and absolute retards at networking. That's not a pledge to buy anything :-) I think what you are doing is good. Stick to it :-))

kops··on India to launch its first mission to Mars [video]
Many a times I used to be stuck behind an ISRO bus while driving to office. Their bus can be described as more suitable to transfer prisoners than the best minds in the country. Then they will go off to work on rocket science as I inched my way towards building a web application for GM. Feels kind of weird. I guess it is about time that their funding is increased to be more in line with the quality of people they have and their contribution to the country.

Hats off to the whole lot at ISRO, BARC, TIFR and myriad other such institutes...

kops··on Ask HN: Thoughts on our MVP that helps people find a better career?
> Discover companies and roles you've never considered

Can't resist saying that linkedin already does that. The kind of jobs they keep suggesting to me are just hilarious.

Your site looks good. Just checked a familiar company's listing. It looked nice.

And I agree, if you are targeting recent graduates, then search by degree is a good starting point. Ideally you should be able to read my mind and my dreams :-), but as a startup going by something that you can feed straight into a simple algorithm is the way to go.

kops··on India to launch its first mission to Mars [video]
If you don't go and take a peek from across Khyber pass, then someone else will come and screw you for hundreds of years.

When you rely on suppliers too much, then you keep buying and selling to Arab traders, and don't develop naval capabilities. Again a tiny country from other side of the world will send a force on your shores and you will be screwed for 100s of years.

When do you intend to learn a lesson?

You may be living in the la-la land where relying on US infrastructure for a small fee looks like a great idea, but you would do well to consider what if Obama decides he doesn't like Indian anymore. Americans sent a warship in Bay of Bengal in 1971 in support of Pakistan. If you leech onto their GPS then it is not hard to imagine that you will have to seek their permission before tackling any troublemaker in the region. You may not have a problem with this setup, but many others do.

Now to see what happens to the countries that don't go beyond their coasts, look at the allocations of arctic or antarctic regions. Do you want the smallest share of the pie when moon is being mined?

And then there is China. Have you spoken to someone who can recollect what fear people lived in 1960s. In my opinion both space and nuclear program of India are not a luxury, they are necessary tools to tackle existential threats. And both of these programs have run very cost effectively with good results.

However, if you feel particularly philanthropic, then nobody stops you from being the messiah. Mother Teresa didn't come on HN to change the world. Go do what you pretend to believe in..

kops··on Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
I first spotted that book in 1993, when a semi-illiterate guy passed it to my dad. The book came from a person who runs a school "Feynman public school" in a place called Bharatpur in northern India. It was the best thing that happened to me in 1993 and there was quite a lot that happened that year in my life...

The part that got me hooked was "he fixes radios by thinking" and then sure enough I learnt a bit of safe-cracking too :-)

His lectures on physics were the most beautiful books sitting on my shelf during my school years(never read them), but in India cool kids aren't supposed to be theoretical physicists... they are supposed to be Engineers..and so here I am...

kops··on TED talks are lying
Most of your post is lost on me. I am sorry, I'm not a native English speaker...neither am I particularly good at deciphering stuff written by people smarter than me...my problem, I know...sorry...

However, I would like to say that I do know the importance of shoulders of the giants our current world stands on. If there were no Intel in 1961, then most likely there would be no iPhone in 2006, if there was no DNA model in early sixties then there will be no stem cell advances now. The point I was trying to make was that the fact standing on the shoulders of theses giants gives us a better shot at the kind of problems our predecessors couldn't even dream about. So the only time better than now, will be in future....when I am long gone up in smoke....I have absolutely no reason to complain...

edit: typo

kops··on TED talks are lying
The Dude invents phone (late 1800) > phone goes wireless (1980's) > iPhone (2006-7)

Dudes invent a a computer (1940s) > availbable to public (1980ish) > internet > I know more than my teacher and my dad

Dude invents penicillin > 100 years pass > people complain about not enough donors (1990s) > stem cells(now)

That looks like a rocket ship to me... and we are about to take off as far as I can tell....so buckle up man..

Or may be not if you are still carrying the glass slab from 1989...

kops··on TED talks are lying
Exactly. I may not gain an iota out of it, but I will trade an Elon Musk over a Prince Charles any day. We are gradually moving towards a society where inheritance may not be illegal, but hopefully it will be irrelevant. To me this sounds like the greatest achievement of human race...
kops··on Facebook PHP Source Code from August 2007
LOL:-) I know the feeling.

Someone recently mocked a full-stack-developer on HN as "I can javascript and servers too..". Oh man, how it made me cringe...In another 10 years, may be I won't have to. Off to dreaming...and coding...where is google....and stackoverflow of course...

kops··on Is TDD Worth It?
I have committed professional suicide on more than one occasion by voicing my doubts about the whole TDD and worshipping at the alter of "unit testing school". TDD works when problem is well defined but complicated e.g. a datetime library. TDD is a tool to get the grunt work out of way and take care of occasional forgetfullness/regression, but beyond that it is a pile of code that becomes more and more unmaintainable with each passing day. I have seen unit testing code which grows into a snowball over a period of time and people wasting their time to maintain tests that they don't know a thing about. IMHO you shouldn't write a single line of code if you can get away with it e.g. if you need to write unit tests for your add(int i, int j) then I guess you have bigger problems to solve. I always take comfort in something a colleague said long time ago while coming to my rescue in one such outburst "are there any unit tests for *nix, vi, emacs etc, the kind of software I dont see crash very often"

Disclaimer: My TDD worshipping friends seem to do better in their professional lives, which I will shamelessly put down to industry trends/religion rather than the true merits of the methodology ;-) It suits me better...

kops··on The Future of AngularJS
Yeah I don't understand it either. This is very much in line with cryptic style of communication by AngularJS :-)
kops··on Practical AngularJS Examples
https://gist.github.com/kapilpandit/6404978

Disclaimer: I am no frontend/javascript developer. Just getting by.

kops··on Practical AngularJS Examples
As for the structure, I tried Yeoman but quickly gave up due to learning curve and lack of time. I settled on a simple folder structure with minimal grunt file which uglifies and minifies my code. If minification/uglification wasn't a concern then I would have ditched grunt too. Not because I have issues with these cool tools, but purely because I just don't have time to understand them thoroughly. AngularJS itself helped fix my jQuery spaghetti wonderfully though.
kops··on Practical AngularJS Examples
I used this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12592472/how-to-highlight...

Works fine, as long as your URL scheme structured enough. Toss me your email, and I can give you the controller and the tmeplate code with link to the live site. I would have copy-pasted here but don't want to turn HN into stackoverflow.

kops··on Founders' Accents
I tend to disagree. Specially the Indo-European[1] family of languages and even more with the ones which are mostly phonetic. Most of the these languages have rules which you can mug-up and get used to in no time(ok a few months). I would assume learning a language which is pictorial in nature probably will be way more difficult and requires you to completely immerse yourself into it. The ruleset of all Indo-European languages is surprisingly common with varying degrees of sophistication but if you know one of these languages, then it is easier to learn others. But yeah, it probably wouldn't work if you speak none of these langauages.

I wish I had internet and wikipedia when I was in school.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

kops··on Save 50% on All O'Reilly Ebooks and Videos
Thanks. I was mixing up margin with pre-tax profit.
kops··on Save 50% on All O'Reilly Ebooks and Videos
<quote> * O'Reilly Store selling print book (bulk print discount assumed): 95% margin or $38.00 </quote>

Is that really the kind of margins they operate at or is that a typo?

kops··on Save 50% on All O'Reilly Ebooks and Videos
Thanks, that seems to be the only reasonable explanation.

Comparing the prices of a book on oreilly[1] and bookdepository.co.uk[2] seems to suggest a print book has about 50%(just a guess) margin while the ebooks sells for almost 100% margin once it is produced. So knocking the prices of ebook down to 50% to drive sales would make sense. Thanks again,

[1]http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do

[2]http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Programming-Collective-Intel... I assumed that these guys buy the book for 20 dollars and sell for 20 euros and make 25-30% profit. Great site btw with free worldwide shipping although delivery takes anywhere from 1 to 3 weeks.

kops··on Save 50% on All O'Reilly Ebooks and Videos
Same here. But on rare occasions when I do avail the buy-one-get-one-free offer, the second book invariably goes unread.

Also does anyone know why these 50% discount offers are limited to ebooks only?

kops··on Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation
sure...how about you throw a party at your home and a thousand people show up and want in? Unrestricted anything leads to chaos and trouble.
kops··on Why am I being endorsed for skills and expertise I do not claim on my profile?
linkedin guys are either spammers or they just don't know how to build the "email notification preference" thingy. I suspect they keep this feature broken by design...
kops··on Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
The word "portlet" is like a huge warning sign to me that reads "run...like hell....while you still can...."
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