luckystrike

I understand your point about the front page graph on the WebROaR site. The only thing I can say on a public forum is that the project is being done inside an organization, and you might know, developers ain't always in control of everything (except perhaps their code). :-). Why would I move out of a project that I had so much fun creating ..

I'll just leave it here for now.

If you ever happen to visit India, do let me know, would be happy to catch up over a beer (or your favorite drink).

Hey, no problem! May be I had a long day here and read too much in to it.

Love your stuff.

Good work by Phusion guys (as usual). It is extremely heartening to see renewed focus on performance by them.

I was a little disappointed to read this comment though:

  Needless to say, we’ve performed our own benchmarks already and have concluded 
  that “the self-proclaimed fastest deployment solution” really isn’t 
  the fastest deployment solution compared to Phusion Passenger 3. ;-)

The comment seemed a little snarky to me. Never met these folks in person, but all I have heard is good things about them. So, I hope it was just a tongue in cheek comment about the competitor solution. :-)

Most of the times competition is good for everyone, as it raises the bar and in general improves helps improve the quality of the solutions.

Hope they keep coming up with more such good things in future.

Disclaimer: I am the co-creator of the 'self proclaimed fastest ..' referred in the post. - http://webroar.in/blog/2009/11/25/comparison-of-rails-deploy...

I am no longer involved in the project, so would not be able to say anything on behalf of the folks who currently taking care of it now.

Almost all the suggestions on hiring in this article are pretty good. The one where I would differ is:

  We're happy to skip over the perfect catch 
  if we don't have the perfect job for the person to do. 

If you already know the person is 'perfect' for your organization, and have the financial capacity to hire him/her, you should go for it (IMO). I would think of it as an investment that would help my business in the longer run.

Right now, a company might be content with their current suite of products, but constant innovation is required in our industry to stay ahead. It could be in the existing products or coming up with completely new solutions.

If people working on existing products have their plates full most of the times, they 'might' not be able to devote as much time as they would like on coming up with newer things, that could further improve the bottom line.

She recently posted about it here that led to a very interesting (and useful) discussion: http://letsfreckle.com/

HN Post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366862

Printer (& Human) Friendly Version: http://www.inc.com/print/579

I take your point that Alex's tone was sarcastic and may be he could have avoided it. But, hey if someone dismissed me as being less dependable etc, just because I am a programmer (or anything else for that matter), I might also lose my politeness for a minute.

Yeah, I would also be eager to see more information on their plans. I hope they would start talking more about them on their blog. I am sure they could get some good inputs if they can get a good community going. (It could be one place where his programming/OSS experience might come in handy.)

IMO, the response was right on the money (no pun intended).

My first thought when I read maxklein's comment was that he is perhaps saying it half in jest. But in case he was serious, I don't think one can just deride a person/organization based on stereotypes. (Hey you programmer of some web application, what do you know about banking, where's your suit and your MBA, you'll do a shoddy job for sure ... etc)

Let's see what they come up with and critique/praise them on what they actually do, rather than carrying prejudices.

As far as I know, currently only YC backed companies can post on HN jobs.

To make it more broader (and perhaps more useful), anyone with more than a certain karma threshold (e.g. 500) can also be allowed to post a job opening on it. A certain number of karma points (e.g. 50) can be deducted for making every job post. This strategy would keep it clean and free from recruiters, and since the post is coming from a 'accredited' HN user, it would possibly have a good chance being interesting and useful enough for most of us.

The additional problem this would solve is that it would allow job postings to be visible for longer durations than what's possible with regular news threads.

Just a thought.

It would be great if you could write a blog post on your views/experiences with respect to startup scene in India. It would be insightful, especially for people like me just starting out here.

I got the exact same response when I left my job a few weeks earlier. I was pleasantly surprised with the overwhelming positive response and support almost from everyone (friends, acquaintances, (ex)co-workers etc). I am based near Delhi, India and entrepreneurship is not exactly a very hot thing here (compared to US).

All the best to the OP and you as well!

Update published on the article:

  Facebook's Response
  After this story was published, Facebook spokesperson David Swain contacted us and 
  confirmed that the appearance of unauthorized apps was a bug:

  "In this case, there was a bug that was showing applications on a user’s 
  Application Settings page that the user hadn’t authorized. 
  
  No information was shared with those applications and the user’s list of 
  applications was not shown to anyone but the user. This bug has been fixed."

  It does appear that unauthorized apps are no longer being added to users' pages, 
  however any unwanted applications that were previously added will still need to be 
  removed manually.

  Men with prestigious degrees and good careers regardless of their attractiveness 
  generally have their pick of wives through arranged marriage. 

I would say its more about 'good careers' than prestigious degrees or intelligence here in India. I am pretty sure even a guy with a 'prestigious' degree but an 'unsettled' career (Startup? NGO Worker?) would have a lot of trouble going through the arranged marriage routine. (Most of the gal's families would reject him even before they get a chance to meet each other.)

But doesn't a guy with a career that is perceived to be good, have an advantage everywhere else in the world as well, when it comes to selecting a mate?

Delhi

If someone starts earning Rs 25000 (~$550) per month after college, generally it is almost equal or close to what most middle-class parents earn themselves.

Being an engineer always provided a possibility of getting a decent job, but the trend was accentuated after the advent of IT Services companies thriving on outsourced work. This in conjunction with a large number of private engineering colleges setup in the 1990's, meant engineering became an easy ticket to getting a decent paying job. And at the end of the day, money matters especially in a poor country. (Btw I'm an Indian living near Delhi, before someone thinks I'm just trying to bash the country.)

On the positive side, things are changing for better. Post economic liberalization in 1991, there are plenty more opportunities for young (& old) people to earn a good living. Overall, economic development coupled with information revolution are paving the way for this and the future generations to take more risks and do what they want, rather than worry about basic necessities of the life.

I was around 10 in 1991, and I have literally seen things/attitudes change in front of my eyes. (May be everyone thinks the same ..). I am very hopeful and optimistic that more people would now start getting in to different things/professions.

  I don't know how long i could stay like this; 
  I don't know how far i can stay unmarried (remember, i am an Indian and 29).

I can relate to that .. :-). I think you are doing great, and am sure this would turn out really well for you.

Off topic:

In my opinion, the current job sites in India are completely broken for the smart programmers who are looking for interesting work. And the few companies/startups who would like to hire such people again fail miserably (most of the times) when they try out these sites.

These sites cater to the majority - companies doing low-end services work & average programmers. (Sorry for sounding elitist here.)

It is a very good opportunity for a startup to bridge this gap. Make a smart programmer meet a smart company.

HN seems to be a good place to reach out for good people but a country/location specific (apart from Silicon Valley) job post doesn't stand much chance of being on the front page for long.

It would have been great if we had a job board for HNers where job posts can only be made by people with a certain karma threshold (e.g. 500) and each of it costs 50 points for the submitter. Allow browsing through the job posts based on locations/countries and type of work.

It is no different from any other job listing out there, but since it comes from a HN user I think it would have a higher chance of being interesting enough for people who hang around here (and other smart people as well who are not on HN).

Good to find people from the same city here. I would be interested to see how many other HNers live around us in Delhi.

Yeah, he is the same guy.

Thanks for the list. And for people like me who don't know much about (some of) them, here is a primer:

  Ian Lance Taylor - gcc maintainer, creator of GNU UUCP
  Rob Savoye - primary developer of Gnash
  Tom Lane - member of the core PostgreSQL development team,  standardization of JPEG
  Lou Montulli - co-authored Lynx, came up with HTTP Cookies and HTTP Proxying
  Jacob Kaplan-Moss - Django maintainer
  Raymond Hettinger - core developer for Python
  Margo Seltzer - Berkley DB architect
  D. Richard Hipp - architect and primary author of SQLite
  Ben Tilly - developed a bunch of Perl modules

Edit: Added standardization of JPEG to Tom Lane's intro.

I guess a better title would have been: "Top Indian CEO: Most American Grads Are 'Unemployable' for his firm"

In my opinion, this article and his views do not deserve too much attention. But it scares me how top management of some of these so called 'software development' firms trends to drift away from reality, and just start equating developing software to having an assembly line like process.

Yes, the title is a linkbait. Here is the what the author says in the post:

  However, I *wonder* if the unfolding events surrounding
  the discovery of critical vulnerabilities in 
  applications developed by LXLabs might have some bearing on the tragedy?

The original new article linked inside the post just mentions the following as 'possible' reasons:

  He lived a lonely life, perhaps unable to come to terms
  with the tragic suicide of his sister and mother a couple of years ago.
 
  He was also deeply upset his company, Lx Labs, in HSR Layout, 6th Sector, 
  had recently lost a project to another company.

I found this explanation quite crisp and useful:

http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/

Yes, it is a good read. Also, it was a good insight for me in to South Indian living/culture of those days.

In my opinion, the best thing about HN is the community.

The insights in to the thought process of some of the smartest people around, and sharing of experience and knowledge, helps in overall intellectual growth. Hopefully, this would help in having a net positive impact in some ways in the respective spheres of influence of the people here.

As far as, jump in 'popularity' index goes for any idea/site that gets covered here, i would daresay HN hasn't yet reached digg/slashdot proportion. And it might never happen as well, given that the focus is to keep it targeted at a specific niche.

p.s. Standing and admiring oneself in the mirror for a long time is generally not advisable. :-)

Original news article: "New Pattern Found in Prime Numbers" - http://www.physorg.com/news160994102.html

Paper: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0811/0811.3302v1.pdf

  1 million lines of code written and deployed into production.  

Just curious. Any favorite ones that we can see? (Applications/Source Code)

I did think twice before submitting this article. Honestly, even i am tired of all the repeated talk on the issue, but this probably had the most balanced and sensible view on the issue, that i have come across so far. I specifically found the section "Some thoughts on common statements" quite good.

If one has a few minutes, reading this might not be a waste of time (as it initially appears from the name and the topic referenced in it), and could give some good food for thought on the social aspect of collaborating with people who are different from oneself.

I hope you would find the following links useful at least in some ways.

PG's Brilliant Essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

How to Procrastinate Like Leonardo da Vinci: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=zs61txc4kwr4kd1q1rj...

Procrastinating Again? How to Kick the Habit: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=procrastinating-again

Letter to a Young Procrastinator: http://www.slate.com/id/2190918/pagenum/all/

Also, a quick search of HN using Google, should provide a lot of food for thought and anecdotes. There have been a number of discussions on this topic here.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+pro...

Series AA Equity Financing Documents have been open sourced by Y Combinator.

http://www.ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html