Hacker News Reader

movingaheadon Amazon Goes After Dropbox, Google, Microsoft with Unlimited Cloud Drive Storage

All cloud storage services offer unlimited storage in one form or another. It will be interesting to see who comes up with the most seamless solution for managing limited on device memory storage with unlimited storage on the cloud. Users may also want different files to be synced on different devices. I have only used Dropbox among all of these services, and its current manual Selective Sync is a clumsy way to manage data.

movingaheadon SaaS: 4 Mistakes We’ve Done During Our Beta And How To Avoid Them

Everyone starting up should print this out on a paper and stick it over their desk. I have made all of these mistakes myself. Collectively, they suck out usage from your product when you need it most.

movingaheadon Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs

As someone who is a heavy user of both Whatsapp, GTalk/Hangouts and FB Messenger, I find Whatsapp to be much faster than others. So, there could be some technological value to this deal.

Microsoft had its own Live Messenger and Lync too, so the acquisition in both cases was for the user base and the brand than technology IMO.

movingaheadon Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs

They did for prices ranging from $1 - $2 per month. But text messaging does not do groups remotely as well as Whatsapp does.

movingaheadon I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Headley

A terrorist part of the 26/11 attacks on Bombay who was an informant for US DEA.

Which NGO should I contribute to for the DEA to realise that human life has value beyond the territorial borders of United States? White Men's burden is back.

movingaheadon Here’s who probably did that $150 million Bitcoin transaction

In India, if you deposit more than Rupees 50,000 ( roughly USD 850) to another person's account in cash, you need to provide your PAN card number - which is a unique number issued by the Income Tax Authority. I am sure a huge number of transactions are done illegally beyond this system but the threshold for anonymous legal transactions is pretty low.

movingaheadon The Indian and his insatiable appetite for the college degree

Completely agree. The average Indian middle class parent has a lot of other beliefs too which are comfortably side-stepped by their children. In my personal experience, many people use their parents' views as an excuse for their own lack of conviction in what they want to do.

movingaheadon Big buttons are great, but they'd better make sense

Those big buttons seem more like a bad onboarding implementation than call-to-action buttons.

movingaheadon Has the time come to kill the Remember Me checkbox? (2009)

The only major site where I see it checked by default is GMail. Any others?

movingaheadon Has the time come to kill the Remember Me checkbox? (2009)

This is one of the more ideal scenarios. Aren't browsers doing something similar when they send a "Do not Track header"? I can think of other instances where this kind of browser configuration can be very useful.

movingaheadon Two-factor Authentication

Okay, I can set an Indian fallback number, but did not get the SMS.

movingaheadon Two-factor Authentication

I cannot use an Indian fallback SMS number. Wonder, what is behind that.

movingaheadon Beyond Flat

I have only used Android as my primary phone. But, I am still confounded by the back button. For example, I am using twitter and get a notification ( from say Facebook ) and jump in to the app from the notification drawer. I see the photo, like it and want to go back to the twitter app. I hit back expecting to go to Twitter but it takes me to the facebook feed. This is not "wrong" but seems messy.

I wish that Android makes it more clear to app makers what the back button should/can do, and then make them adopt a similar behaviour.

movingaheadon Dark Patterns - User Interfaces Designed to Trick People

I have often wondered about this but never knew this was so universal. The Ryanair example is unforgettable. For someone taking first steps in to UI design, this came at a great time for me.

movingaheadon Bootstrap 3 released

If you are looking for SASS and Rails, this port works great. https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass

movingaheadon Why does Angular.js rock?

As someone who made that choice a while back, I can understand your reasons. I was also familiar with Python from my projects at college and so Django was a natural choice for building a web app. But, I struggled with a lot of basics in Django and then switched to Rails. I can speak with confidence that Rails ecosystem is amazing and the learning curve is easier thanks to the bunch of tutorials and screencasts available.

Though, I hear that the beginner resources in Django have improved a lot lately. If that is the case, it should be an equally good choice.

movingaheadon Martin Luther King Jr. was wiretapped

> Recently on HN people have been acting like the government can dominate the world through wiretapping. As if the NSA can find out a few secrets and people will bow their heads and be silent.

In a democracy where we have constitutionally protected rights, why should one need the courage of MLK to do the right thing. Also, why go through the pain of following a constitution if we define right/wrong by "the will of the people at the time".

movingaheadon The New Google Maps

This and all those other places offering a Google Oauth option prevents me from logging in to multiple accounts on my main browser (Chrome). Although if you do a Google Oauth, it will let you select which email you want to use. I hardly use anything else apart from my personal Apps account, and hence it makes sense to have only a single login on your main browser.

movingaheadon Amazon Acquires Social Reading Site Goodreads

Apparently, Amazon holds a 40% stake in Abebooks which owns LibraryThing. From Pandodaily, "Amazon already owns Shelfari as well as Abebooks, which bought a 40-percent stake in LibraryThing in 2006, so it owns all or part of three of the top social-reading sites."

http://pandodaily.com/2013/03/28/amazon-bought-goodreads-but...

movingaheadon Shoot down the stars

One of the things that I believe leads to fewer people rating things is the amount of mental work involved in giving a rating other than 1/5 star. This is where the like/dislike, up/down systems fare much better.

movingaheadon An open letter to the IIT Graduates

Indian company laws aren't very startup friendly. Also, if you are looking to raise investment from a US based VC, they are much more comfortable in investing in an environment they know better.

Also, there are quite specific advantages of incorporating in USA. Indian payment gateway providers don't offer the same set of features that the Western providers do. This may have changed lately as more payment startups have started in India.

PS: This is based on what I hear from founders at various conferences in Bangalore, and not on first-hand experience.

movingaheadon Show HN: TextRazor, a scriptable text mining API

This is very impressive stuff. I ran a news article through the demo, and the entity recognition was very impressive. Waiting for them to reveal more details on pricing.

movingaheadon Rails has Two Default Stacks

Micheal's Rails Tutorial was my first step in to Rails. I took Micheal's suggestion in the tutorial and spent a few days getting the basics of Ruby.

What Micheal focuses on is teaching you a few things he considers essential to the Rails ecosystem - git, Heroku and RSpec ( He mention the Test::Unit alternative too). I have learnt a lot from his tutorial and this is where I point others new to Rails to go to.

Also, it is better to get acquainted with git while working on a (dummy) project than trying its commands in a vacuum where one doesn't understand its power.

movingaheadon Ice Box Pro: The best of Dropbox and Amazon Glacier combined

The only thing you are right about is that WePay is terrific and I am glad you are not associated with them. How difficult it is to owe up to your mistakes instead of shooting the messenger?

movingaheadon Never Give Your Information To 10 Minute Old Startups

I guess they are using Rails. If they had only taken a few hours to go through a free tutorial like the one at railstutorial.org , they could have avoided this blunder.

movingaheadon As crops rot, millions go hungry in India

What do you mean by 'renewable resources'?

The British rule in India was full of continuous exploitation of the Indian masses, both politically and economically. The value of freedom can't be measured in diamonds.

To learn more, start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_independence_movement

movingaheadon Indian drug company slashes crucial medicine prices by 76%

This is based on my personal experience and those of a few friends at non-IIT colleges.

I know some great teachers too. But, the majority of the teachers are just wasting their time as well as those of their students. There is no love for the subject they teach.

"While I agree that a lot of educational institutes in India suffer from under-qualified or uninspired teaching - I do not believe that it is the core reason of all that is wrong with the education system."

Finding a core reason for the maladies of Indian educational system is a never-ending exercise. But, a lot of problems will be solved if we have more inspired teachers.

movingaheadon How Samsung broke my heart

The disappointment that the Galaxy S III is. To be frank, Samsung has never been the innovator. They copy well and hit the right price points and feature sets. It's over to Cupertino now to lead again. Sorry Seoul, you blew your chance.

movingaheadon Show HN: Filepicker.io - dead simple file uploads

I like the concept and hope the team keeps exploring more. I wonder whether we can get additional information about the image - time, location, people tagged in it etc

movingaheadon Tell HN: YC Application Responses Are Out

Completely agree. The application form makes you think really hard about what you are doing. Every startup founder should try those questions to understand his work better.