narendranag

I use kidoodle.tv — all the kids content I want, for free, legally.

Considering how many apps are using Facebook's SDK, shouldn't this be something that FB should be addressing? After all, they are the ones making an SDK available to app developers to help with user-login. Shouldn't the presumption of trust rest on FB?

There is a difference between working conditions, and labour rights. America has first-world working conditions, and third-world (or worse) labour rights.

This is very disturbing — the idea of all human knowledge being a for-profit venture owned by a founder and his investors is wrong.

As a non-American, I have a question about two things that stand out for me (and do correct me if I'm wrong): the first is that Amazon pays no federal taxes. The second is that corporations seem to expect locals to pay for things that they can then make money off — Amazon's installation in this instance but also American football stadiums stand out as an egregious example.

What responsibility (if any) do American companies have towards the communities/societies they exist in (beyond delivering value to shareholders -- wherever they may be)?

Seconded.

Over on Reddit, this was posted as an example of what happens when you don't involve an engineer. The comments thread is worth reading, but the primary point that most people make is that with plug and play hardware, you lose things like high bus speeds.

I don't think the question makes any sense: Hacker News wouldn't exist without the eco-system YC's investments have created.

Mind = Blown.

This should be very interesting: I think kids between the ages of 9 and 15 have started to see FB as the social network of old people (millenials and X-ers) and are spending way more time on Pinterest etc. And Pinterest doesn't give a complete social experience. The new myspace just might become the social network for gen Y (or Z or whatever alphabet we have for them :)

There is broad idealogical/political movement in India along the following lines:

"India" was an extremely advanced civilization that suffered under the Mughals and the British. Before these "foreign invaders" arrived, there existed a body of knowledge that remains unsurpassed.

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This is a revisionist version of history based on cultural supremacy. It has become a compelling political argument, since it contains truisms that are either difficult to test, or jingoism that's hard to resist.

The controversy stems from the truisms, many of which are repeated in Justice Katju's speech. At it's heart however is this idea of India as an ancient nation.

The modern nation state as we know it today was stitched together from multiple nations by the British. Before them, the Mughals also ruled a vast area, but the ruling classes were completely separate (culturally, linguistically etc.) from the people they ruled. And the Mughals never ruled the south, where the Tamils continue to represent one of the last surviving classic (comparable to the Greek etc.) civilizations in the world.

There are those who choose to pick a particular culture as the dominant culture and present that as "India". However, that isn't necessarily true.

Consider this: There are two types of H1Bs in the US. I'm in India, and I have a bunch of friends who went to grad school in the US and were then hired to work at different companies.

The only visa that they get is the H1-B. So, they can't start-up a business of their own, or go work at a start-up. And I'm not sure they're taking American jobs. They get paid the same as US citizens (trust me, they care :)

Then there are the IT chaps who get sent to the US as part of an outsourcing contract. The guys themselves don't get hired — the company they work for (Infosys, TCS etc.) is contracted to do some work and they send a bunch of guys over.

It's called the software services industry and they have positioned themselves as exporters of software in India. In recent times, this has come under some scrutiny, with some sections arguing that they are exporting people and not software. But the projects that they get can be really shitty — maintaining legacy Cobol code and Oracle 1 databases. I don't know if that's work that most Americans will be willing to take.

PS: I have never traveled to the US on an H1B. And I have never worked for any software services company.

EDIT: for typos

Not compuserve? :)

Pratul, what up!

http://jobs.hasgeek.in/view/r1i2o

Or on IRC :)

This is a brilliant article.

It captures everything that's gone wrong with the Indian software services industry — no emphasis on curiosity, exploration, or problem solving. If you think about it for a moment, that's also exactly what's wrong with CS education in the country.

I've been trying to hire a good engineer for the last four months to expand our dev team. We're not a startup — we're part of one of the largest ad/PR networks in the world. We're great paymasters and offer the opportunity to work on some really cool products. And we're based in New Delhi, India.

I've met at least 10 people in the last eight weeks — all of them engineers, and none of them seem to know what we're talking about the moment we say things like NLP or Node. In fact, they're not even curious. Just scared, and uninterested in being pushed out of their comfort zone. For eg, one guy told me he ONLY does PHP using the Cake framework. I asked if he had played around with any other framework, he said no. The only reason he was stuck with Cake was because the place he worked at said Cake, he learnt Cake and he used Cake ever since. I asked about MVC and I got a blank look.

I just wish I could come across another computer engineer (outside the existing team) who's curious about programming, who still thinks it's magical when the code you write translates in to cool stuff happening on your screen and in boxes all over the world. Who realizes that you're not writing software, you creating an experience for a user and every bit matters.

Either they're terribly hard to find, or I don't know where to look :)

This is a terrible article. It almost looks like Sony's PR people are trying to come up with strange stories to make it look like lots of people are culpable for Sony's inability to store date safely.

It looks interesting, perhaps you could put up a screencast that shows me the sort of experience fourleaf offers.

According to the article, ISPs all over the country are rolling out a block sporadically. Around an hour ago, they weren't opening for me (Airtel, Noida, India). Now typepad is.

Good to see you here udai ... and good luck with finding people.

Interestingly, I think FB's demographics map changes when you move to a country like India or Brazil.

Here's what would make my day: an announcement by MS that they will force-upgrade all users to IE9 from IE6,7 and 8. Goodbye clunky images + css + javascript hacks, hello lovely design.

I recently managed a month-long ad-campaign for a client trying to attract Indians wanting to study abroad on both Google and Facebook.

Takeaways:

We spent 1/5th the money on FB to get the same number of people on our landing page.

The % of people filling up the landing page form was approximately the same from FB and Google on weekdays. Google traffic did better on weekends.

FB ads work best when they don't try to do a hard sell. Google ads work better when there is a hard sell.

I think this has to do with user intent. On Goog, people are already looking for something, so directly addressing that is a good idea. On FB, people will look at an ad and get curious only if you get their interest, and it doesn't look like you're saying 'GIVE ME YOUR MONEY' :)

Now imagine combining this with Bloom Energy's solution :)

Drool. Drool. Drool.

Hacking = coding for food.

The Reserve Bank of India has not approved wallet services yet -- and Paypal function as a wallet.

What it means is that you can receive payments into your paypal account, but you can't transfer them to an Indian bank account.

That sounds like a fund freeze to me .. you can make the money, but you can't have it.

Bugger.

Is this story linked more than the NYT story because TOI have come up with a better headline?

As a former journalist, I can say with some authority that the ability to say no does not come easily. Often, "gifts" are passed off as swag, one of the perks of the business, where companies dole out hardware. At no point do they say that the gifts are being given in exchange for a story. But.

This was a kid, someone who hasn't gone to college yet, or begun to learn to look at things that come too easy with a cynical eye.

On occasion, I've had to explain to reporters starting out in the business that gifts received at press conferences etc. need to be viewed with a jaundiced eye. And that the best companies don't hand out their best product as a gift. If they actually want a review done, they'll send in a product to a publication, not an individual. And it is the publication's responsibility to keep track of all items coming in for reviews.

Even if he asked for something, he deserves a second chance, considering his age. The fact that styleguidance.com decided to publish his name for all to see is their call, and I don't agree with it.

And I certainly don't agree with this submission.

I love it. And I'm an old user.

Your question is well phrased: you have asked for a confirmation, which Youtube has not supplied. That amounts to a tacit admission.

I would suggest using it in a story where you clearly outline your question as well as the answer, and point out that the response does not answer the question. Or you could send out a follow up email:

"Your response, does not contain a confirmation that this ToS change was NOT initiated or modeled in relation to a YouTube API powered website called Totlol (totlol.com).

In the absence of a confirmation, or response to this email, we will go ahead and accept your response as a tacit acceptance that the ToS change was modeled in relation to Totlol.com.

Again: Can you positively confirm that this ToS change was NOT initiated or modeled in relation to a YouTube API powered website called Totlol (totlol.com) which has launched two months prior?

Warm regards, etc."