shortsightedsid

Not necessarily. India for example was ruled primarily by Muslim rulers for over a thousand years but still ended up with a huge Hindu population and a significant Muslim population. If you consider the whole of South Asia, that "Diversity" in religion is even more stark. Since this region has almost 2 Billion people living, it can't be considered as different.

At the same time, you do have a good point. When you consider colonialism, what it represented was non-assimilation. One criticism of British Colonialism in India has been that unlike other Invasions (Greeks, Persians, Central Asian etc..), the British never did assimilate into India. The Mughals for example were conquerers from Central Asia (descendants from Mongols), but dropped their ties and forged new ones in India. That never happened in Colonialism not just by the British but every Colonial power. So, in that sense you are right about assimilation but its a bit more complex than that.

Well, all you have to do is look back a few years in Europe. Until the US enforced peace in Europe, almost every country has been at war at some point or the other. WW2, WW1, 7 years war, 100 years war etc...

Now you could argue that some of it was religious (Catholic vs Protestant), but in general it would be political. What you see in the Middle East isn't a phenomena that's tied to that region but it just so happens to be volatile. Since most of the Western world is peaceful currently, we then to think of everywhere else are violent.

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> almost every other civilized country in the world.

Eh? Not sure what you mean by civilized country. If you mean a richer country vs. a poorer one, then it's a bad choice of words.

1. Samsung is launching the phone in Russia and not a major market like China, US, South Korea or even Europe.

2. The processor isn't an Exynos, but a Snapdragon. That means that they don't know what volumes to expect and are hedging their bets.

3. Tizen itself is interesting but until a few months back support for ARM was very much second class.

IMHO, I don't think putting a 'cute' face to robots make them less creepy. In fact, it's more creepy because the face makes us think of something that looks like a human but doesn't have "life".

Instead, a better robot is one that is clearly a machine. A robot that makes coffee is less scary/creepy if it looks like a coffee machine rather than a humanoid.

Just my 2 cents.

The language itself isn't radically different from most mainstream Algol style languages. That's good because it makes it pretty easy to pick up. In addition to what you mention on variables vs constants, the only feature which is nice seems to switch-cases.

a. No fall through. This is a plus in avoiding bugs. This is minus if you really know what you are doing and want fall throughs b. Pattern Matching in case statements. This is bit interesting and should take care of the previous case.

Other than that my first impression is it's a mishmash of various programming languages. Everything else that they demo'ed seem to be features of XCode (rewinds, variable lifetype analysis etc..) rather than the language itself.

Actually, this is a great point. As someone born and lived almost all my life outside the US, I just couldn't understand the Fahrenheit system. Having spent the last few months in the US, I went the opposite way to try and force myself to understand Fahrenheit and what I found was very surprising.

Fahrenheit actually makes sense if you consider it from a weather perspective. The only way to use the Fahrenheit scale is to look at it as percentage of body temperature. Now, I know that the body temperature isn't 100 but 98.4. If you keep that part aside for a minute, it's very easy to explain the Fahrenheit scale. 50 degrees is 50% of your body temperature. 32 degrees is 32% of your body temperature. 100 degrees means that weather is equal to your body temperature. That means things like if the weather is hot or cold is just percent of body temperature. Also, 0 degrees is the temperature at which brine freezes. So, no matter how much salt you add, ice will not melt.

Historically, when the Fahrenheit scale was invented, body temperature was supposed to be at 100. It was later realized that the body temperature is slightly less but no correction to the scale was made.

Every other scale makes no sense to me. I convert pounds to kgs, miles to kms, gallons to litres etc.. all the time just to get a sense of measure. But for the weather, Fahrenheit is really good.

I wonder how many on HN think they are smarter than the average reader.

I don't think it is a question of good guy or not, rather it's about honoring the contract. The moment you sign up for something you are entering a contract to pay. It's your obligation to do so. Now the other side can choose not to enforce that, but that doesn't make them a "good guy".

E.g. If you rented out an apartment but stayed at friend's place for a month, then is the landlord going to skip asking for rent for that month? No. Does that make him a bad guy? No. It's your responsibility to pay for rent. Same thing applies to car loans/leases/rentals, Newspaper subscriptions and Gym memberships. So, why should SaaS pricing be different? Granted an app can easily figure out if you haven't used their system that month, but then so could a gym.

Any job or work can eventually become frustrating. That's why its called a "job" or something your "work" for. Even if you work for the greatest company in the work with the best engineering driven "culture", there will be something that will hinder you due to business.

The only place I knew which didn't have any business pressure was the old Bell Labs. That's because of the AT&T was a monopoly and was allow a profit of 7%. That meant any expense can instantly be justified because no matter what AT&T would earn 7%.

End of the day, engineering is about compromises and tradeoffs. It's applied science. It's about being practical and sometimes that means we need to compromise on "quality". That's what makes good engineering culture. A product that ships and makes money is infinitely better than a product that doesn't ship. So, I don't think it's right to assume that the corporate approach is incorrect. In fact, it is better simply because once you get business involved, a lot of the decisions become impersonal.

Yes, we are a 2 man startup in customer success stories and how one can use them to get more leads/conversion from content marketing - http://rivet.ly. Right now we are pre-launch and busy coding!

Which is like to a Lunar Calendar with 1 or 2 holidays at the end. So, you have 13 months, each month is 28 days. At the end of the year you get 1 or 2 days off free!

Or you make a Jug Handle turn.

Bill Gates' reviews were notoriously difficult - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html. I wouldn't call him a "normal" boss either.

A marketing plan or sheet as outlined is similar to a business plan. You can even incorporate in the business plan. End of the day, as Eisenhower said - plans are nothing, planning is everything.

I met a lawyer at LinuxCon Europe last year. One thing interesting she said was that of all the other professions, a software developer was the closest to actually understanding legalese. That's because devs understand if-then-else, switch-case, variables etc.. That's exactly what the legal language style is.

Whereas, said party....

> I might believe it of other Asian nations, > where traffic lanes and rules are more suggestions > than anything else

Haha. So, true.

The interesting thing about whatsapp is that it works on feature phones too. It's not targeting smartphones vs. ipad users, but getting smartphones (all platforms), and features phones on a single messaging system for just $1 a year.

Sure I would kill for an ipad or a desktop version but does iMessage work when your friend uses Android or Windows? What about Grandpa using an old Nokia? How about those old friends who moved away to another country? Moving from the US to another country isn't very common, but it's fairly common for the rest of the world - born in Dubai, Schooled at Cairo, works in France is very likely.

450,000,000 actually. At the rate whatsapp is growing, they will add 1 million more phone numbers by tomorrow evening.

Absolutely the same as AIM messenger or Y! messenger back in the days.

There are some differences which is possibly because it's the mobile equivalent.

One is that you don't have to add any new contact. If anyone on your phone book has whatsapp, they instantly show up i.e your identity is your phone number.

Two when you join a group if there is a person already in the group whose you know in real life, but don't have the number of, it's easy to get their contact into your phone book.

I was able to reconnect with quite a few of my old high school friends using whatsapp. The interesting thing was that everyone spread around the world. Many are in the US, but several are in UK, some are in the middle east, many in India, a couple in Singapore and the group chat made it possible for everyone to instantly connect without having to "add a friend". Plus, no cost difference to send a message to someone in the UK or India.

Like you said, it's the mobile equivalent but the group chat feature is what makes it really useful esp. if you have friends in multiple countries.

This highlights another of Yahoo's screwups, IMHO. Whatsapp is built by 2 ex-Yahoo employees. Guess what everyone used in the late 90's for messaging? Yahoo Messenger. That's right - I used Y! Messenger all the time to keep in touch with friends before Social Networking was the norm and I'm pretty sure everyone else did too.

There is one more company that had the lead in messaging and screwed up - Blackberry. They released their app across platforms, 5 years too late. Had they hit the iPhone/Android apps stores 5 years back, they would have been in a better place than Whatsapp. The funny thing is that their co-founder even wanted to do that and not go after BB10 but he got pushed out.

I remember reading that whatsapp's servers basically run using Erlang. Erlang scales massively, and is a beautiful language for messages/telecom etc.. Hopefully, this will trigger some more interest in Erlang.

The only thing that Facebook does not have today (post acquisition) is a good Video Conferencing app. That's the only reason why I use Google Plus - for Google Hangouts. A Google Hangouts competitor that has it's features (multi-party unlike Skype) would be worth building.

I actually got to know about the Acquisition on Whatsapp! My friend from NYC messaged me on it. Unlike SMS, what I really like about it, is the group chat feature. At any given day, I'm chatting on a group chat with friends from here in the US, Canada, India, Singapore and the UK. For that I pay $1/year.

It's probably paid for itself in just a few days of use.

I seriously doubt #5 has anything to do with it. Considering that he has been in the U.S his entire Adult life (i.e old enough to make his own choices), one can characterize him as American rather than Indian.

Don't quite agree; it's time we stop putting the colonial legacy as a reason. The reason? It's been 65 years since colonialism ended and that's enough time to fix things. A lot of things have been fixed too but the real problem is a huge population. It's trivial to fix things for 1 million people compared to the 1.2 billion people and that's the real problem; not colonial legacy.

Interesting. Can you share a link?

Absolutely.

Consider the talk around wearables. Most wearables would be small devices running a bit of code. Maybe some of them will be hackable. Are the current generation of wearables powerful enough to run anything other than C (or maybe C++)? Nope. That's because most would be either small microcontroller or small ARM devices. If you take that trend and the fact that codeeval says its javascript - makes no sense.

So, submissions in codeeval should be title for sure.

The question is really of role. What role does a star programmer play as opposed to a star software engineer. Ideally, a software engineer is supposed to bring in engineering qualities and therefore have a good idea of reliability, scalability, safety, error handling etc. A programmer on the other hand should ideally focus on getting the best of the platform/tools. So, I see an SE to be more broader but a P to have more depth.

I guess my perspective is more from handling customers when they use our software development kits. We developed software devkits and our customers built embedded applications using silicon and software. In such a case, there is no way to get away from supporting customers because that's what we did.