sseth

Oh yes, I agree. We have to get better ourselves too. But having such a stark example in front of us perhaps can help concentrate minds. At least that's my hope.

Its like reading 1984. But now its happening.

I hope the democracies come together to fight this. We have taken our freedoms for granted. I think we will now have to earn them. We should not forget that modern democracy is just a couple of hundred years old. It is not a given that they will always be around.

Those (like me) who like using Google products know the bargain. Until a product reaches critical mass, it could get canceled.

Wave died. G Suite has succeeded. Chrome succeeded. Reader died. Google+ is in a coma. Hangouts and Google Photos which came out of the ashes looks like they will stay, though what they are doing with their chat tools is a real mystery. In hardware, Chromecast succeeded, Nexus faded away as did a bunch of other stuff. Among the ones i am a little worried about : Google Keep - which i am using more and more. I hope it does not die. Also, Google wifi which i am using now - hope it stays. I tried Inbox and liked it, but I did not invest a lot in it.

The ones you can be certain won't go away are the ones with a billion+ users : Gmail, Android, Chrome, Maps, Search, Youtube, Google Drive (almost 1B) and Google Photos (500M+) should be fine as well.

But Google does not owe me anything. And I don't owe them. I don't have to use any of their products if I don't want to.

In 2016, they put an end to the one child policy. In 2017, they are offering women free removal of IUDs. Under the one child policy, women were forcibly fitted with IUDs after the first child, and were forced to undergo sterilization after two.

This has led to a ridiculous situation highlighted in the New York Times, where a woman forcibly fitted with IUDs in 2012, is now being offered free removal of the same IUD.

This is what happens when policy is made centrally, detached from ground realities. I don't know whether there are enough people or not in China - the point was more about the issues with central planning.

Similar U-turns can be seen in the stock market. The government was exhorting people to invest in the stock market as a patriotic duty, creating a huge bubble. When it burst, they tried to manage the stock market by punishing investors who were selling shares! No wonder the stock market has tanked - would you put your money in a stock market where you could be punished for selling?

I agree the Chinese government with its Orwellian-like control of the population can get away with a lot. But they get a lot wrong as well.

I think Michael Pettis is probably worth quoting here : "In most economies, GDP growth is a measure of economic output generated by the performance of the underlying economy. In China, however, Beijing sets annual GDP growth targets it expects to meet. Turning GDP growth into an economic input, rather than an output, radically changes its meaning and interpretation."

See http://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/75355

There's a lot of truth in this. However, there is also the fact that their ability to keep the lid on things means they may also suppress feedback mechanisms which in a democracy may prevent wrong things from going on too long.

Something like this has been seen in the one child policy which went too far and the government is now scrambling. Also, the clumsy attempts to prop up the stock exchanges a couple of years ago have ultimately come undone. So we will see whether we have true resilience in the system, or is it actually brittle.

What is fascinating is that many Indians are discovering the mobile internet having never been on a desktop, or having never even had a land line. We are talking of 100s of millions of people here. Nearly 80% of internet access in India is via mobile.

It would be fascinating to see how their behaviour differs from those who have come to the internet via the normal route.

Besides the rates etc, what Jio has been able to do also is leapfrog straightaway to a pure LTE network, with no GSM at all, with VoLTE. Other providers have to maintain a legacy GSM network and also support LTE. They have gone from 0 to 215 million subscribers in just 2 years, which is incredible.

A lot of people have mentioned that Mukesh Ambani is doing this the second time - even the first launch had a major impact. At that time India had incredible high cellular rates, and the launch of Reliance Communications in early 2000s really changed the game for mobile connectivity in India. So this is the second time he has upset the apple cart.

Everything you say about India is true, and its opposite.

For the record, i can safely say that arranged marriages without the couple even meeting were common in my parents generation upto the 60s, became unusual in my generation (I don't know of any case in my family) around the 80s/90s and now would be unimaginable in my children's generation. This is a mostly (but not completely) urban middle class experience, spanning a very large family in north and west of India.

Things are different in the North vs the South, rural vs urban, poor and rich, different religions probably and so on. We are probably the most heterogenous society on earth, so this is not surprising.

I too work in the software industry in India (and have been working since the last 30 years). And i have worked for several years outside india as well.

My Indian colleagues through the years (male and female) have been no different in their commitment compared to colleagues i have worked with in Europe, US, Australia for several years.

And I should add that at least the companies i have worked in "give a shit" about women in the workforce. I don't know whether we have more women that the US - but we definitely have much fewer than there should be - so there is no need for being self-congratulatory. My company (with about 1000+ people) has several policies in place to hire more women and make it easier for them to resume after a break. And i think we are far from unique.

Thanks for the great reddit link. It is the best way to explain this!

Why say bhakti and not, for example, devotion (which is what bhakti means in Hindi).

Because bhakti is not an English word. And one of the things which congress followers mock is the use of local language, which is what the BJP leaders tend to use. After all, their own leaders usually struggle to speak any local language at all, being more comfortable in English, being mostly Cambridge and Oxford educated, or out of Doon school. Another St Stephen's alumnus, Mani Shankar Aiyar, famously called Modi a chaiwala. Modi of course, had very little education and is mostly self taught, not having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

So by using Hindi words in a mocking manner, the intention is to mock those leaders who use Hindi or other vernacular languages for communication. Whether this is a way to win hearts and minds remains to be seen.

Presumably that explains why they were elected, and are now the government :-)

Why is that surprising?

Its not about inflated cost. It removes your ability to get a higher loan amount, . And increases the risk in the transaction as the cash component is now not backed by any documentation. And finally, it increases any eventual capital gains you have to pay unless you again perpetuate the cycle by taking black money.

I am a great fan of Raghuram Rajan, and used to be one of Manmohan Singh as well. But Manmohan Singh's reign as PM can only be counted as an unmitigated disaster, his economic credentials notwithstanding.

The huge NPA crisis that you see now happened under his watch. The Air India deal, the 2G scam etc etc. It is conveniently forgotten for example, that under Manmohan Singh in 2010 the congress government declared that more bank licenses will be given out, flatly contradicting the RBI whose job it is to issue these licenses.

By the standards we are holding this government to, almost any government prior to this would be called a dictatorship.

This is a good point. But it only goes so far.

Ultimately, even code and toolchain flexibility comes at a cost - for example, should you go for a non-relational database because of potential future scalability needs, or cross that bridge when you come to it? Or should you make your code internationalizable, even though the first release is in English only? The right answer may depend on the probability of the business need occuring in some foreseeable time frame.

Unfortunately, the OPs point is too black and white, where the reality is much more grey. In my view decisions in a project need to be subject to a cost-benefit trade-off, and future-proofing is no exception.

It is stupefying to hear people argue that real estate in India does not involve black money.

You have to be wilfully blind to say this. In every part of the country, real estate transactions used to have a cash and a cheque component. The value is under-reported to avoid paying stamp duty and registration, as well as in many cases to recycle black money.

The proportion of these transactions has reduced since RERA, GST and demonetization. But it still goes on.

Widespread distrust which resulted in a thumping win for the government?

Shutting down the economy... seriously? I was in the economy, it did not seem shut.

Unfortunately the outrage seems manufactured, like so much outrage nowadays.

Actually no, it doesn't sound like dictatorship - an elected prime minister making decisions seems the right thing, generally. You would think this is the first time a government pressured an RBI governor. I should add that he wasn't kicked out - his term was not renewed.

What did look like dictatorship to me was a prince tearing up a government ordinance and the poor PM running around trying to appease him. Or a queen pulling strings from behind with her own unaccountable "cabinet" - the NAC. Or the parcelling out of government departments among partners to loot the country. That is as low as it can get.

This is such a poorly researched article.

In the beginning it quotes a railway official saying enough of foreign influence. The Indian railways on the other hand is working closely with Google to deliver free wifi in nearly 400 stations. Google has even formed a susidiary to do this - Google Station.

There may be data protection and privacy requirements which come in - but that is not about colonization. A lot of the awareness on privacy is coming as more and more Indians come in touch with the internet and start wrestling with these issues. More importantly, it is the widespread use of Aadhar, a biometric unique identification system by the government which has also triggered the supreme court to look at data privacy issues. Surely a journalist worth their salt would mention this.

Rather than any push back against tech colonization, i would argue that what we are seeing is a greater awareness on the part of government and citizens about the need for data privacy, as well as concern around misuse of social media. And it will extend to local and global players, obviously.

There are examples of aliases e.g.

type VectorInt = Vector(int)

npm allows multiple versions of the same package - not ideal, but works. To do this in Java, you need multiple classloaders etc (basically what OSGi provides), but you are now in a different kind of hell.

edit : I forgot to add that Java modules may address this, but i am now out of the Java ecosystem for quite some time.

Freedom of speech is not a meme. It's something people have given their life for, and nations have been founded on this theme.

"I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It" is a cornerstone of democracies - though of course most fall short of the ideal, but it is still an ideal to strive for.

Those who prefer censorship usually prefer it for other people, not themselves.

Unfortunately, the GOPATH structure makes it harder to mix golang projects with other languages when you need to. And it does not support package versions. I think the time has come to say goodbye to GOPATH.

Does not mean of course that include paths are better.

I had a colleague who used to use variable names from his local language in India (we were working in Europe at the time). So hwndParent would become hwndBaap. This combines both the hungarian and the local language strategies for job security.

Fortunately, he stopped programming and became very successful in agriculture. Good outcome for both fields.

I find Go code ideal for maintainability, with the "one way to do things" philosophy. Developers often don't like Go precisely because it does not allow them to do "clever" things.

Go is also not performance obsessed - else it would not have opted for garbage collection by default.

As far as variable naming goes, Go convention says - the further from its declaration a variable is used, the more explicit and qualified the name should be to disambiguate it. This to me strikes as being eminently sensible.

Whether that is possible or not, the primary theory for the Deccan Traps is that they were initially formed as India drifted towards Asia and passed over volcanically active area that lies under the present Reunion islands.

In India, the recent explosion in 4G availability has lead to a dramatic increase in first time internet users. But unlike earlier generation of users, these users have never accessed internet via a desktop - they only use a mobile, usually Android-based - nearly 80% of internet usage is via mobile now. That may account for the low usage as normal users cannot easily change dns settings on Android or iOS for that matter.

Australia is a puzzle though.

This is a great point.

And i think Microsoft could have done this too. But perhaps the conflict between improving the open web vs pushing their own operating system was a conflict they never resolved internally, giving Google the time and space it needed to outflank them. And Google moved fast enough, and as you have said, created a great enough user experience, that it could quickly establish a strong foothold.

I think if Microsoft had truly been focused on keeping IE as the best browser in the world, it would have been difficult to displace given its dominance.

No doubt Chrome had an advantage over Firefox in this case. But that does not explain how they beat IE. Microsoft had the advantage of shipping IE with the OS itself.

I don't believe the licensing cost of Windows Phone was what led to its downfall. The Nokia deal probably cost Microsoft more than any licensing fee it would have collected. Microsoft had the money and the presence in the market to out compete Google. It just did not have the right product at the right time.

It is also good to ask why Google could not succeed at social media. Perhaps network effects and an equally agile competitor were a big enough moat for Facebook to fight off Google successfully.

To say that abuse of monopoly is what has enabled Google to grow big is too simplistic. They have succeeded brilliantly in areas where they had equally big competitors, and failed spectacularly as well in others - social media being the most prominent. But more tech focused readers will recall Wave, or NaCl. Then are cases where we have a stalemate for example G Suite, where Microsoft still holds it own with Office.

Google Cloud is a strange case where one can argue that Google has failed to leverage many of its own innovations in containers and other data center infrastructure to achieve a dominant position. I would argue this is a case where Google should have been a market leader and much like Microsoft in the 2000's has frittered away a natural advantage.