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Why do Baidu and Tencent count, but Infosys and TCS not count? Each of these have companies with >10B USD of revenue, so it's not like the Chinese companies are any larger. And don't tell me, it's because of the difference between product and service companies, because that is meaningless distinction from the perspective of a hardware-marker. They all need hardware to run on and arguably a service company needs more.

> Considering the 'prestige' and money that comes with working in the US, I'd be very surprised if the country can ever accumulate enough talent to do anything fundamentally significant (esp. since all of the relevant Education/Industry is entirely Anglophone).

That was true maybe 10/20 years ago. Right now, thanks to Trump and Republicans, the US is much less attractive destination, especially for top-tier researchers. NSF funding rates are in the single digit percentage range, every year seems to see a new assault from state-level republicans on state university systems. Rising xenophobia and white nationalism obviously don't help the cause.

The situation in India is way better. There is more money available for research: the Shakti project is one example but many other big centers are being funded in various "institutes of national importance." There is a bi-partisan commitment to increasing funding and hiring for Indian research and there is a growing talent pool emerging from the non-IIT undergraduate colleges.

Twenty years ago, every R1 university in the US was better than every university in India. Now, once you get past the top-10 or 15, beyond the Berkeleys, MITs, Princetons and maybe Purdues, it's not at all clear that it is a good idea for a young assistant professor to go to say Virgina Tech over IISc or IIT Bombay. And in fact, these Indian institutes are consistently hiring people who would have been a shoo-in for a faculty position at places like VT.

> The Mughals eventually came to see themselves as "Indians"(sic) and built their homes here.

That is the key difference. The British were never interested in anything but looting India. The Mughals were more like the Normans in British history -- they started off as conquerors but eventually completely assimilated into the local population.

For those who read Hindi/Urdu, this ghazal, which eventually became his ephitaph, by the last mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar is quite touching (https://rekhta.org/ghazals/lagtaa-nahiin-hai-dil-miraa-ujde-...). The whole ghazal is well worth reading, but it ends with:

  कितना है बद-नसीब 'ज़फ़र' दफ़्न के लिए 
  kitna hai badnaseeb 'zafar' dafn ke liye
  दो गज़ ज़मीन भी न मिली कू-ए-यार में 
  do gaz zameen bhi na milee koo-e-yaar mein

Rough translation: How unlucky is Zafar; he couldn't even/be buried in the streets of his friends.

(The British exiled Bahadur Shah Zafar to Rangoon and he was eventually buried there.)

Isn't a glib dismissal of the rest of the article? What would it take for you to be convinced about systemic problems in American election financing that wouldn't just be "hand waving about systemic corruption"?

I made a mistake. I should have said 300 BC not 2300 BC. Also, yes, they are in an older form the language.

In India, it ends up being the availability of records that are (a) decipherable and (b) recognizably in that language. Among the so-called Indian "regional" langauges, the oldest Tamil records date back to about 2300 BC, while the oldest available records of Kannada/Telugu are a few hundreds of years younger. It's quite likely these languages existed long before these written records, but records are what decide the oldness olympics.

I'm a computer security researcher. At some point I posted a public key for people to send me encrypted email. Nobody ever did and at some point I lost that private key.

Point is, key management is hard problem for big corporations with dedicated IT staff. Relying on normal people to be able to do that is just insane.

And are we expecting normal people to do key management?

"I think you're so focused on detecting a dog whistle that you're missing the key point being raised."

There is no need to detect a dogwhistle. We have an explicit statement from Wax (http://www.thedp.com/article/2017/08/amy-wax-penn-law-cultur...) where she says Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior. "I don't shrink from the word, 'superior,'" she said, adding, "Everyone wants to come to the countries that exemplify" these values. "Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans."

Let's not get bogged down by the all cultures are not equal strawman. That is not at all the key point here. Amy Wax/OP's argument is problematic because it conflates very different things using a subtly disingenuous argument. She starts off by saying something completely uncontroversial: kids from stable marriages do well in school. But she then plays on the audiences implicit biases to imply -- but not explicitly articulate -- a completely unsubstantiated racist claim: inner city blacks are incompatible with an advanced free market economy.

This sleight of hand where the speaker/writer stops just short of an explicitly racist implication that deliberately confuses causation and correlation in the presence of multiple confounding factors is a standard white supremacist parlor trick. That is why Amy Wax was roundly condemned. And the OP's claim that saying anything negative about the (lack of) black marriages is taboo in academia is quite blatantly false. Read for example this gushing review (https://nyti.ms/2kbBHRP) of Ralph Richard Banks' book on the very same topic by Imani Perry.

Z3 and similar tools use a combination of canonicalization followed by brute force search. The canonicalization uses techniques similar to what the OP describes. (+ a (+ b c)) and (+ c (+ b a)) are both rewritten as (+ a b c). These rewrites rely on pattern matching.

At this point, if the query is syntactically solvable, we are done. Often queries are not, so the solver uses a symbolic decision procedure. The specific decision procedure depends on the formula. For example, Linear Integer Arithmetic (which allows addition of variables and multiplication by only constants) can be solved using Simplex.

What insurance were you using? I've looked into some of these cheaper insurance companies, but I worry about whether they would really stand up for me if something did go wrong. One scary story I heard from a friend of friend was related to this cut rate insurance company in NJ. They assigned 20% of the blame to the friend even though it was clear cut case where the other guy didn't yield on a left turn.

> If you buy a car, you're going to spend more than that for the next few years, but if it was a fairly inexpensive used car, you might pay ~$250/month for 3 years and come out ahead in 8-10 years.

Do those numbers include maintenance and insurance? IME just routine maintenance on an oldish (60-100k) Toyota runs into the hundreds of dollars. Insurance again something like ~$800-1000.

I got rid of my car after I did the math and realized I was spending $1500-2000 a year on just insurance and maintenance.

I wish I'd done the math on Uber when I bought my car some years ago. I ended up paying ~$80 a month on insurance alone. Add in the initial cost of the car, maintenance and fuel, it was not at all worth it in comparison to just shelling out for a Lyft whenever I needed one. So by my math if you're spending $100 a month on rides, you're well in the black in comparison to owning a car.

The main (and perhaps only) advantage to having a car is the convenience and the ability to go where ever whenever.

I don't buy the climate explanation. Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and much of the north east including New York and New Jersey are all much colder in the winter and have somewhat comparably hot but shorter summers. And yet the per capita numbers for the Texas are much worse than each of these states.

The per capita consumption map clearly shows that red states consume more energy than blue and purple states --- for example, there's a stark difference between Illinois and Indiana. This is clearly a policy problem caused by the Republican party's intentional ignorance of climate change.

What does social media include? Will I have to list my HN and reddit usernames? What about throwaways, am I expected to list those too?

Which means there are rare bugs in the FMA4 they've not been able to iron out. So they decided to turn it off at release time using a chicken bit.

Is it really a fine line?

Lyft explicitly say you can't use their API to compete with them. How can violating their terms of service be in any kind of grey area?

I'm not posing rhetorical questions. I'm asking you an honest question. Why would you think it's okay to use a service in a manner that the service explicitly prohibits?

I'm not talking about faculty members in any halfway reputable university. They obviously publish in reputable journals. I used the word "these" here refers to faculty members at the bottom of the academic ladder, many of whom are based in developing countries and are being forced to publish (often due to governmental initiatives.)

I don't want to pick a particular university or person to name and shame. But my suggestion would be to look at authors in the OP's journal and evaluate for yourself whether these authors are publishing in "respected" journals.

The problem with these journals isn't that they accept low-quality papers. They're called that because they don't make an honest attempt at peer-review, and the publishing/editing fees are pocketed by the publishers.

IEEE Access is an example of a journal which charges a hefty "article processing fee" and publishes rather mediocre papers. But I wouldn't call them a predatory journal. They do get feedback from real researchers working in the field, they do reject fake and obviously-flawed papers, and they do not just use the publishing fees to enrich themselves. The journal in the OP did none of these things.

Yes, it is the editing fees. Nth-tier universities in many countries are pushing faculty members to publish more. This is all done with the best intentions -- we all want faculty at the cutting edge of research. So many of these universities offer financial incentives of various sorts to faculty who publish more. For instance, they may tie pay hikes or promotions to the number of publications. There's often grant money available for research (and publication) to support these activities.

This has led to the inevitable unintended consequences. Most of these faculty members do not have the resources or the ability to publish in "real" journals, nor do they even understand what a good journal is. So they publish in whatever venue that accepts their paper. If it requires them to pay, then so be it. And thanks to the beauty of capitalism, a bunch of predator journals have emerged to lighten the purses of these poor folks.

That is simply not true. You don't even have to look too far in the past to see examples of meaningful differences even if you restrict yourself to economic/financial/business issues. The most recent example is the internet privacy repeal bill. But even Obama's term alone saw Dodd-Frank, the auto bailout, the stimulus package following the great recession all supported by Democrats and opposed by Republicans.

The two parties are nowhere near the same on economic issues. Yes, they are both largely in favour of free trade. But there are very significant differences in terms of philosophies the two parties take towards regulatory behaviour.

Yes, it is 6.67%. That is literally the definition of a small fraction. And that is assuming a gross overestimate of 240k employees for Indian consulting firms in the US. Exact numbers are hard to get but here are some more facts: Infosys had a total of 23,594 employees in the US for 2016. TCS in 2012-13 had a total of only 21,830 employees outside India. With the two biggest H1B employers out of the way, I don't see how you're going to support your claim that there are 700k employees of Indian consulting firms on H1Bs in the US. It is simply not possible.

I have plenty of friends who work for Infosys and TCS. None of my friends even applied for a green card and they all went back to India after a couple of years here at the most. Many postings in the US at these companies last only 9-12 months. And neither TCS nor Infosys have any interest whatsoever in helping people immigrate to the US. (You need an employer to file a PERM application if you want a green card. A green card is required if you want to stay here more than 6 years.) That is the exact opposite of what they want to do.

The article you've mentioned says nothing about H1Bs. Outsourcing is not going to go away even if you eliminate H1Bs. And yes, all these articles making noise about this epidemic of H1Bs are in fact wrong. They're written by a bunch of poorly-informed Americans who wouldn't know the difference between an I-140 and an I-20. And their goal is to just generate clickbait to cater to nativist sentiment in the US. There's a lot of conservatives who emphatically don't want more Indians in this country. But they know they'll never win if they argue that they don't want Google and Microsoft employees here. So instead they've come up with this nonsense about Infosys and TCS stealing American jobs.

You can't stay for more than 6 years on an H1B unless your employer files a PERM application, has that approved, and then you/your employer files an I-140, and that is also approved. In other words, if your employer never filed a PERM, or never had one approved, you have to leave after a maximum of 6 years.

Green card applications for Indians (and to a lesser extent Chinese and Mexicans) are backed up for decades. So you're looking at people who filed PERMs in the last decade and are still waiting for green cards. They're allowed to stay on the H1B, which is why we have 800k people on H1Bs today. But these people are not working for Infosys, they're working for Google and Microsoft.

The 86,000 number contains 20,000 visas allocated to people who have graduate degrees from US universities. I don't think any of these folks are working for Indian consulting firms. So that leaves about 66,000 visas and 40,000 of those, at most, go the consulting firms. I did make an error in my math, which is not accounting for the fact you can stay for 6 years on this visa. Anecdotally, I know that most people of these people leave after about 2-3 years, when their "project" ends. But anyway, let's assume the worst case. You may have 240,000 people in the US on an H1B and working for an Indian tech consulting firm. That is still a small fraction of 3.6 million.

Although Infosys and the like apply for a lot of H1Bs, they make very very few (we're talking double-digit numbers) successful applications for green cards. This means most of these people on H1Bs for the consulting companies are actually going back home.

Which means that Infosys, TCS and the like are contributing a rotating pool of about ~30k-40k "migrant" software labor consisting of individuals who live in the US for a maximum of a couple of years. Could this be the reason why Americans wages are depressed? Well, let's run the numbers. There are 3.6 million software developers in the US. 40k is an insignificant fraction of that. So no. That's not it.

Cows being sacred is no more funny than God killing his son to forgive humanity for the crime of some couple in ancient history eating an apple.

Religions are weird. If you find some funny but not the others, you probably have blinkers on.

India is a third-world country, there's no doubt about that whatsoever. And we are weirdly nationalistic, or at least there's a vocal minority who are overly nationalistic.

But making fun of the other things you mentioned is really just making fun of poor people. I have hard time seeing the funny side of it.

You and the GP are both right.

We're terribly insecure, but that is in part fuelled by how much we get looked down upon. The Indian reaction to mockery and racism during the British era was pumping up nationalism and self-pride. That was a justified reaction to a truly evil empire, but unfortunately, that culture has not evolved after independence.

The fundamental problem isn't that grant funding based on peer-reviewed evaluations of research proposals is a bad idea. It's that:

1. The pie has shrunk a lot because federal funding of research has seen a huge decrease when measured as a fraction of GDP.

2. There's also a lot of political pressure to not "waste" public money on research that doesn't yield useful technology NOW.

3. But at the same time, there's an ever-growing supply of people who love doing science. These people are willing to do pretty much anything to get and maintain an academic research position, because like it or not, academia is still the among the best places to do high-impact research.

So there simply isn't enough money to fund all the good ideas, BUT there's political pressure to fund only sureshot research, and an oversupply means that scientists are doing what it takes to be productive in their academic positions.

The obvious solution is to increase federal funding for research. Accept that not everything is going to pan out as intended. It's not like every product a company makes is going to be profitable, so why should we expect science to work any differently? And then just wait! Some of this research will in fact succeed and we'll see the next internet happen.

Yeah, I totally agree. I was referring to labster's situation not, the Kazakh situation.

Sure, going from recognizing letters to actually reading is what I meant by learning language. If you have some degree of familiarity with a language, you're no longer looking at individual letters and pattern matching them with symbols in your head. You're able to take in a word or multiple words at a time.

And at least some of the English/Japanese difficulty is due to fact that you're also changing systems of writing, going from an alphabet to a pictographical system. Comparing that with English to Spanish is almost unfair because of the fact that so many English words of French and Latin origin have very similar cognates in Spanish. I'd imagine you'd have similar troubles if you tried to learn Hindi/Devanagari for instance. Devanagari is an abugida, so you'd need to learn all of the letters in the alphabet and a whole bunch of "modifications" to the consonants that denote adjoining vowels.