anondon (u/anondon) - Readit News

anondon commented on Why many Indian politicians have a criminal record economist.com/news/books-... · Posted by u/jimsojim

kumarm · 9 years ago

The Article doesn't cover basics of Criminality of Indian Politicians.

These are just two example in last week from 1 south Indian state caught on camera (Because Local media would not cover since pretty much media in state supports ruling party):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOueUSVSuYk [1]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hG2fqW-tcM [2]

Very rarely criminality of Indian politicians comes out because Media do not want to cover it. These showed up because someone could record. But in both cases, elected representatives and their goons are already out of trouble.

India is a land of lawlessness and that's a reality.

[1]A journalist being beaten by local representatives brother because he wrote on their corruption.

[2]Goons of local representative beating a women (1 eyed mind you) because she didn't agree for their illegal construction in front of her house.

anondon · 9 years ago

The videos you linked were so hard to watch.

> India is a land of lawlessness and that's a reality.

It's a little more subtle : well connected people to whatever they want and get away with no consequences. People who dare to oppose these powerful people discover the true meaning of hell. It's true practically everywhere in the world including the US.

IMO for all the shit that social networks receive (for good reasons), one of the side effects is that it's a lot easier to share such gross violations of law an example of which are the above videos. In a way social networks give people power.

anondon commented on A Response to Paul Graham's “How to Make Wealth” (2012) czep.net/12/response-to-p... · Posted by u/jimsojim

czep · 9 years ago

The author, arrogant and verbose though he may be, takes issue with Graham's casual assertion that the best hackers are libertarians, and attempts to deconstrust the psychology underlying this connection. What's so illustrative is how Graham inspires his followers to believe the way he does in order to justify and perpetuate his own wealth. The money quote in my mind is:

> It is amazing how well this piece serves as marketing fodder for Graham’s venture capital arm, Y Combinator. His business model relies on convincing hordes of eager young hackers to sign over their surplus labor to his investors. With logic crafted to appeal directly to the introverted minds of recent computer science graduates, he has no shortage of cannon fodder lining up on his doorstep willing to eat Ramen and gleefully line the coffers of his investor’s portfolios.

anondon · 9 years ago

> in order to justify and perpetuate his own wealth.

Where does he try to do this?

anondon commented on A Response to Paul Graham's “How to Make Wealth” (2012) czep.net/12/response-to-p... · Posted by u/jimsojim

anondon · 9 years ago

> 1. Introversion

There is an implicit assumption in his definition of an introvert that is introvert == cut off from society. This is just plain wrong. An introvert is a a shy, reticent person and this does not imply that he is cut off from society or does not understand social interactions. I would argue that it's the exact opposite. Introverts understand social relationships and the "real world" very, very well. They just don't actively take part in social interactions much.

> The first is the idea that measurement of things like quality and success can be objective, perfect and fair. These are not objective facts, they are highly contextual and can be manipulated by power struggles, charisma, clever marketing, or outright fraud.

The article is concerned with startups with a very small team working on it. Measurement is easier than in large teams of people. I don't see OP disputing this directly. The question of power struggles, charisma etc does not arise in startups with a small team.

> A second critical assumption being posited in Graham’s essay is that one person’s direct contribution can be disentangled from that of others.

No, it's easier to have a better idea of what people in a small team contribute than in a large team.

> Although he never says this payoff is guaranteed, he doesn’t deny it either

First valid criticism.

> Here is the crux of Graham’s assumption that programmers are the real engine of the value chain. He ignores the fact that without the infrastructure and ancillary components of the business, it isn’t so easy to simply translate that new piece of software into pure profit.

That's exactly what small startups do, where the founders manage everything from code to sales to legal work (in the initial stages of a startup).

> Graham so desperately wants to justify his own wealth as the righteous product of his own personal labor without acknowledging the effects of either luck or power

Uncalled for personal attack, but yes, luck plays a major role.

> “Smallness = Measurement”. Here, he uses the analogy of the “ten best rowers” who, if you take them out of a large system and put them together with a shared goal, will necessarily be superior.

In comparison to large teams, measurement is easier in small teams. Team dynamics are still important, whether the team is small or large.

> It is amazing how well this piece serves as marketing fodder for Graham’s venture capital arm, Y Combinator.

Looking at it from a cynical perspective, yes. Nothing stops people from questioning or rejecting (or dismissing) his work publicly as lots of people on HN and twitter do.

> Libertarianism != Meritocracy

This section has some valid criticisms of libertarianism and PG's implicit bias towards it.

anondon commented on What should you think about when using Facebook? veekaybee.github.io/faceb... · Posted by u/vkb

phatbyte · 9 years ago

Last week I permanently deleted my FaceBook account. All my data since 2007 (10 years) and friends gone. Well...apparently my data is still somewhere to be used as metadata...

Still, I must say, this was a liberating experience. I don't go there anymore to see another cat/new born/fake news posts. I don't get get angry with dumb comments. I don't have to see at my friends are eating, selfies, etc..

My closest friends and family are reachable one whatsapp/imessage/phone call away. The other hundreds "friends" I had on FB, I don't even remember their names anymore...

anondon · 9 years ago

Facebook provides an option to download an archive of your data, you should have downloaded it before deleting your account. Apart from having all your data, it would have been the final nail in your Facebook coffin. To say the least, the data scared the f*ck out of me : they knew me better than any of my family or friends. The ad tracking data was...bang on target, they had facial recognition data, all the locations I signed in from. I sometimes joke that Fb knows more about people than the Government of the user. It's true!

anondon commented on What should you think about when using Facebook? veekaybee.github.io/faceb... · Posted by u/vkb

anondon · 9 years ago

Genuine question : do you think a privacy oriented social network where users pay a small annual fee (around $5) would work? Think Whatsapp (use phone number as an id, no native discovery, only connect through phone contacts, encrypted user data only to prevent database leaks from causing damage) + Facebook (feed like feature, share photos, videos, direct messaging, group messaging). No user tracking, no ads, just a no bullshit social network where the average Joe would feel right at home and also one which the HN crowd would use, assuming social networks have a place in their lives.

anondon commented on What should you think about when using Facebook? veekaybee.github.io/faceb... · Posted by u/vkb

jgrahamc · 9 years ago

A related question is "Should you sign up for Facebook today?". Five years ago I killed my Facebook account (and LinkedIn and G+) and it hasn't bothered me, but... am I missing out on something?

anondon · 9 years ago

You are not missing out on much.

The only productive use of Facebook is to keep in touch with people. If you do this using alternative methods (Whatsapp, email or direct phone calls) then you save yourself from the continuous stream of garbage that is the news feed.

anondon commented on Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure techcrunch.com/2017/02/02... · Posted by u/samaysharma

toomuchtodo · 9 years ago

Why opt for Google if you're going to use containers in Kubernetes? You then become cloud agnostic. You can even move to your own datacenter at some point (relatively) easily.

Dropbox built out their own environment (and did it migrating 500PB out of S3) [1] [1a]. As did Twitter [2]. And Facebook [3]. And GitLab [4] (too soon?) As well as Mixpanel [5]. Even Twilio is multi-cloud (last time I checked it was split between AWS and Rackspace; this was several years ago during an interview, so maybe its changed). Sure, start in Google, or AWS, but at some point you will either need to use multiple compute/storage providers (redundancy) or go to your own gear (redundancy and cost).

Example: "In 2014, Moz CEO Sarah Bird said that it was spending “$6.2 million at Amazon Web Services, and a mere $2.8 million on [its] own data centers.” Simply put, the cloud killed its margins." [6]

EDIT:

simonebrunozzi: Forgive me, but when you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in spend, "easy" is relative. It is much easier when you're not relying on underlying primitives that are difficult to reproduce on your own at another provider (witness how terrible Open Stack is; no one wants to do that if they don't have to).

Am I minimizing the effort involved for this discussion? For sure. But the money involved...it solves most problems you would have migrating between providers.

> It seems to me that you have no serious experience in the real world.

You are entitled to your opinion. I have seen the pain, and it is relative. Its easier when someone says, "Here is the budget, just fix the problem", and your vendor's (AWS/Google) margins are 20-40% (these are real margins pulled from earnings reports); that's a lot of money you can put back in your own (or your shareholders') pockets.

If you we're spending $2 billion dollars, and I told you I could save you $400 million by spending $100 million, wouldn't you take that deal? Even at $200 million, its a bargain!

For less than what Snap is spending on Google cloud infrastructure, SpaceX built a rocket that can take a payload to orbit and return the first stage successfully (SpaceX has taken on ~$1.2 billion in funding over the last 14 years). Moving out of a cloud provider is comparatively hard?

EDIT: Maybe this is a roundabout way to kick back to Google in order to get preferential treatment on the Ad network. It sure isn't a logical decision.

EDIT 2: @ashayh: I'm not saying go back to good ol' bare metal. For $2 billion, you could build your own cloud provider out as an internal operation. The amount that's being spent on Google Cloud is egregious, and worse yet, common shares have no voting rights to push back against poor decisions like this.

EDIT 3: @hueving: HN throttles my posting; editing this comment is my only way to respond. Sorry about that!

[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...

[1a] http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/cloud-storage/how-dropb...

[2] https://blog.twitter.com/2016/overview-of-the-twitter-cloud-...

[3] https://code.facebook.com/hardware/ | http://www.zdnet.com/pictures/facebooks-data-centers-worldwi...

[4] https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/

[5] https://code.mixpanel.com/2011/10/27/why-we-moved-off-the-cl...

[6] http://www.thewhir.com/blog/moving-away-from-aws-cloud-dropb...

anondon · 9 years ago

Regarding gitlab, they have decided against moving to bare metal for now. (Can't find the HN comment from the gitlab ceo to link here)

anondon commented on 6.S191: Introduction to Deep Learning introtodeeplearning.com/i... · Posted by u/seycombi

tempw · 9 years ago

What does classify a story as duplicate? Besides having been posted exactly the same content before?

anondon · 9 years ago

If a story was posted earlier and got significant attention (comments and upvotes) and the same story is posted again, it would be considered a duplicate or [dupe] the second time around. The timeframe to repost a story that got significant attention is one year i.e you can repost a story one year after it got significant attention and it won't be considered a dupe.

anondon commented on 6.S191: Introduction to Deep Learning introtodeeplearning.com/i... · Posted by u/seycombi

tempw · 9 years ago

Duplicate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13500957

anondon · 9 years ago

That story had no comments, so this would not be considered a duplicate.

anondon commented on New H1-B Visa bill doubles the salary requirements to $130K/yr timesofindia.indiatimes.c... · Posted by u/mataug

winter_blue · 9 years ago

I've commented on this before, at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13433540 I'm copying the comment below:

---

I'm on an H-1B, and the thing that infuriates me about the dialogue on this is that they are effectively trying to ban skilled immigration, and exclude people like me from coming.

If you don't qualify for the family-based or refugee route, employment-based immigration is the only viable pathway. The amount of hate I see piled on people trying to come here via the employment-based immigration seems insane to me. These people make it seem like employment-based immigration is not as respectable or legitimate, compared to refugee/asylum and family-based immigration.

The problem with requiring higher wagers is that for people like me, who were students in US -- it's very hard to get an ultra-high salary for the first job out of college. (I did my undergrad here, and I don't have a Master's.) I was a student (on an F-1 visa), and my first job out of college offered me $60,000/year. On my first job on my H-1B visa (in NYC), I was offered $85,000 a year (got slightly over $100,000 with bonuses). Then, just about a year and half later, I was paid (incl. lucky cash bonuses) slightly over $200,000 in a single year. (My base salary is $130,000 now.)

If you raised wage requirements, you'd basically be not allowing people like me to continue to stay and work in the US (after graduation from college), and would instead only allow people from outside who have lots of experience (and skill) and can command a much higher salary upfront.

---

It's very disappointing to see the level of vitriol directed towards people who are just trying to build a better life in this country, especially here on HN.

anondon · 9 years ago

> It's very disappointing to see the level of vitriol directed towards people who are just trying to build a better life in this country, especially here on HN.

This line along with the rest of the comment is completely written out of context. I have no idea how your reply is relevant.