coofluence

This is exact reason why AirBnB like services cannot succeed in India. You could be in jail, as the police here will never understand why you allowed someone into your house if you are not a hotel. The attitude of police here is that if anything goes wrong, the owner of the house or business is responsible.

To illustrate, in 2004, early days of e-commerce in India, someone put up a certain CD to be sold on e-Bay. The police just arrested the CEO of eBay India. When something goes wrong police here arrests biggest possible names either to show its working or extract maximum corruption money. Any wonder why Indian startups cannot go beyond providing services to foreign businesses for cheap? To be fair, many startups are innovating in India, but the point is the kind of challenges they have to deal with are just unknown to the more developed world.

eBay news link from 2004: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2902203/India-throws-Ebay...

There is not one bit of useful information in this article. It's just an breezy overview.

There is a massive love in India for documents. To get any service in private or public sector, you need ID proofs and address proofs. Even to browse internet at a "net cafe", you need to produce ID proof! That's so because authorities can catch (and some side cash) you if you were browsing anything against what they think the law is.

The problem is that there is massive trust deficit. Public too is keen to cheat whenever a loophole exists due to simplified procedures. That invites even harsher regulation and the cycle of submitting 10 documents where 1 would be suffice continues. There are endless certificates and NOCs (no-objection certifcates) required to operate in India: Aadhar citizen number, PAN number, TAN number, Service Tax number, Excise registration, LBT registration, Domicile, 7/12 extracts, 20 year old vouchers for LPG gas cylinders, nationality...and so it goes. Also, there is very little belief about who you are and where you live. So for everything an address proof is required apart from an ID.

Any wonder that there are no ground-level start-up stories from India. All that we can do is morph into HSFC (Human Services for Cheap) model to serve the rich western countries who want to off-load their guilt of wanting modern 'e-slaves' in the post-industrial world but not being able to fund their liabilities.

Sam is only highlighting an aspect of a company making it big. This is a multivariate problem with no single trick for solving it.

Government website in India are terrible. Most are built by NIC (National Informatics Center). That works just like an employment scheme with lots of entry-level employees.

What do you do friend now? Pickup the pieces and look at a few positives from the last experiences. May be you made some contacts during the startup experience who could help you with next phase in life. Your family could be your priority and guide all your thoughts. That said, like a Greek heroic story do overcome the challenge and come out well. Good Luck.

The value of learning arts doesn't need quantification. Of course, a study which checks this is welcome. Arts stand as a unique field that has antiquity as old as humans themselves. I wonder what cave-art artists must be motivated with? There is some deep connection between being human and arts. I don't think a small study where children feel coming to museums may be cool isn't validating the place of arts in life.

Reminds me of "Darkness at Noon" by Arthur Koestler

In India, "health insurance" has very little impact. It is essentially for hospitalization. This is the ideal situation as per the article: let healthcare negotiate with patients.

But look at the downsides: no standardization of procedures or facilities, price gouging is common and doctors+hospitals controlling prices.

The fallacy here is that the patients can shop and bargain for care they need. It isn't so in so many situations due many distortions in free market utopia. Perhaps, someone needs to hack a new solution to insurance.

Will Google open source it's core search engine? That will be good for an open web too :)

I am wondering when will the author take on correcting errors in MMIX code in Knuth's books. He will at least earn a hex dollar for his efforts.

Jokes apart, I admire the bravery in questioning K&R C's status. I have only a few personal insights to share as I don't code much these days.

1. I got introduced to C in 80's via some popular book. K&R not only taught me C but also was my entry point into the systems programing world. Before K&R, the BASIC programming books never allowed me to deal with memory or interrupt vectors in the way C allowed me.

2. C has a great power dynamic built in to it. You are on your own in dealing with this power. It's you who crashed the machine, not C and surely not K&R C.

3. Almost every language since C has borrowed something from C. Hence, anytime I saw a familiar notation or code block in any language that reminded me of C, I got confidence that I can learn this language.

K&R's many virtues give it an unique status. It did something that no C book or website can do it. It is the word of the language designer themselves. They shared their reasons of the choices they made.

Thanks Pavlov, I am trying out Radi.

There are other attempts, but either they are limited in scope or ease of use: 1. This Exquisite Forest - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/this-exquisite-for...

2. There was (is?) a Motorola Montage project that was available as a Chrome extension "Ninja". It seems to have disappeared. Here is a Git link: https://github.com/motorola-mobility/montage

3. Adobe Edge animate is there but it is a toy as of now.

This is a fine animation. Congratulations for syncing sound and getting a good narration voice. I guess you used a JS library to achieve this. My difficulties with CSS3/HTML5/JQuery animation as of "t.o.d.a.y" are:

1. If one has to programmatically create all animations, then browser based animation is at same stage as 1985'ish BYTE issues where drawing a chess grid in CG was a major achievement. A lot of great animation work is done by animators who don't code or won't code (http://www.ninapaley.com). Flash provides timeline to achieve this. The newer Edge is nowhere close to that level of fineness. Where are the tools for animators who animate to create these animations? (Psst. We need another Flash!).

2. Most of the current animation we see in CSS3/HTML5/Jquery is boxy, geometric stuff. Where are animated characters? and how easy is it to do it all in one environment like Flash? I am not a banner holder for Flash but it did provide a good integrated environment to draw, animate and code too.

This is neither a rant nor any stand. I am just wishing that tools develop faster and better so that animators who visually create animation can do cool stuff in browser based animations.

Thanks for sharing a nice work of art :-)

David: Thank you for sharing your story. I was moved by it. Best wishes to you.