el_programmador

I would like to know the exact market share of DDG in India.

Its very little as I've yet to come across someone who knows it outside techie circles. Even many techies still use google because they seem to think it gives better results.

Really? So it's not that minuscule market share?

Consider the amount of time and energy the PR departments of various companies spend to get themselves trending on twitter each day? Whatever the size of their market share, it certainly increased that day because of the trending. People who've never heard about DDG started asking what it is and thus got to know about it.

The difference is that you've encapsulated your coding logic in mainMethod() instead of writing under that if condition itself. If latter was the case, you can't call that code from another module without resorting to os shell level features.

Firstly, DDG was blocked by ALL Indian ISPs during that instance, not just Jio. People using Airtel, Vodafone, etc. were as much complaining in forums as the Jio users. From what I recall, BSNL was the only one who didn't block (due to their inefficiency perhaps!)

Secondly, with the kind of minuscule market share DDG has, they or their users can hardly get impacted by a couple hours' block. If anything, Indian govt. made them a favor by making them more famous! I for one don't recall #DDG ever trend on Twitter in recent history.

Another benefit is re-usability. If you want your program to be callable as module or script from elsewhere without going through the tedious shell functions, "def main()" is the only way to go.

As a plebeian, the only thing I'm worried about is my internet bill. Why should I worry who Ambani has political ties with as long as I'm getting cheap bandwidth?

Europe couldn't even manage to implement Linux in Berlin! The capitalist pressure is what really works there in the farce of socialism. Even with GDPR, those who got penalized where small websites, IT Shops, bloggers, etc. for not knowing their intricate rules while the big fish went unscathed.

Perhaps the only way to fix it would be get into fastboot mode and enable USB debugging, then look for that arcane settings file on the file-system which your OEM decided to use for configuring wall-papers and fix that file. I see no other way.

Nations are ultimately made up of people and they are subject to peoples' pressure. Its the people who we must convince and wake them from their deep slumber.

God forbid if Google lifted their hands some day, can you even imagine how many million people will be impacted due to how many services ranging from emails to map apps to cloud services to web services, etc? Is it wise to give one entity power over so many things or its better to encourage a decentralized structure where multiple organizations control only bits of the pie?

One alternative I could think of are chunks or clusters of centralized systems which are then inter-connected among themselves to form a decentralized whole (kinda how the internet works!).

The trick is to go and sit at your desk regularly until writing comes on its own. Its all right if you don't write, but you're not supposed to do anything else. And write anything you feel like ignoring grammar, content quality or even subject. Given enough time, practice will ensure that you'll become a good writer.

Link to article (shameless plug)[1]: Write, Write and Write should be your Mantra - Procrastination is the Writer's only enemy in 90% of cases

[1] https://freelancemag.blogspot.com/2019/11/write-write-and-wr...

There are two kinds of dangers now and there are proponents on both sides of the aisle. One is to give a pause to all labor laws in a bid to bring more economic reforms and kickstart the economy. And other danger is this - bring so many regulations and policing in the economy that the few remaining investors will be scared out of the market. We need a balanced approach here.

This is what happens when you go public! The pressure to earn more (by hook or crook) also increases in times like these. As the author states, this started happening more only after Upwork got listed on NASDAQ, not earlier when they were still a solid private company.

Static IP isn't necessary for hosting from home but a "Non-NAT" connection is. If you don't have a static IP, you can use a service such as dynaDNS or something which runs on your server and keeps informing your subdomain to use the ever changing dynamic address. But if your device sits behind a NAT, then its not accessible from outside at all (unless the device initiates the connection), thus its impossible to host if your ISP has placed you behind a NAT. But the plus point, on the other hand, is increased security which is probably good for the majority of people.

Yes, but there are people of both kinds. Consider Linus Torvalds who instead of starting a multi-million firm, focused on Linux development instead (in fact, it was expected of him to start something like Red Hat or Novell!).

On the other hand, we have the creator of NPM Software[1] Isaac Schlueter who stepped into corporate shoes and turned NPM into a profitable venture. On the other hand, the income of Ryan Dahl who invented Node.js is meager in comparison to Issac's. There was a lot of controversy surrounding this in the FOSS community too if I recall correctly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_(software)

True, it really depends on what kind of project manager you have in your team. Many are very particular about this, they ensure a thorough transition when an individual quits and make sure knowledge transfer happens properly. On the other hand, I've also met those who have no idea what all systems their project is owning!

If you were lucky enough to contact them that is! Attrition rate is such these days that many coders simply flee after a release or so, also depends on how old the code-base is. Git or other version control systems come quite handy, I agree.

Thanks for reminding! I've mentioned in the article though you had to be extremely lucky to land upon test cases in the org I worked.

There is also the case of Alices & Bobs using inconsistent variable & function names, etc. if left unchecked and make life difficult for everyone. Organization/Consistency in code is a real problem that can't be simply wished away.

> but there's potential for someone more malicious to simply seize power which makes me uncomfortable.

Best leaders are those who don't "want" to be leaders but have leadership thrust upon them. I think if everyone follows this basic principle then it should be good in all settings irrespective of organic/chosen/imposed.

They already have GDPR, don't they?

More important than popularity measure itself is WHERE the languages are popular. Python is popular in startup ecosystems and professional developers whereas Java only in academic circles and some android developers (who are also gradually switching to Kotlin). So, in terms of "popularity where it matters", Python is in much better position than Java.

Most likely, those funds will be used for running propaganda against the government that issued those funds and the president!

ES6 has been there in our browsers since a long time now, yet why do so many still use babel?

Yes, I've also found that it has. The most likely reason is that either someone (mods) is vetting them to ensure that the high quality posts stay up, or maybe the community itself is doing the good thing by upvoting the good quality posts and downvoting the bad ones. Or maybe, its a combination of both!

NPM has become a ubiquitous standard at this point, not using it doesn't make any sense.

Similar thing with me except I stuck up with them even with Quantum until that fiasco with SSL certs happened and all extensions came to a halt. I'll never be able to trust a browser which does such a thing to its users.

In theory, they can't be a monopoly. What exactly is stopping anyone else from starting an online bookstore or a mart? In India, there is already Flipkart and Big Basket, just two large e-commerce companies among several others who are giving cut-throat competition to Amazon each day, are there no others in the US?

GMail's time was different, there was a lot less competition among web services back then.

Its also good for the freelancing/gig economy. Now even big companies will be forced to look for outsourcing or remote hiring options as the talent pool starts leaving that country.