olcor

Western Union had, hands-down, the best rates and the least hassle for me sending money to my home country. The old reputation of WU just doesn't hold ground any more.

Exactly the same for me. I had a bunch of goals; I fulfilled most of them, and the ones I didn't/couldn't I god much better alternatives for. I have not created any new goals; a lot of changes have happened recently, and fulfillment of my previous ambitions is just keeping me in some sort of skewed confidence that I just need to react to whatever life throws at me now.

Although, I'm thoroughly fed up of what I liked to do earlier; now I'm looking for a new career path. Let's see how it goes.

Apparently Google "can't find" my account.

I was so scared for a while, then I found that all of my family members have the same issue. Then checked HN and breathed a sigh of relief :)

There are a lot of jaded people here who refuse to accept the way the world is working.

This is HN. Quite a few people here know how the world is working in favor of these things because there's a good chance they built it themselves, or at least know a few people who have.

Of course these products are not for me, and I very much understand that there's a market for the things they sell. Music might be a private matter for me, but it is definitely part of the social lives of a lot of people I know; they derive a lot of enjoyment from comparing different bands/partying/recommending new things. But looking at what the past years (and even before that!) have taught us about the so-called social aspects of technology, it is very difficult for me to believe that communities aren't being pumped for money. Every facebook action (for pure profit motives with no heed to possible harmful consequences of their actions), political agendas festering on social networks, and attempts and successes of being able to manipulate minds of people using such platforms has definitely left a sour taste in the minds of most tech people.

What angered me specifically was the tone-deafness of the article; it didn't mention any of these issues at all, but talked about the topic in a way that it was the best, unbeatable thing ever, and any company not following the mandate would be doomed to irrelevance, which is completely false as quite a few replies here have pointed out.

Spotify is great, but it’s primarily a single-player experience. Music, on the other hand, is an inherently social experience.

NO.

For me, music is an intensely private experience. I do not want people around me when I'm listening to music. I don't share my music tastes with others. Music is part of my me-time.

I get where the author is coming from, but music is not social all the time. I agree with another comment here, this article just clashes with me in such a way that I want to throw my laptop in anger after reading it.

It's the same thing with games right now, they just pester me to keep connecting. I'd rather prefer playing with random people and then not see them again. The "social+ money" part is so scary that I hope that I am actively going to stay as far from it as I can.

Now I've essentially realized the value of subscriptions over free things powered by ads and "social" wizardry. I'll pay for the good stuff on subscription/donations if the good stuff keeps on being what it is and not some ad-infestation/"social+" injection which keeps ruining the experience.

Personally I have a very simple rule. I don't drink alcohol, and I don't need to have a reason for it. I tend not to give any single reason if anyone asks me about it; just any excuse on top of my head. Most of the time it suffices. The times it doesn't, I give up and let them think whatever they deem fit.

I have no issues against alcohol and people who drink. If people want to judge me on my teetotalism, it's up to them, but their judgement is not going to have any effect on my choice. I made mine and I'm going to stick to it.

I've found that Stoicism helps a lot in dealing with this. The choice to drink is in your hands. Other people's thoughts are theirs, and different people will think differently. You can only control whether you drink or not, so leave the judgement (if any) to others and don't think too much about it.

OK thanks. Great idea nonetheless!

I don’t know if this would work on iOS (or if it’s already implemented), but any idea if I can make the app pop up directly every time I unlock the phone? This would mean that I don’t need open the app manually myself /keep the app on top before I lock the screen.

This is simple and genius at the same time. Great idea, will try it out.

I do agree with you on that aspect; in fact the proliferation of cheap smartphones and providers like Jio means that a lot of people are able to get their hands on actually decent hardware and a good internet connection if it is in their reach. Which is a great thing! In fact most of the tips mentioned is pretty much what a lot of people do in 3wc too, just replace Reddit with WhatsApp groups.

The issue here is that this is being given as advice, when a lot of this is standard operating procedure which comes semi-automatically for most people in this situation (this I do know, because you need hustle to even survive poverty in a third world country). Most people have multiple jobs by default; it’s not a discussion of if you can leave your day job here, it’s about how many jobs you can cram in a day, and that too without even the possibility of “maneuverability”. A mobile phone and an internet connection in such a situation is a rather significant investment even if it is widely available; it’s not something you can just get without thinking too much, which is what I feel the post reads like. While yes, the internet connections have become so good that you can watch YouTube videos for entertainment, few will be doing that without checking their daily limit caps first, and do it only when there’s nothing else to do. If you’re thinking of blogging/videos, you’re already thinking of it as an investment, if at all you reach that point. And this comes only when a person has escaped poverty, and has at least some sense of stability.

Add to it the plugs of Hacker News and Patreon at the bottom, and things start feeling very dissonant. Which is why I wrote about the potential target audience of the post.

This so much. It felt so weird that this person was talking about poverty and blogging/reading on the internet at the same time.

Few poor people in the third world would know what blogging even is, forget about even wasting precious resources like time, money for a smartphone and an internet connection just to read/write some ideas which few are ever going to read and you won’t be making anything out of.

This feels like being written by a person who knows that she’s writing for people who like to think about the idea of poverty living, but haven’t experienced it much first or even second-hand, only knowing about it from the news or glossy donation pamphlets.

Link to previous HN post which has a list of all ebooks Springer made available for free:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23520545

Has quite a few of the books mentioned in the post and the comments here.

All I know about him is that he was the one who created Geoff the Robot in Craig Ferguson's Late Late Show. That robot was AMAZING, it enabled a lot of good sketches!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Peterson

This is not a good year :(

He did a collaboration with Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine) a few years ago:

https://stephanpastis.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/ever-wished-t...

This is very weird, I notice a lot of apps are doing this.

Even Firefox Focus, considered to be a "privacy-focused" browser, has this notification pop up every time you add a character to their address/search bar.

Heh, have had some similar conversations myself (how people like me are "supposed to be more X/less Y"). I've had little patience for those, and have let my own opinions be known. Thanks for adding some more colour.

Possibly. Wish we had numbers, but I'm not sure if survey respondents would always speak the truth :)

Not always. As I mentioned, an American (not of Indian origin, and presumably without thinking about caste) warned me about rennet when he knew I was a vegetarian. Please don't misunderstand my words.

I talk about vegetarianism because the GP talked about it through the lens of caste, and I stated that I thought otherwise.

It requires nuance to understand how deeply and yet subtly embedded caste is in India

And this is the nuance I'm talking about. I understand vegetarianism definitely has positive connotations in India, but it's rarely about caste, which is what we're looking at here.

There's a lot of different opinions in a country of a billion people, but just labeling it as caste isn't going to do any of it favors.

It’s not a light subject

None of it is. It's not fun being a vegetarian in the States; doesn't mean people have ostracized vegetarianism because they love their meat burgers. Two different things here, we can't get to the root of things if we don't parse them properly.

Yes well if we want to go all Veblen, we can see that throughout the world, not just India.

But let us be real here, there are a lot of people in poverty following vegetarian diets, especially because meat doesn't always come cheap in India, and dal/milk relatively are. Some follow it because they were raised in a vegetarian culture. Some do it because they dislike the thought of eating animals.

Brahmins aren't always rich/powerful, and the "lower castes" aren't always that hard off, and this has been the case throughout history.

Some of my friends my well-to-do friends eat meat (sometimes including beef) just fine, some don't. Same with people from different socio-economic levels. This just doesn't reflect reality any more.

As I said, ~not all places~ varies from place to place. Haven't myself had an issue yet, coming from a not-so-desirable caste, and I know plenty who haven't either.

definitely a major part of marriage discussions

Again, not all of them; speaking from personal experiences. Most of those sites have a "don't know/don't care" field, and many have that option set :) I agree that the field itself shouldn't be there, but I tend to highlight progress wherever possible

I don't deny this happens, but it doesn't happen _all_ the time, or even the majority of the times nowadays (I can only say what I've experienced, I know others would have seen differently).

I'm a very white guy living in California and I often get the impression that caste is something that Indian folks living here are aware of amongst each other, but they don't really discuss it with white people.

The level of conformance (or even awareness!) to caste is different for different Indians even. Some don't even know much about the system apart from what has been taught in the textbook, being raised in a liberal environment. Some are steeped into it. Most are in the middle, and many are very very confused about the whole thing, which would mean that even if they tell you, their interpretation might be different from someone else.

In my opinion a lot of caste stuff is just hogwash. But certain remnants remain, and these remnants vary from person to person and place to place (some might put an emphasis on diet/religion, some on the education you receive, some on the gods you worship, etc). A lot of it has been used to divide people in the locality against each other, which is essentially just classic politics. But much of the new generation (depending on where they're from) is quite ignorant of/against all this, which is good.

eating that tortilla since it contains lard

I'm not a Brahmin (and am technically from a much "lower caste") and I wouldn't eat lard (I'm a vegetarian). IMO caste and vegetarianism are different concepts. While certain castes/communities/regions might promote vegetarianism and some might not, I'm not sure if they're always an identifying marker. A lot of people in India are vegetarian for a multitude of reasons and a lot of them who are new to the States might not know what contains lard and what not, so he might have been looking out for you in case you didn't know. I for one didn't know about rennet until much later, and am much grateful to an American dude who pointed that out to me.

I think it sucks that people conflate two different things, because it gives someone who isn't from an Indian background incorrect details. I'm not saying that that Indian-origin guy isn't casteist (given that he reacted against your "brahmin" comment that way), but certain nuances are lost here.

Resource curse? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

I’m confused. Doesn’t Microsoft 365 include the desktop versions of the product and the ability to update them?

I never said to not be optimistic; I said to not be too optimistic. On personal level, immigration decisions and everything that comes after needs to be tied to reality and consider what could happen in the future, including all the nasty stuff. You need to consider all realistic scenarios, including all the political, financial and personal issues and shenanigans which can crop up. As the above poster said, none of this is new.

has to be based on the employer's decision to continue their employment and not some politician's whim

While everyone here would love for this to happen, clearly nothing's working as it should be, or how we want it to be. It hasn't been, for quite a while. This is realpolitik.

You're exactly right, this is what I mean when I talk about the current government being this transparent. Immigrants tend to think of the risk-reward scenario, and a lot depends on image and perspective in their heads.

This image now is a lot nearer to reality than it previously was. When this leads to people not having US-citizen children, or not buying houses, or just not jumping on the boat to reach the US come what may, or just not being too optimistic in general (essentially not tying yourself to a country when the country hasn't done the same with you in terms of citizenship), things will maybe get a bit more sane.

Thinking about it as an immigrant, just the same way as the H1B: why punt on it if it is this variable? And why even depend of this? The entire problem is that immigration isn't working as it is supposed to. If even this can be gamed, what's the point?

I agree. Noped out of staying in the US last year even after finally getting an H1B in my third attempt. All the dollars in the world aren't worth it if I have to leave at any random point just because a politician wanted to pander to his base, or I get laid off for any reason, or <insert any random twist of fate here>.

The only way this nonsense will change is when more people who do have other options take them. This is mainly an image issue; in the Obama years, even though it was probably as bad as this today (just not overt), the risk-reward ratio of surviving all this was viewed as better than going somewhere else. All this changed with Trump being this transparent. There is going to be a lot of hesitation now for anyone who wants to immigrate. Anywhere except the US, and only if necessary.

You don’t even need to log in for replying to messages. IIRC you can just reply to the email and that would get relayed.