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slaxman

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grist.org 10y ago

WTO swats down India’s massive solar initiative

slaxman
9pts5
medium.com 10y ago

Short Term vs. Long Term

slaxman
2pts1
mea.gov.in 10y ago

Advisory for Indian Nationals Travelling to the United States of America

slaxman
2pts0
www.dnaindia.com 10y ago

India launches its first dedicated space observatory ASTROSTAT

slaxman
2pts0
filterkaapi.org 10y ago

The Illusion Matrix

slaxman
1pts0
filterkaapi.org 10y ago

Forming Habits

slaxman
1pts0
sputniknews.com 11y ago

India’s Fighter Jets to Be Armed with World's Fastest Cruise Missiles

slaxman
2pts0
zeenews.india.com 11y ago

India to test reusable launch vehicle next month: ISRO

slaxman
1pts0
www.artofmanliness.com 11y ago

10 overlooked truths about taking action

slaxman
2pts0
www.savetheinternet.in 11y ago

Tell TRAI we need network neutrality

slaxman
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Ask HN: What the best resources to learn sales for B2B companies?

slaxman
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Ask HN: Does anyone use Phoenix Framework in production?

slaxman
7pts1
www.thehindu.com 11y ago

Accused Uber Delhi cab driver had been jailed earlier

slaxman
2pts0
medium.com 11y ago

What do you want to be remembered for?

slaxman
1pts1
slaxman.com 12y ago

Hiten Shah on Marketing

slaxman
5pts0
news.ycombinator.com 12y ago

Ask HN: What's the quickest way to port a Rails app to Android?

slaxman
10pts14
news.ycombinator.com 12y ago

Ask HN: Which is project management software do you use? And why?

slaxman
2pts6
slaxman.com 13y ago

Stop cribbing about the ecosystem

slaxman
1pts0
ubiquitary.wordpress.com 14y ago

The 'Real' reason why few IITian's do a start up

slaxman
12pts3
A Grain of Salt 10 years ago

You want the front of the car to absrob the energy. When it crumples, it absorbs the energry and lesser energy is transferred to the passengers. The Engine is tough and will not crumple. It will thus not absorb the energy but transfer it to the passengers.

    'No pictures of the "shuttle." Strange.'
The picture clearly shows a 'winged' rocket as described in the article.
    "The episode has the smell of government propaganda."
Not sure from where you get the smell of government propaganda. ISRO has been credited for some of the most successful launches. They sent a probe to mars in the first attempt. There seem to be smart folks working there.

There is major difference with being depressed and having clinical depression. I have been fighting the latter for the last few years and I can vouch for there being no cause.

Example: I was with my extended family members in mountains of coffee plantations enjoying a vacation. There was no internet connection and thus nothing to disturb me. We were all (over 20 of us) having a great time. We were playing a game of cricket, where during the game I had a depression attack and almost collapsed on the ground. There was nothing there to upset me at all.

This is just one example. I have faced many more in a similar manner.

There is one thing for sure. Community support helps you fight depression very well. I am a member of a Buddhist group and their encouragement and support has really help me fight it.

On top of that requiring a percentage to be produced locally is just asking for trouble in a country with as much corruption is India.

Not sure that I understand the reasoning behind this. Are you saying that if a country has corruption then it shouldn't manufacture? If that's the case, you have excluded 90% of the countries including China from manufacturing.

The 4$ smartphone 10 years ago

Wow! I am extremely surprised to see this. If this device actually works, it will do a lot to push internet connectivity in India.

1/ Telecom marketing is absolutely central to this discussion. It is THE way that free basics in sold on the street. Even the world bank has said free basics breaks net neutrality (http://www.scoopwhoop.com/The-World-Bank-Has-Said-Free-Basic...)

2/ Clearly you haven't the slightest idea of the number of people that travel by trains in India. In Mumbai alone, close to 8Mn people use the train to get to their place of work EVERYDAY. Many of them travel for over 2 hours at a time (over 4 hours in total). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai_Suburban_Railway)

3/ You have no idea how rich/poor the ones fighting for net neutrality are. You shouldn't be making such statements. It reflects badly on you. The fact is that a bunch of few activists with no financial backing were able to put an end to intense lobbying by multi-billion dollar telecom and media companies.

This is exactly what you expect from a good regulator. I am extremely happy with TRAI. They saved my bootstrapped education startup.

Wow! This comment is really far away from reality.

1/ There are no studies that show correlation between free basics and increase in internet penetration. In fact, Reliance Telecom, Facebook's free basics partner in India, marketed it was a way to surf facebook & whatsapp for free.

2/ Google is giving away free internet in Railway stations in India. Unlike free basics, it gives access to the complete internet and not to a set of websites that have done a deal with facebook. No one opposed it, since it does not break net neutrality.

3/ I find it ridiculous that some folks in Western countries can start dictating what's good for the poor in India and think that the arguments of people actually living there are invalid.

I would encourage you to try to understand the issue from a local perspective by speaking to the people who live there rather than have unsubstantiated assumptions.

As someone from a developing country, it really shocks me to read stuff like this about the US. Mainly because we kind of look up to their justice system to be better than ours. Yes, there are police harassments in my country as well. But it's not this bad. And apparently what they did is legal, which is really shocking.

Two points to this argument:

1. what about farmer details. If you want to personalise info for farmers, you will need to register them and capture info. W/o encryption, fb has access to it and is likely to sell it to advertisers.

2. The argument that "Free basics" is essential for farmer is wrong. Reuters has a paid product for farmers (http://www.rmlglobal.com/) and is used by over 1.4 Million farmers in India.

Once you reach a certain scale of users, percentage growth don't matter because it's hard to hit big absolute numbers. In whichever way you look at it, 52Mn is a freakishly huge number. And this timeline is 6 months, not a year.

Further "Free basics" has been launched in other countries. But there is not proof that it results in more internet connectivity. (http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/ther...)

Few points here:

1. It's not really internet. It's a set of 100 sites that includes a real estate portal and a personal blog. If you are talking about connecting the unconnected with essential services, why have these on your list? On the other hand, chennairains.org, a website that helped people during extreme floods in chennai was not on that list.

2. There is no proof that "free basics" actually improves internet connectivity. In fact, Facebook's telecom partner (Reliance Comm) advertises it as a way to save money for surfing on facebook and whatsapp.

3. None of the traffic must be encrypted

4. All traffic flows through facebook's servers

5. It's not an open platform. Facebook and Telcos reserve the right to accept or deny websites on "Free Basics"

The above points make it clear that "free internet" is a facade and it's more of a walled garden that makes facebook the gatekeeper. Another Telco launched something similar a few months ago and was scrapped because it violated net neutrality.

Arguments that "free basics" is required for internet to grow in India are ridiculous. India added _52 Million_ internet users in the first six months of 2015 (http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-09-03/news...)

Wow! This is the worst excuse for not completing the task that you have promised. It doesn't matter whether she had videos or not, it doesn't matter if anyone visited her profile or not. The only thing that matters is that your customer asked you to delete your account. And all you have done is lie, give excuses and edit her profile page with a vengeance that I (and others) cannot comprehend.

Wow! This reminds me of my career at PwC. I was a strategic consultant to the Financial Sector there.

<rant>

People were measured more on how long they stayed back in office rather than how much work got done. On multiple occasions, I was contacted by the Associate Director for some 'urgent' work while I was on leave. As you can imagine, none of the work was actually that urgent. The worst was the politics to take credit for other people's work.

</rant>

I love Warren Buffet's quote on hiring:

“Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.”

Often we tend to focus too much on intelligence and too little on integrity.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/76790-somebody-once-said-tha...

I do not think that's the point. For Buffet, allocating capital perfectly is extremely important.

I used to read his letters regularly until a couple of years ago. In all his letters, he always seemed to blame himself for investing in bad companies. But at the same time, gave all the credit for profits to his CEOs. IMHO, there is a lot of humility in that.