smdz

It is in place now.

This war (not the ceasefire) is basically a loss for the USA. Many people don't yet grasp the scale of the reputational, economic, and power damage that has occurred and will continue to occur.

It works, but do not expect huge returns.

I have worked on multiple strategies. - Strategies using technical indicators do work, but you have to reasonable. If you find these giving higher than expected returns, or too many consecutive wins - take the money. Stop live trading and continue dummy trading - eventually there is a point where you can start live trading again. The thresholds will be determined from backtests.

- Statistical strategies work for swing trading. However, these are very difficult to figure out. Need a lot of data (for backtesting). These work consistently over a longer period and might look loss making over a small period.

- Scalping within 5-10 minutes works pretty consistently, signals based on options data.

- Understand and realise the law of large numbers, and use that to your advantage.

- Give importance to understanding the concept of Time. There is a whole lot of weird and scammy pseudo-science around it. Therefore do not blindly rely on one theory.

Lots and I think anybody who is passionate about programming, has enough motivation to get it done. Most of my stuff is to reduce complexities in my daily life and/or automate/simplify monotonous work to be done at regular intervals.

The audio gives away. The fake audio is either of too monotonic or rythmic like singing a song

A video from 6 years ago that pretty much predicted what is happening, and why it's not as straightforward as it is made out to be https://youtu.be/JrMiSQAGOS4

You might be experiencing a mid-life crisis (assuming you are not undergoing depression). Fortunately, I found what I was experiencing by just openly talking about my feelings to my friends (and not spouse/girlfriend).

For me something snapped one day after age 35. I was relatively successful, married and I suddenly lost interest in my work or any kind of work. Even retired for 6-9 months, only to come out extremely bored - pledging that I would never ever take a retirement. It took me 3 more years to understand what was happening - I felt that at 38 too, and ideally it was still too early to experience a mid life crisis.

Some tips based on my experience:

1. Take very good care of your health. Regularly exercise (including at least some resistance training) and mostly healthy food. Measure health parameters. 2. Rule out any medical illness and/or deficiencies. Get a full body checkup done (including a detailed blood/urine tests). Do not cut corners here, but if not recommended, you could skip tests involving radiation. 3. For a month or two - take less stress (don't overperform or even try to overperform) and find periods of emptiness. After some time fill in those times with some activity that you love to do - doesn't matter how illogical it sounds. Let your intuition guide you. Make notes weekly. 4. On the work side, try to get into a management role. My situation was a little different, I was not an employee.

I do not know whether I am out of the woods(at early 40s), or just got used to the new reality. But I do feel quite better and may have made significant progress - only time will tell.

I have been called a 10xer (aka magician/one-man-army/genius/R2D2/etc..) quite a few times in my programming career. Sometimes I have felt that to be true but most times I just feel like a 1x.

Many years ago, one junior programmer asked me "How do you do it?". And I answered - "Trust your intuition". I realized later it was a "dumb" answer - but few years later I have realized the following (this may not be true for all 10xers):

I cannot remember a lot of things. Probably these memory issues are due to an undiagnosed ADD. But to compensate the memory issue, I have from an early age picked up the skill to see patterns, asking the right questions and attempting to understand things fundamentally (as much as needed to connect the dots). It exponentially increases the learning effort - but may be that extra effort gives me the intuition to solve/narrow down certain problems quickly. On top of that, I have tried to solve difficult problems just for fun - nobody had to ask me to do that. At times it is like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. I would become obsessed with solving that problem even if I had pending studies for exams next morning. All that added a plethora of experience/hours. If I find somebody solving a problem quickly when I am stuck (which in itself is a rare, because I tend seek help quite late), I typically ask questions on what they were thinking. May even dig into their mindset (to their discomfort) like a psychologist.

On the other hand, I am miserably just-average when I am not interested in certain work or do not understand its purpose.

If somebody feels like a 10x in their company, I advise them to move out to a team/company where they are back to 1x, and keep doing so until age catches up and slows them down.

For a long time, I believed this myth - might have heard it on TV as a kid. Then one day while reading about the possibilities of intelligent life on other planets - I wondered how far we (humans) would have got technologically without oil or similar fuels, which "I thought" were a result of dead dinosaurs and a extinction level event. That is when I looked up and found the correct answer.

Similar mismatch stuff exists with Google Scholar on two patent applications(now abandoned) where I contributed. It has my name but somebody else's photo and job title. Cannot apply to correct it just because I do not have any University email.

Is this not abuse of privilege?

Not really. It is part of the journey towards evolving efficient systems as a whole. If you go by the 80/20 principle about workplace/work (which is true in most cases) - will you fire away 70-80% of the staff as a manager/entrepreneur? or will you give 80% the privilege of not doing as much work or taking on responsibility as the 20%?

Work at an org where you think you could be considered at least a 4x engineer. Even better a 10x. I could be a 4x/10x/100x engineer someplace, and a 0.25x at another.

Learn to automate stuff at your job. It works at programming jobs too.

Prefer the workplace is a product or SaaS/product company. My experience with it shows that it has a lower cognitive load after the initial 6 months to 1 year of hard work. Yes, you have to put in extra effort early on to reap the benefits later on. This does not mean programming more, but understanding the product in depth and in domain.

On top of that prefer an established product which has sizeable management and team size. Things move slowly here.

Stay away from lead/architect/management roles - it would be unethical to take up any of those.

Prefer a development (programming) role. Over the years, I have realised that "time is elastic" with programming roles.

Keep away from consulting companies/consultant roles. Some of those pay well, but then you are not looking to earn more.

In ideal situation I would recommend leaving toxic places - but embrace and learn to manipulate workplaces that give more importance to "visibility" than "actual work".

And the last piece: All of the above should be temporary for few years - it will hurt your psyche the longer you keep doing it. Explore and change your earnings to something that will work for you long term.

Had been waiting for something like this few years back and with Ubuntu. But with M1 chip's success, I think we are much closer and it could be worth waiting for an iPhone (or a bulky iPhone) with something like MacOS that docks into a desktop or lapdock.

Why would a business pay 2x to someone when they can get the same output from a local at 1x pay? Unless they(business) are doing some financial trickery

I was wondering the same. Still not sure how they detect whether that is incoming or just flying to a different destination?

I am not saying it is OK to circumvent rules. BTW my access was revoked because they assumed I was using some automation - when I know I was not using any such thing. I am just good at computers and not even a fast typist. No response to my appeal - stopped using tatkal since then and fortunately never needed it after that.

There is a difference between "guilty until proven innocent" and "innocent until proven guilty". In India, the former is how the law-enforcement works for most people while the justice system says the latter. Most people entangled in the slow legal system just want to get out of it even if it means injustice towards themselves. And the laws are so convoluted and in this case he has a behemoth monopoly to fight against.

This is a case of 'BUREAUCRATS STIFLING INNOVATION' and this is how it often looks like. He could have gone through legal channels to approve his app and would not be able to find approvals even after being able to afford those financially.

Fair access is not provided by the official website. When one clicks "Book" and then suddenly get an Internal Server Error in network logs (while UI shows in-progress icon) or gets logged out - where is Fair Access? If Railways gave 10 Rs for each such failure, they will go bankrupt within 2 hours. First-come-first-serve does not mean fair access when they can't fix their technical problems.

And this guy charged money only after the cost of the servers was high. To give a context the alleged amount between 2016 and 2020 he earned in 4 years is in the range of 27k-30kUSD. That is as per Railways. It is likely to be inflated. Pretty sure he was running into losses.

However I doubt he is totally innocent. Most developers would know this app would be illegal. Or may be he is just too naive - hard to say that since he is an IITian. The railways will probably find out each ticket booked, heavily penalize each such booking, add huge interest to that till date and make the total amount sound like a huge scam. Adventures with Indian bureaucracy will cost him big unless he manages to heavily PR himself as a victim.

A string of such stories have me concerned. What happens after you are locked out? Can one have access to the data? I have a lot of important personal and business related stuff in GMail and GDrive - do they revoke read access too?

EDIT: I know about email clients setup to backup data, but there are other reasons I do not like to use those - unless of course that is the only way to protect data

Don't get fooled by India's startup hype. India has one of the world's "best" anti-business systems that will create hurdles all along the way to the top. If you do get to the top, the same systems will become your ally (as you would have learned to grease those).

Apart from the regular business troubles and risks, the unease of doing (not just starting) business in India is a huge growth barrier. And it is worsening. The bureaucracy is just horrible and spiced with corruption all over from taxation to approvals. The leaders have little control on that. And it may not visible for first 1-3 years of business growth time, it consistently hits and threatens you as you grow further.

Having said that - Any economy focused strong leader in India could flip that view in a matter of 6 months or a year. It might require reducing the bureaucracy resources by 70-75%. Otherwise the country might be selling the same hopes & dreams for next 50 years or more. India has talented resources and is potentially a talent goldmine, but they are mostly hidden, misused, abused, suppressed, unaware or just moved out.

I guess this will attract a lot of downvotes

Why not just allow both and not be restrictive? And keep the choice to consumers and manufacturers. Why not just focus on safety standards of the vehicle and batteries

Just imagine a country that did not allow you to buy a laptop with pre-fitted batteries. A heavy user like me would like a standardized external battery in that case, but many won't. The limitations on the design are huge. I am not arguing against swappable batteries.

With electric cars being approx 2 times costlier in India, I do not think taxis would be a use-case for that. They are a business and they need to look at practical cost-benefit and they will not be the first ones to jump to electric.

On top of that only 5-10% of India's population can afford to be generally environment friendly in an impactful way. And only 1 or max 2% can afford the huge upfront premium on electric cars.

The Indian government needs to create less restrictive and less taxing policies towards electric but it creates policy quagmires, has a very small tax base and hence is tax-greedy overall.

My thoughts on this - The energy used in sending a craft up is already lost when the craft leaves the planet. And potential energy can only be induced into the object from a larger mass. That is based on the object's mass and the large mass like a planet pulling the object. And the "value" (read: usefulness/utility) of that potential energy is based on where it exists

P.S. I am not a physics guy and could be completely wrong here.

From an economics point of view - We cannot say whether we are in a recession or a depression or none of that. Depression is supposed to be much longer. Probably we are in a recession and won't get into a depression unless some major geopolitical conflict occurs

It is good that you have 1 year of backup. Others have already given good business or technical ideas, my comments below are more philosophical

You should not target 1-1.5k. It may be enough today, may be better than nothing. But not okay, even for a 3rd world country. To begin with - you should target 2x of your job income at least. Once you have a figure in place, find out what you like to do (and that pays). It will be easier for you to filter opportunities as they come by. Believe me, opportunities come in truckloads and almost simultaneously. Everyone has just 24 hours and without a filter you will not be able to grab the right opportunity.

If you lose the job, you could get into panic driven fire-fighting mode. With a job today, your fear of losing it might drive you into a half-hearted effort to do something. In the safety of your job, you can plan for your progression to become independent. Tech skills are just one small part of the progression. Read books (or watch videos or listen to podcasts) about entrepreneurship, sales and/or people. Learn about finance and good financial mindset - it helps in the long run too. Take a notepad or use boards like Trello and keep writing the ideas that come to you, what you want to do, how will you achieve it, what problem it solves for you and others. Then prioritize and do the practical stuff one step at a time. That list will never come to an end. Other than a house mortgage, stay away from debt and even the house mortgage should be low or reduced.

Consulting for someone or some company is a good way to make yourself financially independent/safe sooner. But unless you enjoy it, do not stay with that too long. It consumes you and it is a different mindset. I've seen people (including myself) not able to leave consulting for a long time.

I'd argue that as abstractions and automation improves, it will bring in more complex demands to be met and therefore it will increase demand of programmers/engineers. And the cycle continues.

Software will continue to eat the world until it creates an authoritarian utopia for humans.

It is not the caste based discrimination like you might intuitively perceive.

In history there was a caste system that led to systemic deprivation of education and opportunity to underprivileged castes. So India (few decades back) came up with a reservation system so that people belonging to those castes could get jobs/education/opportunities.

In today's times it's scale is more like racism that you would find in most developed nations.

However after achieving the basic purpose, the reservation system based on caste was never withdrawn. Lots of political parties invested into those vote banks.

Nowadays, the situation is such that many people who get admissions based on the reservation policy are from acceptably well off educated families. There are many people who are relatively poor and financially underprivileged but belong to the upper caste and they cannot get any benefits.

You became the largest broker, next may be you could become an exchange :D

Saying sorry doesn't fix the losses. Pro traders are used to taking losses and can manage it. But it is super bad when we lose more than 50% of a huge profit in case of a exceptional market move just because of Kite not able to handle the load and accept an order. Or worst when there is an exceptional loss that just doubles because of system failure. You guys did a great job on the platform, but you should provide reliability to professionals who don't mind paying you extra for that

Well that is so true, sometimes the glitches are very consistent across a few days and they take time to acknowledge it or will not acknowledge it. Over a few years I have come to understand what is reliable and what is to be double checked and when it is not reliable. I have ended up with bad order executions because of their buggy Kite Web UI that doesn't update at times. The UX for trading is not professional. Don't have to invent a new interface, just look at the existing desktop platforms. And they refuse to provide a desktop trading platform. The only good part is their apis so that people like me can develop their own interfaces. But once I find another broker with reliable REST APIs for OMS and lesser glitches, I will move out.

For now, they are doing this in good intention. But they will not stop at that. Privacy is like a joke in India.

This is just the beginning and just an app. Further they do plan to track citizen movements directly from the mobile towers, the app will not be required - it requires them to legally acquire live data from mobile companies. And they have found an excuse to make such privacy intrusion laws. It is making of a police state. There are a few officers in the govt advising against this, but the bottom line is that the govt does not trust the country's citizens.

With Covid-19, the govt officials are publicly sharing the names and addresses of all positive people. The intention is good (to let others know whom to stay away from) and fortunately there is not much social stigma against infected people.

Every year 8 million people die because of tobacco. In the US alone, the number of deaths (due to tobacco) per year is close to half a million. Similarly between 4-7 million people die due to air pollution. Ironically, that does not alarm anyone, that does not cause lockdowns, that does not require flattening the curve. The numbers don't lie - global lockdowns that led to significant drop in air pollution may have coincidentally saved more lives and helped mother nature heal.