As an Asian male new to the Bay Area, this has been something that I can relate too. At workplace and coffee shops, restaurants and almost any place, I've struggled to answer the question "How're you doing ?". The author summarizes it quite well.
Nepalese national here. While I can confirm that most of the stuff in the NY Times article is true, what bothers me the most is how helpless is the Nepalese government with this regard. Tourism dollars and oversea migrant workers' wages make up for a sizable (and growing) chunk of Nepal's GDP. Every day hundreds of migrant workers leave for the middle east in search of better work. A few of them come back in coffins, others come with disease or a youth wasted in foreign land. Now, don't get my prospective wrong, but the situation of Sherpas is better compared to the migrant workers. While its not the most desirable job, its better among the ones available.
I've somehow always found Ruby to be opposite to the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. While Ruby may seem trivial and fun in the beginning, it tends to be cumbersome and maintainable as the size of the repository grows. Coming from a Python world, my first reaction to Ruby was that it was more like Perl where there are many ways to achieve the same thing, and no it was not really helpful if you inherited poorly written code.
I've a feeling that the formation of a new Japanese legal entity by Github is due to legal hurdles in doing business in Japan. I used to work for a firm earlier which had created a Japanese legal entity for this purpose.
While, certainly not all those who claim to be the refugees might be actually one, the poor human rights record[1] of Bhutan speaks for itself. For a nation that issues citizenship based on race and origin [2] and "categorizes" them, a lot of economic development (and the self claimed Gross National Happiness) might be just a good publicity move by the Druk regime.
A bit misleading title, but Bhutan has its own share of problems. The Bhutanese refugee issue, a large scale eviction of Bhutanese citizens of Nepalese origin is a prime example of the Druk kingdom's shady regime.
As a past Google Summer of Code participant, I think that its a good move by EFF and the Tor Project. IMHO, GSoc is one of the best ways to get started with Open source, while your still a student.
Well, I'd have loved to do that. But the company is located across the country from where I'm located right now and its not feasible for me to talk to the founders face to face.
I've had a couple of non interview talks with them and they sound like really good people. On the other hand, in absence of a long term growth plan which they've failed to present me with, its a bit risky on my side.
The VC investment seems like a reasonable explanation to believe that they have a long term plan. But should I trust this explanation ?
Thanks a lot for support. After a bit of thinking I've come to realize that my motivation for building the app is to learn. And now I realize that I'll probably stop learning if I don't go all the way and complete it. That way hopefully I'll have fewer reasons to abandon my next app.
This may come as a bit skeptical, but IMHO the large scale adaptation of a Linux distro in Indian state departments seems a long way to. The lack of Linux operational training to the personnel along with replacement costs may call for an early demise to the plan to switch to Linux. While it does sound promising, the average government clerk in India, is computer literate in terms of Microsoft Office suite. Replacement of MS Office with Libre/Open Office suite itself is a big hurdle which in terms of usability is still in its early days. In addition, most systems on government offices I've seen run IE8 as their primary browsers, running applications "designed for IE only". I believe that if the switch to a Linux distro is to be made, the government should start with replacing leagcy windows software with their open source, linux compatible counterparts, before making the big move.