darwinGod's comments

darwinGod | 12 years ago | on: India's pro-business Modi storms to historic election win

To those very new to India's politics, there are few things to consider before forming an opinion of Modi's involvement in the 2002 riots.

(a) The Government in power at the center was the opposition party ( Congress) throughout the last decade. (2004-214). If they had the power to twist Supreme court's arm (appointment of judges etc), they would have most certainly done that, and influenced the outcome.

(b) The Government at the Center (2004-2014) has had at its disposal the main investigative body of the country (CBI) to do any arm-twisting against Modi.

(c)Despite this, and despite intense media scrutiny in India, if the Supreme Court- the highest court in India- has given Modi a clean chit on his involvement in the riots, then sufficient respect has to accorded to the same. It is significantly way,way,WAY more authoritative than any wannabe-investigative journalists airing their opinions non-stop on television or highly-viewed blog articles. Let that sink in.

If a thousand well-indexed news articles/ well followed blogs paint a different picture, that does not change facts.

The Supreme court of India has been known to be strong and independent,even openly rebuking the Center for it's stupidity and corruption ( Search for 2G-Spectrum scam). True we have a lot of corruption everywhere,but the arm-chair dismissal of Indian Supreme Court's weightage- by Indians ourselves- against top 10 google search results - pains me.

If Indians ourselves cant do that, how can we expect the global audience to form an informed opinion?

darwinGod | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do you know anyone who left the tech world and found happiness?

One of ex-colleagues has now been happily trekking in the Himalayas for 6+months,and will most likely might set up some non-tech venture over there sometime soon. (He has had the rare opportunity to reject offers with Google/Amazon/Microsoft etc).Am lucky to call him a friend,not just because he is smart- he is a great source of inspiration for me- for his perspective on larger things in life - his pursuit of happiness,and guts.

darwinGod | 12 years ago | on: People with nothing to hide

Nice list- I am not sure if an equivalent law exists in any other country- but in India, if you have attempted suicide (and survive),you will be arrested!

darwinGod | 13 years ago | on: Ants can sense earthquakes a day in advance

:-/ Exactly. TOI (Times of India), is missing an adjective in the beginning. It really is: (Garbage) Times of India.

It really is the last place on Earth I would hope to read any decent article on Science/Tech.

However it truly is cutting edge,if anybody wants to find out who was the latest Bollywood "celebrity" that got caught because of drunken driving.

darwinGod | 13 years ago | on: Why doesn't `kill -9` always work?

The number of times I have spent 10 minutes staring at the output of 'pgrep processname' , when I had attached gdb to the process in another terminal session... Urgh!! :-/

darwinGod | 13 years ago | on: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

To folks who think C code is in general a mess of Pointers, macros, and goto's - Go download Postgres codebase,build cscope,open vim.. and try browsing the code.

Arguably, one of the most beautiful C-code bases you can get hold off.

darwinGod | 13 years ago | on: Escape from Callback Hell: Callbacks are the modern goto

As someone who writes C code for a distributed system that uses event-driven callbacks ( Zscaler) (yes,the binding is at compile time), I was aghast when I saw goto's in the codebase. I mean,I believed programmers were indoctrinated with " using goto = goto hell". I have realized that if used smartly,goto's cause no problem-say in error handling. I can confidently say I have not seen a single bug because of improper usage of goto in the last 1.7 years. And we do a lot of interesting things in C,including talking to a Postgres database,having a messaging protocol layer,doing shared memory manipulation etc.

darwinGod | 14 years ago | on: Books Programmers Don't Really Read But Recommend

Probably, the key part of what you said, is "couple of comments". Makes a huge difference if the same convention is on,say, 100,000 LOC, and the people who wrote it didnt give proper comments and left the company! :P

Speaking on naming conventions: This is the name of a class in Chromium source code (C++): 'BufferedSpdyFramerVisitorInterface' . The codebase is that meticulous! For a guy who wanted to learn about browser implementation,and downloaded the codebase,this is good.

These meticulous naming conventions- has it anything to do with using a full-blown ide vs vim?

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