fgpwd's comments

fgpwd | 8 years ago | on: ‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

Exactly. This has happened to a friend. They were able to find my friend's name from Truecaller. Soon they started getting fake calls to get her account number or aadhar number. If my friend's aadhar data had been leaked (as has for thousands other), they were done for. Once your aadhar number gets leaked it gets leaked forever. There is no provision for the government to issue a new one and which is a fundamental flaw in the system.

fgpwd | 8 years ago | on: ‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

That's not how it works. Your aadhar account is linked to one number. Why do you need to link all your numbers to your aadhar?

Besides the link is not two way. Case in point - a friend forgot to recharge their phone. The phone went out of service. Another person got the phone and started getting my friend's aadhar otps. Even though they got the phone using their own aadhar number. The "link your phone to aadhar when you need a new connection" has got nothing to do with "link your aadhar number to your phone in order to get authentication OTPs".

They are two entirely different processes.

fgpwd | 8 years ago | on: ‘Big Brother’ in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

SMS is not safe as a 2 factor.

The known attacks I have come across in India include the hacker somehow coming across your sim card number and using that to get a new sim card issued in your name. A lot of people have had their bank accounts drained this way (source: social media posts)

There was another thread in an yesterday on this where someone mentioned they could just rent a cell tower in Malaysia at $10 an hour and broadcast your number as roaming there to get your messages. Also mentioned were mobile number porting attacks though I don't know how viable that would be in India.

There are so many apps with the permission to read your messages on Android. I wonder how many of these upload your messages to the cloud. An attacker could simply get the OTP from there. By creating a malicious app or attacking the database of another app uploading your messages. Also possibly your sim card number which I have seen apps broadcasting in the open, unencrypted.

Another scenario - let's say you have a prepaid connection. You go abroad on a vacation without this number or get sick or whatever, and forget to recharge your phone. The provider can stop your services and give your sim to a new user. The new user now gets all your OTPs.

There are probably more attacks. Messages to your phone are just not a safe choice for 2-factor authentication, but sadly that is the base on which aadhar is built upon. Even today one can open a bank account with just an aadhar number and an OTP. Wait till people start taking loans in others' names.

fgpwd | 8 years ago | on: In hospital for 34 years

I had a friend who lived next to me with similar conditions, he was about 15 years old. He had a lot of weakness, stomach problems. Bloating in his stomach would cause headache. He would have bad itching in his body and his head (probably from the dryness), his hair were falling, and whenever he tried to stand up for a moment he said his vision and hearing would go away and he would see stars in front of him. Then they would come back. And his stomach problems would cause him headaches. The doctor in the government hospital here in India (who provide free treatment) did some blood tests and gave him some antibiotics. When it didn't work he just scolded his parents and told them to go away and just feed him well. Free health care can be like this in my country - there are just too many patients.

His parents could not afford private healthcare. So they decided to go to a local homeopathic doctor who used to charge half a dollar for a visit (compared to ten dollars for private doctors at that time which they couldn't afford).

Amazingly, it worked. It made him feel like going to sleep and the next day he was feeling maybe 50% better. Then he gradually became normal.

But placebo can be powerful. I have seen so many people cured by homeopathy - most of the times from problems that would need antibiotics or pain killers to cure, but sometimes other things too. Homeopathy is very popular in my country and there's a doctor or chemist selling homeopathy on every street.

Now I am not saying that it would work in your case, specially if you consider it to be a placebo and then that you already know it's a placebo. But it might be worth trying out.

You can do some research on the internet for the best homeopathic medicine for your symptoms. I just searched a bit for these symptoms and came across something called carbo veg. Maybe you can read about it and others, find one that you (and hopefully your subconscious mind) are convinced matches your symptoms and then take it. Order it in 30c, not even a single atom of the original substance is left at that point so what you chemically would have would be a drop of pure alcohol in water (hence it would not have any side effect). Ofcourse a homeopath would say that the water has magical properties , but all that doesn't have to matter. All you have to lose is maybe a few minutes of research to pick something that convinces your subconscious mind, and a couple of dollars for the medicine.

Just a suggestion.

fgpwd | 8 years ago | on: Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India

I remember 1-1.5 years ago, the Supreme Court had asked the government to publish widely in print and electronic media to make it clear that Aadhar was not mandatory. It was never done. I don't really see a situation where the government would back out of Aadhar, regardless of supreme court rulings. The court has reiterated this many times but the government has shown that it does not care.

“The Union of India shall give wide publicity in the electronic and print media including radio and television networks that it is not mandatory for a citizen to obtain an Aadhaar card.”

Source: http://www.livelaw.in/supreme-court-says-aadhaar-act-keeps-u...

fgpwd | 8 years ago | on: Launch HN: Piggy (YC S17) – Investment App for India

You are right. I forgot about the charges for the demat account - there are AMC charges of Rs.300 per year. So that makes zerodha coin about Rs.75 per month.

But there are no transaction charges in zerodha on buying equity (delivery) or MF. So it is still cheaper than piggy for someone wishing to make a large number of transactions or someone who doesn't want an SIP but wishes to invest manually every month.

Also, if you need a demat account for some other purpose - like investing in ETFs or equities then maybe it makes more sense for some people.

If all you are doing is an SIP with a couple of mutual funds, which is what most people around me do, piggy is probably cheaper. You can always have a zerodha (or equivalent) account for equity/ETFs/etc. and piggy for MFs.

But for someone like me with slightly different requirements, zerodha would be cheaper. I have a variable income so SIPs are not an option for me. I invest money as a percentage of my income so the amounts vary every month. In this case zerodha turns out to be cheaper despite the demat charges.

fgpwd | 8 years ago | on: Launch HN: Piggy (YC S17) – Investment App for India

I currently use zerodha for investing in mutual funds. Both offer direct funds. There are no transaction charges with zerodha coin, no demat charges either, but they do charge a flat monthly fee of Rs.50, regardless of the number of transactions or funds you invest in. With piggy, as per their website, the fee is Rs.30 per transaction for every time you buy a fund, and Rs.100 per year for every fund you SIP. RS.3 for every time you buy a liquid fund.

So piggy turns out to be cheaper for most people who would start an SIP with 2-3 mutual funds. Since I guess most people won't have needs that extend beyond this, piggy is probably the cheapest platform to buy mutual funds. However, for someone expecting a larger number of transactions or SIP with more than 6 funds, zerodha would turn out to be cheaper. Also, if instead of an SIP, for some reason you wish to invest a different amount every month, zerodha would turn out to be cheaper.

A big advantage of having a zerodha account is that I can also invest in index ETFs which I feel are much safer than mutual funds for the long term. Index mutual funds have very high expense ratios of more than 1%, but in comparison the index ETFs have lower expenses, like the NIFTYBEES etf has an expense ratio of just 0.1%. The SBI NIFTY etf has an expense ratio of 0.05%. There are no exit loads or transaction charges. These are passive funds that just track the basket of companies in the NIFTY index.

I think index ETFs should also form an important portion of a person's long term/retirement investment portfolio, apart from mutual funds.

fgpwd | 9 years ago | on: Struggling with Japan’s Nuclear Waste, Six Years After Disaster

As far as I understand, the reactors there are still active. The reactors nuclear waste is not like regular cargo, you cant just pick it up on a crane and move it a 100 meter away let alone another continent. They are having difficulties making a robot that can study the reactor because it's so radioactive. A person would die in less than a minute near that reactor.

Maybe they should dig deep into the earth and then let it merge with the earth's nuclear core :)

In order to keep the reactors cool, they pump 400 tonnes of water through the reactors everyday. This water has to be stored in tanks after that. The radiation seems to be never ending and they will run out of the space to store this water in a couple of years. There is also the radioactive debris around the place that they have to take care of.

We have the science to create energy from nuclear fission, but the science to deal with the aftermaths of a nuclear accident is still a work in progress.

fgpwd | 9 years ago | on: Prophet: forecasting at scale

My guess would be yes. I'm thinking this could be used to find out how effective a particular marketing campaign was. Just compare the forecast with actuals and the difference would be the number of sales/clicks you got from that campaign.

fgpwd | 9 years ago | on: Prophet: forecasting at scale

They probably take into account day-specific trends , such as if the data shows sales are usually lower on a Monday than a Tuesday, they would take that into account in the forecast. This is as far as I understand.

So, assuming they are doing this, the time scale does matter. What I am trying to say is that these solutions (like prophet) are opinionated and that is why they can get accurate, as they are taking into account these time-scale specific trends.

But being opinionated means that they are assuming stuff about your data. For example saying that the number of sales you make in a day is a function of or correlated to the day of the week is probably a reasonable statement. However if you move away from sales and marketing, and try to forecast say the number of seismic events in a day, nature doesn't care if it's a Monday or Tuesday or holiday. So any such correlation the program is able to find out and use in forecasting would be incorrect. Like maybe there are more earthquakes on Monday than any other day in a particular dataset, but that would just be incidental and doesn't mean earthquakes are more likely to occur in future on Mondays. It's not a good example but there could be other such cases where such assumptions could be wrong.

fgpwd | 9 years ago | on: Encrypted email is still a pain

Agree about Matrix. You get addresses such as @username:example.com , which work somewhat like email addresses. The example.com part is the homeserver, analogous to gmail.com or yahoo.com in emails. Users can communicate across homeservers.

It's also fast to setup. Took me about 30 minutes to set up a homeserver and host a customized riot client to use it.

It's not completely decentralized yet, and you can only use from a fixed list of identity servers. Although you can set up your own synapse node, you can't yet use it along with the centralized identity servers.

The reason they give for not decentralizing the identity servers yet is to avoid spam. But they plan to make them decentralized in the future, so at that point it would completely be like email.

fgpwd | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

Anything related to lucid dreams? Think of the ability to utilize the 8 hours of sleep for something productive or recreational. It will take atleast a decade before VR catches up with the level of detail you get in lucid dreams. Something that makes them more accessible for people, so that everyone could get this "me time" every night would be amazing.

If you want to try, just keep on asking yourself if you are awake throughout the day. Try reading something, it's difficult to read something on dreams. Or try using electricity switches, they normally don't work in a dream. Sooner or later you would find while doing this that you are in a dream. From there, sky is literally the limit. Imagine whatever you want, fly across mountains, travel in spaceships, etc. till the time you wake up.

fgpwd | 9 years ago | on: Announcing Ionic 2 Final

Electron would be analogous to Cordova, which is what ionic is based on. Something like Microsoft fabric or similar, or even bootstrap would be the analogous thing for desktop.

fgpwd | 9 years ago | on: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

The initial estimates for the cost to repair the damage caused by Fukushima were as far as I remember, around 50 billion dollars. According to a recent news article [1], the costs are now estimated at 250 billion dollars. They just keep on increasing. And then there is also the human/environmental damage to consider.

I have been excited about nuclear since my school days, but at this point the downside if something goes wrong is imo just not financially worth it. I would much rather pay 2x for a safer solar plant with similar output than invest something this high-risk. It's like selling uncovered options, with no way to set a stop-loss or to recover if anything goes wrong.

I think it is likely that at some point the global community will also realize that the cost considering the risks is just not worth it and begin to move away from nuclear fission. Especially if any another incident like Fukushima happens in the next decade or so; that could have big implications on nuclear policy.

[1]:http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-17/fukushima-nuclear-c...

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