Would agree with your sentiment, but Whatsapp itself is an example of a messaging service that relied on their 1$/year model and had around 200 million active users before it went free.
I wouldn't say they "relied" on it. It was not enforced at all (lots of people used it without paying $1) and they sold out to Facebook. It would have been interesting to see how things played out if they had stayed independent.
I used to study for my engineering entrance exams with the Problems in General Physics book by IE Irodov. They were some of the most challenging and creative problems that I have ever solved. They are quite interesting and require critical thinking to solve. Even the problems I later studied in actual engineering courses didn't come any close.
The books by Russians in any of the STEM courses are really well written and approach problem solving in a way that most American and/or Indian books don't.
Even with over 1000 friends on Facebook - the maximum engagement that my posts reach is probably in the range of 10 to 200 or at the max 300.
One thing I have noticed is that the friends with whom you engage the most - chat, like, comments - in turn get to see your posts often and engage with them.
Anyone with whom you have not interacted in a long time - more than a few months - will never see any of your posts. I don't see any point of being Facebook friends with anyone with whom I haven't interacted in a while. You aren't getting their updates and they aren't getting yours. Facebook is a social network which I mostly see as a place to broadcast life events to all my broader friend networks and acquaintances.
For close friends and family I always prefer medium of communications that are more intimate in nature - phone calls, video calls.
If you look at the Q&A, there's a question about whether the product is original Apple or not. And there are 5 answers to the question all on the same day saying the same thing. These must be fake accounts posting fake answers for such products.
Strangely, the small merchants in India are doing a great job when it comes to door delivery of groceries.
Even over 15-20 years back, my mom used to get door delivery of the month's groceries by just making a phone call.
One of the reason's for the success of this model was that most customers did not have a car to transport all of their groceries and phone-order was the easiest option available to them. (I'm talking about the late 90s when Internet was not that common).
Of course, it works on the assumption that the customer exactly knows what they want - rather than making them buying arbitrary items at the store.
Most of the merchants circulate their menu/deals along with newspapers and have a phone number that customers can reach them at. All you do is decide on what you want to order and then call the merchant at the given number. They deliver all the items at your house within a couple of hours. It uses the idea of "Cash on Delivery" i.e., you make your payment in-person to the delivery person. This method has been in practice for so many years that customers are quite used to the entire process and the merchants make sure that the delivery is processed as comfortably as possible.
Why not just increase the fees for companies that are filing a lot of H1B applications? For example, they could charge 4000$ per application for the first 100 applications and then increase it to say $8000 or $10000. Companies that are taking advantage of this, would be discouraged due to the higher fees. At the very least, it would bring down the number of applications from these companies and would increase the chances of other smaller companies.
The spin of the article is that smaller companies are more deserving, but I don't see why we should expect that in general. If Apple or FB bring in a thousand people on H1Bs, is that a problem?
Any one hire has less impact at a company employing thousands or tens of thousands of people than at a company whose employees number in the single or double digits.
I wonder why GitHub has a separate domain githubengineering.com for this blog instead of a subdomain like engineering.github.com.
I notice that there is an inactive user account called engineering. If at all an User Page is created by that account, it would be available at engineering.github.io.
GitHub Pages used to be served under github.com subdomains (they were switched after GitHub realized this was a same-origin security hole), and said username.github.com subdomains still redirect to github.io for backward compatibility.
It's not unheard of for GitHub to rename inactive accounts, though: most likely, they gave this its own domain for something like SEO purposes (as it's content marketing).
This approach is probably in complete contrast to what Flipkart/Myntra have been doing in India. Both are widely used e-commerce websites that are going complete mobile-app only by killing even their desktop and mobile websites.
Two moves in completely different directions. Would be interesting to see the results down the line.
Flipkart's customer base is completely different. A large percentage of their customers will probably never own a desktop let alone access their application on one. Front is an app targeted for business where the users still use desktops where it may make sense to have a desktop app.
