entha_saava

There are alternative clients that lack some features but are very lightweight, open source and don't have ads.

RedReader and Slide come to mind.

Edit: that was on Android, I guess there are alternatives for iOS too, even if less likely to be open source.

How many of us get to study in IITs?

> I dont't really understand what point you are trying to make.

That the quality of NIT and IITs are decreasing. I have seen a lot of previous generation people who studied in IITs and have stellar achievements. But I don't think the same will be true for current crop of IIT and NIT students. To be clear, I won't be judging those people who are of my own generation, but this is a disappointment about how artificial the entry to these institutions has become. How many of them will be mechanically grinding leetcode as compared to their previous generation?

Increasingly so in recent years - the year I wrote JEE mains, the paper was much more susceptible to 'tricks' and 'shortcut formulae' taught by coaching institutions, than the previous years.

At this point, I have heard IIT professors expressing discontent about the coaching center crap. I don't know how you think it is still a fair game.

> I don't think there are any tier A colleges that takes money for accepting students. Probably explains why your batch had a lot of CS students who were not any good.

Fine, what defines tier A? I also mentioned lot of them with high state-level entrance exam scores are not "Good Enough", too.

In what I have seen, those people who do well in exams solely due to peer pressure and high expectations, don't very well understand the concepts. I have seen so many such book-worm topper kids not properly understanding recursion or algorithm complexity.

As an Indian there are reasons you can point out for this.

Education: Engineering syllabi are pretty outdated. And due to a work-just-enough-for-month-end-salary mindset, professors are against being up-to-date. As a result, everywhere but in top notch colleges, quality of teaching is piss poor.

The "Rat Race": There is no better word to describe this. 90% of people who enter computer science / engineering courses don't have any interest in computers. They enter because they scored well in entrance exam (which can be games by studying some books relentlessly for some years), and since Software is still one of the highest paying fields. And quite some of them continue their relentless pursuit for a good "package" by grinding Hackerrank / leetcode. It is literally a rat race.

The same mindset will create an impression that being a manager is superior to being a programmer. Because you are "managing" people. These people do all kind of office politics to become manager, and spend rest of their life ruining someone else's life.

You can't expect these kind of people to love their job or even do it properly.

Hierarchy: Related to above point, in India, you don't oppose or even question an upper officer or elder's decision, because ELDERS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT HERE IN INDIA. That's why so many people want to be manager.

Lack of interest in improving education: In many Indian engineering colleges, one year is wasted teaching theoretical subjects like chemistry and physics. No computer science related subject except basic C Programming (Lol not even malloc() and free()) are taught. This appears to be purely done in order to provide jobs for people who had studied these subjects. While teaching these subjects may have marginal benefits, they are outweighed by pure rote learning oriented assesment sysem and wasting one year of CSE programme. That's a bad trade-off for someone interested in CS. All entrance exams are based on Math/Physics/Chemistry and we have learnt enough of that. STOP the old age tradition.

If the chemistry they teach in last two years of high school (called pre university here), which is quite high level, qualifies for entrance exams, Computer Science should too. No I am not telling this because it is a programmers forum. But CS taught in pre-uni (optional subject) is more essential and often more helpful than chemistry and half of physics taught to these grades. But chemistry is compulsory for some legacy reasons. There is no interest to change that.

Indian here. This piece may sound biased, but it is true.

The lockdown was a good step. But poorly enforced. /people think it is against their prestige if they are home quarantined/. Not much of rationale could be seen even during the lockdown. People always put emotions above logic and screw up everything.

People also stepped out of homes unnecessarily because they don't understand the seriousness of the situation. But it is like every other country, only that we have much higher population density and disorganised public.

But the darker side is that there are lot of people in India who Cannot afford to stop working and stay at home. And this means lockdown can't be completely obeyed at villages, where most of agricultural activity happens. Village people are harder to keep aware of social distancing as well. (No offence intended, in fact I am from a village). The agricultural activities confined to villages wouldn't have been a big issue if people reduced other methods of contact with cities / other villages. But they don't understand.

Since there is no Govt. support for COVID-19 patients, it costs some multiple times of a village person's income. That means people won't get tested even if they have slight idea about the pandemic and suspect they are infected - because they can't afford treatment even if they get tested.

COVID-19 is currently mostly limited to urban areas. I can't even imagine what happens if it spreads to villages.

* people are delusional because colleges are getting away with low quality work, because of the higher barrier of entry for competition compared to something like Udemy.

* People are getting delusional because of both low quality and high price.

Edit: disclaimer: I am a college student at thus I may be biased about what I see here in India. But I assume it is almost universal from other discussions here and on reddit.

Classes are not worth the cost of full tuition.

Yeah I know. I had even detected using about:config to render Kannada text on the phone which didn't support it - it cost more bandwidth but 20MB was too much for a day at that time.

The other firms were worse in vision, thus Jio had an edge.

When I was using internet on a J2ME phone and Opera Mini, it cost INR 4 for 20MB airtime (2G!), which lasted 1 day. A GB of data cost somewhere around INR 250, and lasted a month. [1]

After Jio, these days I get around 30GB of 4G data for INR 150. That's the kind of improvement that changed people's lives.

Yeah the fake news is No. 1 issue in India, WhatsApp and Facebook spoiled this country. The elder generation naively believes what they read on whatsapp and that's terrible. The young generation is driven by emotions and identity politics not logic. But I think that's orthogonal to Jio the company.

[1] It is another thing that Opera Mini was freaking fast even on that network and didn't spend even 10MB per day for casual web page browsing. But if you want to get PDF or media content the internet was both slow and expensive.