7 ms·

It's definitely to be welcomed, but India barely has the kind of interests, state-apparatus or companies that'd want something like this to succeed. India neith

by throw3192312 9y ago

It's definitely to be welcomed, but India barely has the kind of interests, state-apparatus or companies that'd want something like this to succeed. India neither has Baidu, nor Tencent, nor Wechat. They have Flipkart, which is barely an Alibaba, and is on a long drawn collision course towards merging with Amazon. The startups I've seen generally seem to target foreign markets, or to service people who service foreign markets; this is inherently a tiny subset of India's population. Considering the 'prestige' and money that comes with working in the US, I'd be very surprised if the country can ever accumulate enough talent to do anything fundamentally significant (esp. since all of the relevant Education/Industry is entirely Anglophone). I also feel there is generally a lot of self-flattering that goes on, often for this very reason. I'm old enough to remember the embarrassment that was to be 'India's answer to OLPC' (also conceived at an IIT of note).

r_singh 9y ago
I agree with this comment so much, it hurts.
zaptheimpaler 9y ago
With luck, Trump, the tightening H-1B/GC situation and the recent wave of xenophobia worldwide will push some talented people who would've otherwise left to stay in India. Modi has also pushed to make starting a business a quick process w.r.t paperwork.
- PeachPlum 9y ago
  Resisting mass immigration to leach from your welfare state is not xenophobic.
  - throw3192312 9y ago
    Resisting immigration of a particular demographic, one that arguably contributes most to the coffers of the said welfare state, is well within epistemological domain of the word 'xenophobia'.
    - PeachPlum 9y ago
      you're talking about the US I'm responding to > the recent wave of xenophobia worldwide The costs of the refugee crisis The German government will have to spend 50 billion euros on refugees during this year and next, a new study estimates. In order to balance these costs, researchers urge financial restraint elsewhere. http://www.dw.com/en/the-costs-of-the-refugee-crisis/a-19016394 http://www.dw.com/en/the-costs-of-the-refugee-crisis/a-19016...
  - zaptheimpaler 9y ago
    Sure, except immigrants under work visas are not entitled to any welfare such as unemployment/medical - in fact we lose our status as legal immigrants as soon as we become unemployed so we must leave the country. Keep the hate flowing though. I don't have any objections to a country looking out for its own interest, resisting illegal immigration or immigrants that otherwise cannot contribute much to the economy, but they are not the only ones the government is cracking down on.
    - PeachPlum 9y ago
      > the recent wave of xenophobia worldwide your welfare state is not the world model e.g. Germany Sees Welfare Benefit Costs More Than Double Asylum seekers received nearly $5.91 billion in welfare benefits in 2015 https://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-welfare-bill-rises-169-as-refugee-numbers-grow-1473077920 https://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-welfare-bill-rises-169... and your assessment of employment rates among legal immigrants in Europe is simply not borne out by the statistics https://www.economist.com/news/finance-economics/21709511-too-few-refugees-not-too-many-are-working-europe-refugees-sweden-are https://www.economist.com/news/finance-economics/21709511-to...
      - zaptheimpaler 9y ago
        If you read my comment, I was talking about restrictions on WORK visas in the US, not refugees in Europe.
  - sctb 9y ago
    > Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Taniwha 9y ago
  yes, most Americans don't realise just how many Indian people work building chips there - IIT and its ilk train more than 25% of the chip designers in the US (my rough guess from working in the industry) ... if Trump chases them all home and they go on to build great things, as I'm sure they will, Trump may be responsible for destroying the US semiconductor industry single handedly
reacharavindh 9y ago
Very unfortunate but true. Here’s to hoping atleast this time would be different. We need to look past the “If it’s India it has to be ridiculously cheap” factor. Everytime the Indian Space Agency reports an achievement, I always look for the “done for the first time, learnt about X” than the “look, I have done the common Space thing at 1/10th of the cost”. I wonder what all the talented ISRO would achieve if they had resources in the scale of NASA...
- padmabushan 9y ago
  > I always look for the “done for the first time, learnt about X” than the “look, I have done the common Space thing at 1/10th of the cost” Water on the Moon
achow 9y ago
Of course any new venture has high probability of failure. However, But India barely has the kind of interests, state-apparatus or companies that'd want something like this to succeed. They have Flipkart, which is barely an Alibaba... Flipkart last week announced a Designed and engineered in India Smartphone [1]. And this was done by a homegrown company smartron.com. Their website shows how heavily invested they are in IoT (apart from mobile phones). This company was founded by a Mahesh Lingareddy, who it seems was a co-founder for a company which was acquired by Intel for $250 million.[2] - so he has all the resources (or credibility to raise funds) to put in place the execution plan for their vision of "India’s first global brand with focus on innovation, design, engineering, products and platforms." [3] Or in other words, things are changing - past is not an indication for future failures. [1] www.flipkart.com/billion-smartphone-launch-store [2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/technologyinvesting/2-acquisitions-that-could-pay-off-big-for-intel-corp/ar-AAuazHq https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/technologyinvesting/2-acqu... [3] http://www.smartron.com/about.html http://www.smartron.com/about.html More about Smartron: www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/smartron-plans-rs-1500cr-investment-to-expand-operations/article9622268.ece
- throw3192312 9y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. I was much too cynical in the above post.
wsxcde 9y ago
Why do Baidu and Tencent count, but Infosys and TCS not count? Each of these have companies with >10B USD of revenue, so it's not like the Chinese companies are any larger. And don't tell me, it's because of the difference between product and service companies, because that is meaningless distinction from the perspective of a hardware-marker. They all need hardware to run on and arguably a service company needs more. > Considering the 'prestige' and money that comes with working in the US, I'd be very surprised if the country can ever accumulate enough talent to do anything fundamentally significant (esp. since all of the relevant Education/Industry is entirely Anglophone). That was true maybe 10/20 years ago. Right now, thanks to Trump and Republicans, the US is much less attractive destination, especially for top-tier researchers. NSF funding rates are in the single digit percentage range, every year seems to see a new assault from state-level republicans on state university systems. Rising xenophobia and white nationalism obviously don't help the cause. The situation in India is way better. There is more money available for research: the Shakti project is one example but many other big centers are being funded in various "institutes of national importance." There is a bi-partisan commitment to increasing funding and hiring for Indian research and there is a growing talent pool emerging from the non-IIT undergraduate colleges. Twenty years ago, every R1 university in the US was better than every university in India. Now, once you get past the top-10 or 15, beyond the Berkeleys, MITs, Princetons and maybe Purdues, it's not at all clear that it is a good idea for a young assistant professor to go to say Virgina Tech over IISc or IIT Bombay. And in fact, these Indian institutes are consistently hiring people who would have been a shoo-in for a faculty position at places like VT.
- signa11 9y ago
  > Why do Baidu and Tencent count, but Infosys and TCS not count? Each of these have companies with >10B USD of revenue... umm, probably because both of these companies are not exactly known for their cutting edge r&d.
  - bluejackal 9y ago
    Even these people didn't claim they have cutting edge r&d. IITM has implemented that is already open source and continuing their work in open source

r_singh 9y ago

I agree with this comment so much, it hurts.

zaptheimpaler 9y ago

With luck, Trump, the tightening H-1B/GC situation and the recent wave of xenophobia worldwide will push some talented people who would've otherwise left to stay in India. Modi has also pushed to make starting a business a quick process w.r.t paperwork.

PeachPlum 9y ago
Resisting mass immigration to leach from your welfare state is not xenophobic.
- throw3192312 9y ago
  Resisting immigration of a particular demographic, one that arguably contributes most to the coffers of the said welfare state, is well within epistemological domain of the word 'xenophobia'.
  - PeachPlum 9y ago
    you're talking about the US I'm responding to > the recent wave of xenophobia worldwide The costs of the refugee crisis The German government will have to spend 50 billion euros on refugees during this year and next, a new study estimates. In order to balance these costs, researchers urge financial restraint elsewhere. http://www.dw.com/en/the-costs-of-the-refugee-crisis/a-19016394 http://www.dw.com/en/the-costs-of-the-refugee-crisis/a-19016...
- zaptheimpaler 9y ago
  Sure, except immigrants under work visas are not entitled to any welfare such as unemployment/medical - in fact we lose our status as legal immigrants as soon as we become unemployed so we must leave the country. Keep the hate flowing though. I don't have any objections to a country looking out for its own interest, resisting illegal immigration or immigrants that otherwise cannot contribute much to the economy, but they are not the only ones the government is cracking down on.
  - PeachPlum 9y ago
    > the recent wave of xenophobia worldwide your welfare state is not the world model e.g. Germany Sees Welfare Benefit Costs More Than Double Asylum seekers received nearly $5.91 billion in welfare benefits in 2015 https://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-welfare-bill-rises-169-as-refugee-numbers-grow-1473077920 https://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-welfare-bill-rises-169... and your assessment of employment rates among legal immigrants in Europe is simply not borne out by the statistics https://www.economist.com/news/finance-economics/21709511-too-few-refugees-not-too-many-are-working-europe-refugees-sweden-are https://www.economist.com/news/finance-economics/21709511-to...
    - zaptheimpaler 9y ago
      If you read my comment, I was talking about restrictions on WORK visas in the US, not refugees in Europe.
- sctb 9y ago
  > Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Taniwha 9y ago
yes, most Americans don't realise just how many Indian people work building chips there - IIT and its ilk train more than 25% of the chip designers in the US (my rough guess from working in the industry) ... if Trump chases them all home and they go on to build great things, as I'm sure they will, Trump may be responsible for destroying the US semiconductor industry single handedly

reacharavindh 9y ago

Very unfortunate but true. Here’s to hoping atleast this time would be different. We need to look past the “If it’s India it has to be ridiculously cheap” factor. Everytime the Indian Space Agency reports an achievement, I always look for the “done for the first time, learnt about X” than the “look, I have done the common Space thing at 1/10th of the cost”. I wonder what all the talented ISRO would achieve if they had resources in the scale of NASA...

padmabushan 9y ago
> I always look for the “done for the first time, learnt about X” than the “look, I have done the common Space thing at 1/10th of the cost” Water on the Moon

achow 9y ago

Of course any new venture has high probability of failure. However, But India barely has the kind of interests, state-apparatus or companies that'd want something like this to succeed. They have Flipkart, which is barely an Alibaba... Flipkart last week announced a Designed and engineered in India Smartphone [1]. And this was done by a homegrown company smartron.com. Their website shows how heavily invested they are in IoT (apart from mobile phones). This company was founded by a Mahesh Lingareddy, who it seems was a co-founder for a company which was acquired by Intel for $250 million.[2] - so he has all the resources (or credibility to raise funds) to put in place the execution plan for their vision of "India’s first global brand with focus on innovation, design, engineering, products and platforms." [3] Or in other words, things are changing - past is not an indication for future failures. [1] www.flipkart.com/billion-smartphone-launch-store [2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/technologyinvesting/2-acquisitions-that-could-pay-off-big-for-intel-corp/ar-AAuazHq https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/technologyinvesting/2-acqu... [3] http://www.smartron.com/about.html http://www.smartron.com/about.html More about Smartron: www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/smartron-plans-rs-1500cr-investment-to-expand-operations/article9622268.ece

throw3192312 9y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. I was much too cynical in the above post.

wsxcde 9y ago

Why do Baidu and Tencent count, but Infosys and TCS not count? Each of these have companies with >10B USD of revenue, so it's not like the Chinese companies are any larger. And don't tell me, it's because of the difference between product and service companies, because that is meaningless distinction from the perspective of a hardware-marker. They all need hardware to run on and arguably a service company needs more. > Considering the 'prestige' and money that comes with working in the US, I'd be very surprised if the country can ever accumulate enough talent to do anything fundamentally significant (esp. since all of the relevant Education/Industry is entirely Anglophone). That was true maybe 10/20 years ago. Right now, thanks to Trump and Republicans, the US is much less attractive destination, especially for top-tier researchers. NSF funding rates are in the single digit percentage range, every year seems to see a new assault from state-level republicans on state university systems. Rising xenophobia and white nationalism obviously don't help the cause. The situation in India is way better. There is more money available for research: the Shakti project is one example but many other big centers are being funded in various "institutes of national importance." There is a bi-partisan commitment to increasing funding and hiring for Indian research and there is a growing talent pool emerging from the non-IIT undergraduate colleges. Twenty years ago, every R1 university in the US was better than every university in India. Now, once you get past the top-10 or 15, beyond the Berkeleys, MITs, Princetons and maybe Purdues, it's not at all clear that it is a good idea for a young assistant professor to go to say Virgina Tech over IISc or IIT Bombay. And in fact, these Indian institutes are consistently hiring people who would have been a shoo-in for a faculty position at places like VT.

signa11 9y ago
> Why do Baidu and Tencent count, but Infosys and TCS not count? Each of these have companies with >10B USD of revenue... umm, probably because both of these companies are not exactly known for their cutting edge r&d.
- bluejackal 9y ago
  Even these people didn't claim they have cutting edge r&d. IITM has implemented that is already open source and continuing their work in open source