from the article.

"As Bangalore moves further up the technology ladder, this four centuries-old city of nearly 6 million citizens has ambitions to challenge places like Silicon Valley and the Research Triangle at Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, as a world center for innovation."

I am Indian, live and work in Bangalore and have lived a few years in the United States. This is just a rhetorical flourish on the part of the writer. There are no such "ambitions" visible on the ground.

Of course the writer has conveniently made the subject of statement "the city", and has given no supporting evidence.

There are many MNC research labs, but nothing like what the article implies. And very often these Indian research labs don't produce high quality research. Just ask someone in Microsoft or Yahoo Research how good the Indian "labs" are.

Intel seems to have a more succesful offshore lab, but it is the exception, not the rule.

It looks like the journalist took a couple of weeks tour of the city, swallowed whatever Nandan Nilekani and other corporate CEO types told him (Infosys Labs is a joke within Infosys. "Innovations" often have to do with "process improvement" and so on, hardly cutting edge CS research) and wrote a sloppy article, thin on logic and facts.

Being a native of Bengaluru and a current resident of US, I could not agree more with plinkplonk.

These are fluff pieces written by visiting western journalists after visiting the shiny campuses of SWITCH (satyam, wipro, infy, ..).

This piece is nothing different than the ones that gets printed often in local english media (esp. ToI). It is tiring to listen to the "phoren" returnees living in their gated communities, complaining daily about the traffic and power-outages. Bah!

After having studied in what is arguably the best undergraduate tech campus in Bangalore, I know what goes around for "research" and "high tech" in computer science departments.

All the undergraduate schools are solely focussed on getting you into one of the SWITCH companies. Woe be you if you had an independent mind and tried to join a more hacker friendly company like Google/Thoughtworks etc.. The immediate family will start distressing over you not making it to the holy shrines of Infy, Wipro etc.,

Some interesting discussion here: http://www.pluggd.in/entrepreneurship/why-wipro-infosys-and-...

Of course all is not doom and gloom. The hacker scene is quite vibrant with Python/Ruby/FOSS communities being as active as anywhere in the world. Quite a few youngsters are getting into the startup mode. Even if a lot of them are testing the waters by attending startup events, reading and blogging about it, being on HN and boot strapping their ideas while living with their parents (not many basements in Bangalore, I'm afraid :).

Going forward, I strongly believe that these independent hackers will do more for the startup scene than the "bill-by-the-hour" Goliaths.

Who cares?

I hate it when a perfectly reasonable article is split into 15 separate sections you need to click through. Here's a copy you can read quickly - http://jottit.com/myvqn

depends on what you really want out of a job. if you want security and less stress gov't is the way to go. but you're also going to find people that don't care about quality, "doing it right", the latest technologies, learning, working hard, or sometimes working at all. you deal with the biggest bureaucracy in america... working for the gov't seems to be the opposite of the values purported by hn posts

I think more than a few of us start typing so early that it's hard to separate the two.

OTOH, I find that the kinds of pen & paper I use have a significant effect on the quality of my handwriting.

Perhaps, but the claims regarding brain emulation and "thinking" are way off. To begin with, we don't even know the biological basis of thinking--neurons firing is something even a slug can do, and has as much to do with thinking as walls and doors have to do with a research institute.

It's like saying: since we understand gravity now, designing spaceships with warp drive is just round the corner.

Yes, it's called python.

Write a crawler that examines all local links, and builds a graph (it needn't be anything fancy; a collection of nodes and edges is enough, but you'll have to detect cycles when building the graph), and then print it out in graphviz .dot language.

Then you can feed it into neato [either through a command-line pipe, or construct one using Python's subprocess module], et voilà, instant pagemap! :)

You can also use some of the rendering modes and scrape position data for the rendered nodes, if you want to generate a clickable imagemap.

As a multi language user I prefer the python style for the following reasons:

- It is easier on the eye, especially when somone else has to read through & understand it

- I find it quicker to code

That said there are some aspects where C-style is superior - so a combination of the 2 might work well! Invent your own "mash up" style (as long as it is not too confusing).

Let me see if I've got this straight. It took one guy to write the BitTorrent protocol in the first place, but it takes 19 people (previously even more) to fail at turning it into a business? As soon as you have titles like "Chief Scientist" I think you're pretty much destined for failure.

Here are the ones that get the most traffic, with daily page views:

     1760 Stuff
      770 What You'll Wish You'd Known
      403 How to Start a Startup
      365 Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
      349 Why Nerds are Unpopular
      294 How to Do what You Love
      274 Web 2.0
      247 Great Hackers
      207 How to Make Wealth
      187 Lies We Tell Kids

Note that the article is from 2003.