Zomato and Flipkart are not successful. They are just surviving. Most of the startups are "me too" kind just copying what has already been done but just localizing it to the Indian market. It just takes a foreign entity entering the Indian market and competing with these companies to start its collapse.

Also software engineering is not a nascent field. It was nascent in the 70's and 80's. All the low hanging fruits are gone. It is very hard to be a the next Sun, or Microsoft or Oracle. In fact India should start looking at more nascent and upcoming fields and try to be leaders in it.

Keeping cash under mattress is risky. Why not buy gold(or precious metals)? Movement and hiding it is way easier than $100 bills and transport too is easier. Just wear it as jewellery.

Just curious, did you fund your FU fund living in the current place?

Yes.

Renters will increase the price knowing full well that people will double up. Also if the renters are ruthless they would directly tell you to have more people packed in an apartment to pay their price and if people are helpless they would have to cough up or find some other job in another state where you can live decently with lesser pay. Also a lot of shitty apartments will increase their rents which puts more pressure. This I feel is simple price discovery at work. This is why it is better for the company to spread itself in different places rather than hole up in a single place and pay very salaries which are not sustainable. I really don't understand start ups which are supposed to be tight on cash sitting on one of the costliest real estate and expect to be profitable.

Opening up bit streams would be really great. I am still hoping that someday we have completely open source FPGA tools.

Here's some fun reading for you:

Open-source FPGA http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-43...

Open-source, bitstream generation for Xilinx http://drop.isi.edu/sites/default/files/users/nsteiner/soni-...

Open-source tooling for lattice http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

Open-source EDA flow http://opencircuitdesign.com/qflow/

Older, academic tooling for FPGA's http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~jayar/pubs/rose/rosefpga12.pdf

How long can the circus keep going? It might collapse at any moment yet I don't think anyone knows for sure.

This statement is fundamental. It is very very hard to time the market. In fact there is a famous saying by John M Keynes "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

Thanks, I will add that Keynes quote to my collection

Fountain pens. I have some fountain pens come down to me from my mother's student era.

As a person who bought these ads I think you would be the right person to answer some of my curiosity.

Do people really click ads and buy? Is there data of the whole from click to the buy revenue? Are your products US centric? If yes what part of the US do people click on your ads and buy the most?

1) yes, but i don't use their "buy" button with any of my clients, just simple links to website

2) as much as any old ad platform. conversion tracking is pretty simplistic on pinterest but it exists.

3) yes, but keep in mind pinterest doesn't let you target outside of US using their self-serve ads

4) the distribution is fairly normal compared to other platforms. i have not looked for pinterest specific outliers.

I have been writing a FAT32 driver to understand the FAT32 file system. It is very exciting as this is my first time I am dabbling with file systems. I will be porting this to my baremetal firmware for the MINI2440 SBC.

This tiny thing may be interesting: https://gist.github.com/ryancdotorg/9f557d3513710ce91aed

I stumbled on it randomly several months ago. I suspect that a) it might be interesting to read through and b) might help add resiliency.

That's a pretty cool project

The idea to write a tiny modular driver came to me because of need. Sometimes developers do not need a write and simply need to read a file. Sometimes they want a very minimal read and then would like to write. This would be in case of storing ADC samples and then transferring it via a wireless interface or if a USB is connected they would want to mount the space as a drive.

I see a lot of people having problems with the BSP. Excuse me for the shameless plug but I am developing an open source baremetal firmware for the Samsung SoC S3C2440 ( https://github.com/mindentropy/s3c2440-mdk ) and planning to port this to S3C2451. These are found in HP IPaq etc. It will be basically a tutorial for people trying to develop their own firmware or as reference code for bringing the SoC and the controller's up i.e. Drivers for the controllers and also the ARM board bring up code. It can also be used to test the board by testing individual IP's.

I am planning on supporting Samsung SoC's and will start of with TI AM335x Sitara series and FriendlyARM's NanoPi2 which contains the Samsung SoC S5P4418

I am running behind OEM/ODM's for funding me for development of their SoC's and nobody seems to be interested except FriendlyARM. What do you think I should be doing to get some funding for this?

Wow - keep publishing would be my advice. Build an audience - eventually that will drive a critical mass.

Thanks! I also have a blog ( http://thesoulofamachine.blogspot.in/ ) where I go in detail explaining parts of the code of the various subsystems to get things up and running. I have developed without any costly JTAG tools and the code is compiled using free GNU tools keeping learners in mind who cannot afford costly development tools although a good scope would be great to debug clocks.