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Nepalese student learns HTML, JavaScript, CSS using just a mobile phone

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Re: Nepalese student learns HTML, JavaScript, CSS using just a mobile phone

#181

Post by walty »

quijoteuniv wrote: post #157
pera wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Argentina you have to pay 50% of the market value for all electronic imports and you will have to deal with customs officers (who will usually try to make your day quite miserable if you don't "tip" em)

Is worth mentioning regarding Argentina and this HN submission in particular that the government is aiming to provide a laptop to every secondary student, they are build (assembled is probably more accurate) in Argentina and they come with a Linux distribution maintained by them called Huayra. I think that is pretty awesome for such a poor country. Customs in general are annoying, I was arriving to Germany from the U…

Germans also have been somehow ok with paying bribes: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-siemens-executive-plea... https://www.dw.com/en/ex-siemens-manager-pleads-guilty-in-us... In the 90s, those bribes would have been tax deductible in Germany: https://archive.is/Eit0f

Re: Nepalese student learns HTML, JavaScript, CSS using just a mobile phone

#182

Post by 908B64B197 »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #173
hemanta212 wrote: post #20

Sadly, this is how things are for many of us students, I currently study bachelors in CS here in Nepal and for me and some of my friends stuck in our villages (lockdown isn't still over here yet), we have been doing C assignments using editors avalialble in the playstore. Seeing these apps have millions of downloads, we're definitely not alone and I have seen many indian and other south asian friends do the same. My…

> we're definitely not alone and I have seen many indian and other south asian friends do the same. Thank you for considering the struggles of others while you yourself face it. I know a self made individual from Nepal like you in U.S. working in IT with green card and might be able to guide you. Contact me if you're looking for such help. It's hard to visualize the digital divide in education induced due to the pand…

> Perhaps if OLPC had been successful things might have turned out differently, Maybe there's still a chance to build a OLPC using latest hardware like RPi 400.

At India scale they could design their own machines. Something like a ThinkPad X60 where the motherboard can attach a RPI Compute Module.

Re: Nepalese student learns HTML, JavaScript, CSS using just a mobile phone

#183

Post by zepto »

dharmab wrote: post #91
zepto wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say ‘sadly’, but that is vastly better than the equipment I had when I learned these skills in 80’s and 90s.

It's sad because they're at a disadvantage to their peers.

Some of their peers, perhaps, but much less of a disadvantage than they would have been at before smartphones.

Re: Nepalese student learns HTML, JavaScript, CSS using just a mobile phone

#184

Post by moron4hire »

emptysongglass wrote: post #120
moron4hire wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Statistically, if you know programming, you probably learned it in a tertiary education setting, most likely in your late teens or early twenties. Just like learning a foreign language at that age, you'll never be perfectly fluent. You'll always have an accent, no matter what you do. I appreciate your story, but this comment bothered me, because it's something people repeat a lot and it's actually not true. There's…

Can people like me hire your company to teach a language at a higher level?

Yes, you can. We take on individuals regularly: https://www.dlsdc.com

Re: Nepalese student learns HTML, JavaScript, CSS using just a mobile phone

#185

Post by krrrh »

908B64B197 wrote: post #179
hemanta212 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for such kind and generous gesture. Sadly, with how things are with the courier and customs dep. here they can charge 30-40% of orignal price to receive electronic items Fortunately, I have managed to get few python freelance gigs here and there and in a few months, I may be able to afford one.

> Sadly, with how things are with the courier and customs dep. here they can charge 30-40% of orignal price to receive electronic items Something I never really understood, when going to less developed countries, why are customs always trying to fleece everyone? Normalized bribes, byzantine bureaucracy, astronomical import duties on computers and essential products. What's the goal with this? Is there some kind of lo…

I don’t know about Nepal, but traditionally places like Brazil pursued “import substitution” strategies of charging high tariffs on technology products to try to establish home-grown industries, and pursue autarky (self-sufficiency).

It’s an insane thing to do since the benefits to consumers and business users of these products is many times higher than the money made by the industries producing them. To a lesser extent the same pattern emerges in dirigiste-curious economies like Canada who limit foreign entrants into markets like telecom, resulting in a general tax on the entire population who suffer expensive and inadequate data plans in order to protect local oligopolies.

Re: Nepalese student learns HTML, JavaScript, CSS using just a mobile phone

#186

Post by foolinaround »

908B64B197 wrote: post #179
hemanta212 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for such kind and generous gesture. Sadly, with how things are with the courier and customs dep. here they can charge 30-40% of orignal price to receive electronic items Fortunately, I have managed to get few python freelance gigs here and there and in a few months, I may be able to afford one.

> Sadly, with how things are with the courier and customs dep. here they can charge 30-40% of orignal price to receive electronic items Something I never really understood, when going to less developed countries, why are customs always trying to fleece everyone? Normalized bribes, byzantine bureaucracy, astronomical import duties on computers and essential products. What's the goal with this? Is there some kind of lo…

> Do they not want investments or a tech sector?

The individual customs official or even the department is not incentivized to look at the benefit to the entire country. On the other hand, they are directly responsible to increase their collections, based on which they get a cut.

Re: Nepalese student learns HTML, JavaScript, CSS using just a mobile phone

#187

Post by foolinaround »

krrrh wrote: post #185
908B64B197 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sadly, with how things are with the courier and customs dep. here they can charge 30-40% of orignal price to receive electronic items Something I never really understood, when going to less developed countries, why are customs always trying to fleece everyone? Normalized bribes, byzantine bureaucracy, astronomical import duties on computers and essential products. What's the goal with this? Is there some kind of lo…

I don’t know about Nepal, but traditionally places like Brazil pursued “import substitution” strategies of charging high tariffs on technology products to try to establish home-grown industries, and pursue autarky (self-sufficiency). It’s an insane thing to do since the benefits to consumers and business users of these products is many times higher than the money made by the industries producing them. To a lesser ext…

> the benefits to consumers and business users of these products is many times higher than the money made by the industries producing them

the money made by the industries producing them is tangible, and there are lobbies protecting it, whereas the benefits to customers are intangible.

If you think about it, it is not the insane thing, in fact, given the system, it is the sane rational thing that benefits these actors.

Re: Nepalese student learns HTML, JavaScript, CSS using just a mobile phone

#188

Post by 908B64B197 »

krrrh wrote: post #185
908B64B197 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sadly, with how things are with the courier and customs dep. here they can charge 30-40% of orignal price to receive electronic items Something I never really understood, when going to less developed countries, why are customs always trying to fleece everyone? Normalized bribes, byzantine bureaucracy, astronomical import duties on computers and essential products. What's the goal with this? Is there some kind of lo…

I don’t know about Nepal, but traditionally places like Brazil pursued “import substitution” strategies of charging high tariffs on technology products to try to establish home-grown industries, and pursue autarky (self-sufficiency). It’s an insane thing to do since the benefits to consumers and business users of these products is many times higher than the money made by the industries producing them. To a lesser ext…

> To a lesser extent the same pattern emerges in dirigiste-curious economies like Canada who limit foreign entrants into markets like telecom, resulting in a general tax on the entire population who suffer expensive and inadequate data plans in order to protect local oligopolies.

That's something I never understood either. Telecom is a commodity. I also think that's what hurt Blackberry back when it was still relevant: They were developing these phones in an environment where the carrier had all powers and where data was so limited.

I remember them being incredibly skeptical at the iPhone because Apple was expecting data to become cheap and plentiful.

Re: Nepalese student learns HTML, JavaScript, CSS using just a mobile phone

#189

Post by Aromasin »

908B64B197 wrote: post #179
hemanta212 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for such kind and generous gesture. Sadly, with how things are with the courier and customs dep. here they can charge 30-40% of orignal price to receive electronic items Fortunately, I have managed to get few python freelance gigs here and there and in a few months, I may be able to afford one.

> Sadly, with how things are with the courier and customs dep. here they can charge 30-40% of orignal price to receive electronic items Something I never really understood, when going to less developed countries, why are customs always trying to fleece everyone? Normalized bribes, byzantine bureaucracy, astronomical import duties on computers and essential products. What's the goal with this? Is there some kind of lo…

During my travels I met a family in Kenya who were some of the friendliest people I'd ever met. They showed us all around the the local towns and brought us to a fantastic bunch of places. In return, I wanted to support their son who was going through education at the time - either pay his fees or send him school supplies. Unfortunately, they said that there was no point because any money or supplies we sent to them would never arrive; they'd just be taken by the people at the post office as soon as they saw a foreign stamp. It wasn't even government mandated fees on customs. It was just theft. This was before the advent of digital currency and other means of sending money abroad, so we simple had no way we could support them other than giving them gifts while we were there.

I still think about them all the time, and how sad it is that people live in a society like that where blatant robbery was simply the norm. It gives me some hope though that with the proliferation of affordable mobile phones across impoverished regions, people finally have the means, however modest, to receive an education.

Re: Nepalese student learns HTML, JavaScript, CSS using just a mobile phone

#190

Post by nashashmi »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #173
hemanta212 wrote: post #20

Sadly, this is how things are for many of us students, I currently study bachelors in CS here in Nepal and for me and some of my friends stuck in our villages (lockdown isn't still over here yet), we have been doing C assignments using editors avalialble in the playstore. Seeing these apps have millions of downloads, we're definitely not alone and I have seen many indian and other south asian friends do the same. My…

> we're definitely not alone and I have seen many indian and other south asian friends do the same. Thank you for considering the struggles of others while you yourself face it. I know a self made individual from Nepal like you in U.S. working in IT with green card and might be able to guide you. Contact me if you're looking for such help. It's hard to visualize the digital divide in education induced due to the pand…

I think of all those people with phones that easily break because the phone was not made so well. Or because the children are not so tech savvy to make garabage tech work. Like I can. Having been in a highly stressed environment myself, the emotions that drive them to self harm are all too well known for me.
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