Hacker News Reader

Happiness, like pain, is definitely a spectrum.

dilawaron How Dowries Are Fuelling a Femicide Epidemic

Dowry, the opposite of bride price, is a way to marry your daughter into a higher status family. Ours is an extremely status conscious society. For a bride family, it is like buying status. Dowry in its most obscene form is a richer India thing but poor seems to be copying a quite a lot of it. As a corollary, its mostly high caste, and cities and thing. Cities accounts to most dowry related deaths/murders though I am not very sure if underreporting has something to do with it.

In the last, it was mainly a north Indian thing but has successfully been imported by South as well especially Andhra.

dilawaron Total recall: the people who never forget (2017)

https://medhum.med.nyu.edu/view/12247

I am a bit surprised not finding any reference to Lauria's book.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-mystery-of-s...

dilawaron Founder Personality and Entrepreneurial Outcomes

> Technology startups are essential to the global economy. Yet, predicting their short- and long-term outcomes remains difficult. This is particularly true in the early stages of a venture’s lifecycle when little to no performance data are available. We offer large-scale, ecologically valid evidence for the importance of a startup feature that is available from the moment of conception: founder personality. Our findings suggest that while some traits consistently predict startup outcomes across all stages (i.e., emotional stability), others reverse their associations with entrepreneurial outcomes as the startup matures from conception to exit (i.e., conscientiousness). By doing so, they offer novel insights into the role of founder personality in technology startups.

dilawaron I Am No Longer Speaking at RustConf 2023

r/rust mod on reddit has a good summary of timeline of events.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/13sqdt7/i_am_no_longe...

dilawaron First Rust code in the Windows 11 kernel

https://github.com/SubconsciousCompute/poc-windows-rust-filt...

We have been playing with Rust and minifilter for Windows. Its almost there. Microsoft has been working on rust driver kit.

dilawaron My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

In my country, India, cheating in university is rampant. But there were more than a few of my classmates, who didn't. On average, it sad to see all that cheating. Aren't you saying you are incompetent by cheating?

dilawaron Ask HN: What product for developers has the best documentation you know?

TiKZ/pgf has the best documentation. Apple and Zoho docs are the worst!

dilawaron Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

Remind me of an article where three anthropologists were debating what does mean to be civilized. "Knowing one language makes us human, knowing more than one language make us civilised." is the only thing I now remember from that reading.

Does knowing more than one languages make you more reflective/liberal?

dilawaron Why flying insects gather at artificial light

Biorxiv provides HTML version a few days after PDF ia posted. Rxiv doesnt. AFAIK.

dilawaron What are transformer models and how do they work?

Thanks. ML noob here. I liked the insight that attention adds context, by modifying the distance in an embedding.

dilawaron Gig Workers Are Being Stabbed, Stoned, and Abused in India

I'd be surprised if such incidences ratr is high in south India compared to Ganges plains. Delhi and its surrounding areas are infamous for such crimes, gig or non gig workers.

dilawaron Will another Forbes 30 under 30 member be arrested for fraud before 2025?

Other extreme is field medal in mathematics given once 4 years to encourage young folks to do mathematics. Every decade, he promote,encourage, recognize two and half people. By all accounts, they are already super motivated and accompolished.

dilawaron Will another Forbes 30 under 30 member be arrested for fraud before 2025?

Exvept for a few rare cases, IMO, awards given by your peers are the only awards worth celebrating.

dilawaron Chrome ships WebGPU

obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/

dilawaron Mullvad's campaign against EU chat control

+1. I see nothing wrong in playing positive sum games. Mullvad will ptobably gain a lot if they succeed but as long public also gains a little, I am totally cool with it.

dilawaron The decline of net neutrality activism

India's Unified Payment Gateway (UPI) is also created and managed by government. Private players are free to use the service and build products around it. It worked really well. Though I am more inclined to give more credit to people who built and maintaining it rather than to some model. Like ISRO and Delhi Metro, its a miracle since India's stultifying beurocracy has a well deserved reputation.

dilawaron Seattle becomes first U.S. city to ban caste discrimination

Look for Prof. Andre Beteille work. His father was French and mother a Bengali Brahmin (French had a few colonies in India). M N Srinivas has done a lot of empirical work on caste. Every student of anthropology study caste .

There is a quite a lot of data on both Indian villages and caste system but caste is the offices is not well studied, IMO.

By the way, caste takes a lot of shapes. There have also been attempt to study racial divide in US South from caste perspective (a social category rather than a biological one).

PS: I am a high caste Indian living in India who has more than interests in caste system.

PPS: Mention of caste triggers most Indians, even those who are not living abroad. My wife (south Indian Brahmins) feels somewhat annoyed with my interest in caste. I won't ask my fellow Indians about caste, ever!! It triggers them more than saying bad thing about Modi.

dilawaron Seattle becomes first U.S. city to ban caste discrimination

Maybe you are from a higher caste!

dilawaron Seattle could become the first city to ban caste discrimination

Its very much alive, though it has changed a lot. https://www.epw.in/journal/2012/13/special-articles/peculiar...

dilawaron How to Start Your Blog in 2023

I've tried so many of these solutions. These days I am using Notion and generating static site using loconotion.

For me, writing outside Notion has become impossible. Notion AI does a fantastic job fixing my grammar and style. My English has always been less than passable and Notion AI does make it much better. I hope they dont make it very costly when they take it out of alpha.

dilawaron The israelis destabilizing democracy and disrupting elections worldwide

This was a sad read.

dilawaron BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

We have rules but tradition has be to follow person. If a powerful person say something and rules comes in the way, then expect that rules will be bent or ignored altogether. Rules are written often written in a way that leaves them.open to.interpretations.

In India, at least, and probably elsewhere too, charialsmatic leaders are often the one who destroys instrlitutions because rules comes in their way and slows them down (whatever they are trying to achieve). Last charismatic leader before Modi was Indira Gandhi who imposed emergency.

I'd love to see lame leaders and powerful institutions in democracies.

dilawaron Building a Cloud Database from Scratch: Why We Moved from C++ to Rust (2022)

Same here. Clippy and rust compiler made me switch to Rust from c++. Now after experiencing cargo, I find python to be insufferable (tooling, not the language).

dilawaron New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm

A hell lot of computation inside a neuron (in fact inside any cell) is chemical in nature. Proteins interacting, channels opening and closing, membrane doing membrainy stuff.. In fact their is a AND gate which is entirely chemical in nature.

Simulating chemical reactions are slow in silicon therefore chemical side is ignored.

If you glance over the graphs in chemistry papers, most of them are sigmoids. sigmoids are the sinusoid of chemical world. Its nice and heartening to see sinusoid appearing often in AI/ML as a fundamental computation.

dilawaron Trustfall: How to Query (Almost) Everything

obligatory, "written in Rust".

dilawaron I use C when I believe in memory safety

You may want to checkout pybind11 library. And checkout NIM lang too.

dilawaron I've been told (many times) that “the good employees never get laid off”

I dont remember who said it first. I have heard it from more than one good scientists, "You are as good as last year."

dilawaron Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework

Kagi's universal summarizer: https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://www.dougengelbart.o...

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework is a 1962 paper by Douglas Engelbart that outlines a framework for increasing human intellectual capabilities through the use of technology. The paper outlines a strategy for developing a system that would provide humans with the minute-by-minute services of a digital computer equipped with computer-driven cathode-ray-tube display, and developing new methods of thinking and working that allow the human to capitalize upon the computer's help. The paper also discusses the importance of structuring concepts and symbols to enable humans to comprehend and find solutions to complex problems, as well as the importance of automating the H-LAM/T system to increase the effectiveness of executive processes. The paper also outlines the use of time-sharing, light pens, and pushbuttons to communicate with the computer, as well as the use of associative-trail manipulation to improve the human's process structuring and executing capabilities. The paper concludes by discussing the importance of positive feedback in the research development process, and the potential for providing users with a basic general-purpose augmentation system from which they can construct special features to match their job and ways of working. The overall message of the paper is that technology can be used to augment human intellectual capabilities, and that this can be done through the development of sophisticated techniques for process and symbol structuring.