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merrinkurian

2 karma · joined July 28, 2017

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merrinkurian··on How to Get Kids to Do Chores: Does the Maya Method Work?
‘Maya method’ is just clickbait. This is how most of the rest of the world operates. Kids being the boss is a relatively new phenomenon and probably started and flourished in the western/urban setting. I used to help with household chores until I went to college and all of that came in handy when I started to live on my own when I got my first job. And my mom mostly never asked me to do it, it was just about being part of the household and sharing responsibilities. And yes, I was never paid to do any of it, neither was my mom.
merrinkurian··on Kerala floods 2018
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Kerala_floods
merrinkurian··on Kerala floods 2018
People blamed many factors for the extensive floods and resulting damage but some natural calamities are simply unavoidable. The state received 2087.67 mm of rains this season when the floods started whereas the normal is 1606 mm. Rains haven’t stopped since then and all 35+ reservoirs had to open shutters at the same time to contain the flow. This is the largest rainfall in almost a century. The largest rainfall state ever received was in 1924 exceeding 3000 mm of rain which even washed away a mountain. So man made construction alone is not the cause for the destruction. Comparitively the Uttarakhand floods of 2013 that killed about 5400 people was only from 500 mm of rain. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indiatoday.in/amp/india/sto...
merrinkurian··on Kerala floods 2018
Rescue and relief efforts are largely powered by volunteers with various government agencies. Social media is helping in a big way, however the ephemeral nature of posts make the deluge of information unmanageable for volunteers. Kerala is the most literate and have most of its working population outside. With a population of 300 million and tech savvy relatives and friends outside the state retweeting and sharing sos calls and relief resources, volunteers are inundated with duplicate and sometimes heavily outdated information. Scanning the feeds with content mostly as images and in Malayalam language with contain images and content, data collection is a huge challenge. Another challenge was identifying the location of victims. After the road signs and two storied houses were almost under water even sharing google map coordinates proved to be difficult to be useful. India does not have a standardized address system. Landmarks were under water too. So were mobile towers.
merrinkurian··on Kerala floods 2018
The state of Kerala known as Gods own country in India received 257% rainfall this year, the heaviest in a century. $2.7 billion in damages estimated. More than 300000 evacuated to relief camps and thousands are still stranded in flooded areas. More red alerts issues throughout the state. Cochin airport the 4th largest in the country is closed for more than 10 days. Details https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/08/18/asia...
merrinkurian··on Ask HN: Do you use State Machines for UI dev?
I have seen state machine explicitly coded for handling menu items. Based on the current state, there are a bunch of menu items that need to be enabled/disabled. Prior to using state machine they were hand coding all these enable/disable logic. Regression testing was a nightmare. Once they moved to the state machine adding new menu items and testing became super easy. That is menu changes became config changes and not code changes.
merrinkurian··on Ask HN: What is the best time to introduce eventual consistency into a system?
To clarify, is this a valid usecase to introduce streaming architecture to the system?