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sanj

6,989 karma · joined March 29, 2007

CEO and Cofounder of https://directbooker.ai

Executive Director at https://maskson.org

formerly Group Product Manager at Google

formerly Director of Product Development at Time Out

formerly Senior Director of Product, Restaurants at TripAdvisor

formerly Director of Product, Restaurants and Attractions at TripAdvisor

formerly Director of Mobile at TripAdvisor

formerly Technical Lead on Personalization at TripAdvisor

formerly Engineering Manager for Social at TripAdvisor

formerly founder: luckycal.com

formerly cofounder: patientkeeper.com . . .

Reach me at svakil@gmail.com

submissionscomments
sanj··on 2007 Boston Mooninite Panic
At the time I lived next door to the “litebrite” bombers.

It was disconcerting to arrive home to that many news vans in front of my house.

sanj··on Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
Caveat: I formerly worked at Google.

What missing is that code being written by AI may have less of an impact than dataset that are developed or refined by AI. Consider examples like a utility function's coefficients, or the weights of a model.

As these are aggressively tuned using ML feedback, they'll influence far more systems than raw code.

sanj··on Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan
Parenting.
sanj··on Show HN: Itineraries.io – I built a joint trip planner in between surgeries
Is your globe showing a Mercator projection??

https://xkcd.com/977/

sanj··on Congress fights to keep AM radio in cars
A recent software update enables AM radio in Ford EVs: https://es.ford.com/support/how-tos/ford-technology/software...
sanj··on Meta Movie Gen
Hippos don't float.
sanj··on I Am Tired of AI
A compiler is deterministic. An LLM is not.
sanj··on GM electric vehicles can now access Tesla Superchargers
this one?

https://ev-lectron.com/products/lectron-vortex-plug-tesla-su...

sanj··on The Double Irish Dutch Sandwich: End of a Tax Evasion Strategy
“ The obvious loss is to government revenue, but the more subtle and still very real loss is the diversion of high-powered talent from what could have been gains in efficiency and productivity to focus instead on corporate reorganizations and tax evasion games.”

I’d expect very little overlap between those talent pools.

sanj··on Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?
It smells awfully close to: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-realp...
sanj··on Launch HN: Roame (YC S23) – Flight search engine for your credit card points
Love the idea!

If a user has entered what points they have, can you limit the results and prices to just that card?

sanj··on Kawaii – A Keychain-Sized Nintendo Wii
This is in poor taste.
sanj··on Ask HN: What are some iconic comments on HN?
Ravi's my cousin.
sanj··on Ask HN: What are some iconic comments on HN?
I love that this continues to top the list.
sanj··on Cyclomatic complexity
I used this as a metric of autoflight system complexity!

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/9172

sanj··on A Partisan Solution to Partisan Gerrymandering: The Define–Combine Procedure
Is this a generalized version of sharing a cake?

- I get to cut the cake in half

- you get to choose which slice to eat

sanj··on U.S. National Park Service API
Do you have contact info for that team? The NPS app is one of the best I've ever used and I'd love to know who built it.
sanj··on Can Microsoft Flight Simulator help me learn to fly or make me a better pilot?
You’re not misinformed, but perhaps underinformed.

The hexapod both provides acceleration and rotates to use gravity to simulate continuous acceleration.

The brilliant part is that it trade between these two modes below human vestibular thresholds. So you can’t tell whether your sense of acceleration is coming from movement or orientation.

I took a flight physiology course with Larry Young who modeled the human vestibular system as a set of feedback loops with known gains. And an awesome graduate course entirely on flight simulation.

sanj··on BC Supreme Court bars man from calling himself an 'engineer'
British Columbia, not Alberta.

You can’t call yourself Alberta unless your a registered Alberta.

sanj··on Engineering a Solar System
And visuals!

https://lucas.bourneuf.net/blog/uess.html

sanj··on Google is picking ChatGPT responses from Quora as correct answer
I had a similar experience trying to find a justification for a “House rule” we use when playing Catan (aka “the penny rule”).

In trying to find a reputable source, the first result was to an HN comment… that I wrote.

The folks we were playing with were not convinced.

sanj··on The “three things” exercise for getting things out of talks (2011)
What a strangely small world – that's my cousin!
sanj··on Brex Devalues Rewards
They’re all just white-labeled Expedia.
sanj··on What does the land under Antarctica’s ice sheet look like?
Do you have a link to an article explaining this?
sanj··on Ménage Problem
“Along with their applications to etiquette and knot theory,…”
sanj··on Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it tries to rally confidence
It isn’t. But reality is almost as good:

In a statement, Mars said it was "absurd" to compare its corporate governance and financial reporting requirements with Binance's, adding that its goods and services are "highly regulated."

sanj··on Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
I helped start and run https://maskson.org
sanj··on The lonely runner conjecture
Is the lonely runner a proxy for the overloaded server in a load balancer using consistent hashing?

Or are the pictures just similar?

sanj··on Tesla devs at Twitter misunderstand Slack privacy; leak fire lists based on LOC
I wrote code that wrote code.

I regularly topped that “SLOC touched list.”

But there were a heap of much more talented engineers than me.

sanj··on Patagonia Founder “Going to Hell.”
'When I arranged for him to talk to a gathering of Silicon Valley whiz kids, he let me know he didn’t have a sports jacket.

That didn’t keep him from lecturing his audience on their failure to spend more time and money on saving the environment. “Brokaw and I are going to hell for not doing enough,” he told them, “but you still have a chance.”'

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