sohamsankaran

From painful experience this is true, especially the parts Rachit wrote to personally call me out.

I'm one of the authors of this article -- happy to answer questions if anyone has any.

This is great! If you're not a Delta Chat user and someone tries to message you, can you receive and respond to it as an email?

Gandi has been my registrar for years -- they're solid, high-integrity folks. Hope they manage to resolve this without too much damage.

Pashi (YC W20) | REMOTE / US / India | Full-time | Compiler engineer | https://pashi.com

Pashi is building the operating system for manufacturing. We already work with some of the largest manufacturers in the world, and our software is being brought to bear against some of the thorniest problems that plague the most mission-critical high-volume production processes ever constructed.

We're currently a very small, very technical team spread across India, Europe, and the US, and we're looking for folks with strong backgrounds in programming languages and compilers to help us build better programming abstractions for physical processes.

Email soham@pashi.com with a paragraph-length description of any relevant experience if you're interested.

This has been obvious for months -- Romer has been yelling from the rooftops about it -- and yet no major western govt save the Brits have attempted to even try this strategy. Madness.

As it turns out, you can build most distributed protocols on top of an API which only allows you to append to and read from a shared log -- for example, if you want to do consensus across a number of actors, you can just have each one write their proposed value and the current epoch to the log, and the value that is written into the earliest log slot wins. In general, shared total orderings are equivalent to consensus -- this is clear when you consider that State Machine Replication (Paxos, Raft) is all about ensuring that all actors perform the same set of commands in the same order. If you're looking for a more detailed exposition of the shared log abstraction and its uses, you might benefit from reading the Corfu (https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/mahesh/papers/corfumain-final....), Tango (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~taozou/sosp13/tangososp.pdf), and FuzzyLog (https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi18-lockerman.pdf) papers from the lead author that precede this one.

Netflix gained ground in original television by funding bold new stuff that nobody else would (Orange Is The New Black, BoJack). They've now becomes slaves to their data despite the fact that the signals they rely on are hopelessly confounded. It's possible that they've hit upon the right strategy, but I both suspect and hope that isn't true.

Reference? AFAIK this was proposed by Wipro in a white paper but was never implemented.

Starting an independent project or two in an area you haven't played in before might be both fun and useful. I have a somewhat long list of ideas I don't have the time to do if you're looking for inspiration -- feel free to email me if you want 'em (soham at soh dot am).

Hi folks, I'm the host of Segfault, which is a podcast about computer science research. In this episode, Cornell Professor and former Facebook AI Researcher Bharath Hariharan joins me to discuss what got him into Computer Vision, how the transition to deep learning has changed the way CV research is conducted, and the still-massive gap between human perception and what machines can do.

Happy to answer any questions about the stuff we talked about, and would appreciate any feedback you might have.

FYI, in addition to the audio, there's a complete transcript available on the page as well.

Ethan also writes about machine learning at https://honestyisbest.com/kernels-of-truth each week -- his most recent piece there (https://honestyisbest.com/kernels-of-truth/2020/Jul/14/facia...) has a neat explanation of how convolutional neural networks (CNNs) work.

This is a test of a potential bug in the HN API, please ignore.

Oh, sorry, hadn't seen the other story.

I endorse this as a temporary solution, thanks for the suggestion!

Sadly we're not likely to support an RSS feed for Today in Indian History for a little while, but if you sign up via email we'll definitely let you know when we add one.

I wonder what happens to folks like Ninja with big exclusive deals.

If you want to target ads, which is where the majority of the money in 'data' comes from, personal data about rich people that helps target ads to them is a lot more valuable than personal data about poor people.

In a weird way, this would be a regressive policy -- the data of the richest people is worth orders of magnitude more, so this would just make the rich, well, richer. Increasing corporate tax rates would help the poor much more.

It was, for a time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Buddhism_in_the_I...

I think there is no alternative but for the west to tie itself closely to India if they want liberal democracy to prevail. India is deeply flawed, but has a deep and abiding affinity for democracy, and a polity that is sophisticated about things like strategic split-ticket voting to prevent too much power being concentrated in one political party. As such, it frustrates me that Western countries don't help us consolidate our position in international affairs, including by allowing us to officially be a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and supporting our bid to be on the UN Security Council.

If you're interested in how India's history informs our politics, economy, and foreign relations today, take a look at Today in Indian History, a newsletter which my brother and I recently launched. Four times a week, we lay out the context and consequences of an event in India's past that happened on that date. Link below:

https://honestyisbest.com/today-in-indian-history/

Seems like this is analogous to YC's SAFE. I hope this takes off -- this would have already saved thousands of dollars of lawyer time for us, a small startup that is less than a year old.

We're not on Spotify at the moment. We are on Apple Podcasts and most other players, and you should be able to import the RSS feed directly into most players as well. My personal recommendation is Podcast Addict (https://podcastaddict.com/). Feel free to email me at soham [at] soh [dot] am if you're still having trouble subscribing.

My brother and I launched a newsletter called Today in Indian History. Four times a week, we lay out the context and consequences of an event in India's past that happened on that date.

https://honestyisbest.com/today-in-indian-history/

I also launched a podcast about Computer Science research called Segfault.

https://honestyisbest.com/segfault

Hey folks, I'm Soham, the host of Segfault, a podcast mapping the terrain of Computer Science research. The first episode, available at https://honestyisbest.com/segfault/2020/Jun/16/programming-l... & linked above, is about the research area of Programming Languages (PL), and features Adrian Sampson, Rachit Nigam, and Alexa VanHattum of Cornell's Capra group. There's a complete transcript for the episode at that link as well, if you would rather read it than listen to the audio.

What's the point of this? Well, Computer Science is composed of many different areas of research -- operating systems, algorithms, and cryptography, for example -- each with their own problems of interest, publications of record, idioms of communication, and styles of thought. What people doing research in these areas actually do, and how that interacts with what people in other areas do, is not usually apparent to folks who haven't spent a lot of time in academia or are just starting out.

Segfault intends to serve as a map of the field, with each episode featuring discussions about the core motivations, ideas, and methods of one particular area, with a mix of academics ranging from first year graduate students to long tenured professors as guests.

If you find the time to listen to it or read the transcript, I'd love to get your feedback.

Yep, it's pretty clear they use IBM db2 on z/OS internally for some applications. Here's an example job posting: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Aqb9oU...

I think there's a place for alternate representations like these outside of proofs that need to be exhaustively machine-checkable. I have, for what it's worth, had far better experiences with Coq and the like than with mathematics in general.

For me, each of those text based representations is more clear, despite their divergence, than the symbolic version.

I have a lot of frustration with this notion of the "visually evident formal properties of the integral" -- I think the existing visual-symbolic paradigm of mathematical notation is intuitive to some subset of people, but that subset does not encompass everyone who could do mathematics at a high level, excluding those for whom some alternate, in this case more text-based, representation is more tractable.

This is not even true across subfields in mathematics -- there's a lot of context-specific notational overloading, and there is often inconsistent notation even within a single long paper.

I would pay a fairly large chunk of my income to someone working on this kind of alternate representation of mathematics full-time. Email me at soham [at] soh.am if you're interested.