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tejaswiy

948 karma · joined March 6, 2010

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tejaswiy··on Zuckerberg’s Rules Would Hurt Everyone but Facebook
Yeah I don't buy that part either. The problem is inherently hard and pushing the responsibility for policing content to a corporation is not okay. As a specific example, I was listening to a podcast I was listening to earlier that was dealing with how Facebook filters content (I think radiolab). I'm para-phrasing heavily since it's been a while since I heard the show, but I think I got the gist of it right.

- There was a violet attack in Mexico against a journalist by some drug cartel and a random body part (leg or an arm or a head or whatever) was chopped off and posted on social media by the cartel. The people protesting cartel violence picked this image up and were using this image as a part of their protest. Facebook's censors allowed it until the image popped up on some school kid's feed in America / England and all sorts of outcry later, it was removed from the site as a violet image.

- The boston marathon bombing happened and gruesome images of people lying on the floor with limbs strewn about started getting shared on the site. Facebook's policy at this point specifically said no violent images on the site so they got blocked by the censors. Media picked this up and raised an outcry on how facebook was censoring these images and basically someone high up said 'leave it up or else' and the images were allowed on the site.

This is clearly hipocrisy and there's no right answer here. Traumatizing school children with violent imagery they didn't even want to see is not great while the Boston marathon bombing was a significant political event in America and those images didn't deserve to get silenced.

This ends up being a question of free-speech and what sorts of content Americans were okay with. There are no right answers and I believe the govt. definitely should step in and provide guidelines here.

The disingenuous thing is using this as an example of how Facebook is okay with govt regulation while resisting any regulation around things that can hurt them like any number of their privacy mishaps, shady 3p data markets and ad tech in general.

tejaswiy··on Is China’s corruption-busting AI being turned off for being too efficient?
> Beijing has been developing a nationwide facial recognition system using surveillance cameras capable of identifying any person, anywhere, around the clock within seconds.

So before all the privacy activists are up in arms, this is pretty incredible and it looks like they're getting pretty close to eliminating all violent crime. I think that's an incredible achievement if they can pull it off. In an even broader historical context, individualism and capitalism have had their run for 100+ years, maybe this is the rise of a new ideological movement.

tejaswiy··on Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
Is there something that tracks the number of minutes a daily active user spends on the site? I still login to facebook but I barely post on it anymore and spend way less time than I used to a couple of years ago.
tejaswiy··on H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads
Most IT / h1 roles are not based out of the Bay Area [1]. Significant amounts of H1b population goes to doing cookie cutter consulting projects spread across the country and setting a 150k min on the wage means that you won't be able to hire H1s at all in other parts of the country. Obviously this creates a lot of demand for American programmers and personal experience suggests that this will cause a labor shortage.

[1] https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.as...

tejaswiy··on H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads
That's what the regulations say right now - for each title, there's a prevailing wage level that DOL publishes and a H1 has to meet that wage level. It is however a single level across the country so it tends to be a bit on the lower side.
tejaswiy··on H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads
Needs to be adjusted for cost of living, salary changes over time by profession (Tech salaries are in a bubble rn. which makes 150k reasonable by bay area standards, but they may go significantly up / down in the future) which is complicated enough but there's edge cases like Universities / Non profits etc. that can't pay salaries to compete with the private sector but people work there anyway because of passion.
tejaswiy··on Facebook to integrate the infrastructure for WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger
Oh man ignoring the privacy implications of this, all the "product" people at Facebook are going to destroy WhatsApp as we know and love. It is going to become a giant monstrosity with a 500MB binary size, lag, whole bunch of tracking code and super slow servers. It has begun to a certain extent already and it's only going get worse.

I assume they think that the network effect is going to lock users into WhatsApp but the moment it becomes too painful to run on a 100$ Android phone with 1GB of RAM, it will inevitably die. Sure it's not going to be instantaneous but I'm a 100% sure that all the PMs that run Facebook Messenger are itching to get their hands on WhatsApp.

I understand these changes are only on the server side, but I imagine the client side is not too far away. Some client changes are inevitable because I'm pretty sure they'll build a "unified" API for all these apps and it's is going to contain a whole bunch of messenger service code (because look at all those messenger features that noone cares about, surely we can't just drop what a whole org has been working on for two years)

tejaswiy··on Toyota Lifts the Veil on Its Guardian Driver-Assist System
> The driver might almost forget the help he’s getting, and attribute the success to his own powers

I really like this idea but I feel this is the key in getting it right. Several video games achieve this feeling of seamlessness when translating raw input from a controller to in-game actions. However this does occasionally go wrong and can be a frustrating experience in video games (especially if you're playing online competitively) but in the real world it can have much more drastic consequences.

Also, given the complexity of the real world, it's somewhat scary to think of a scenario where you're actually trying to take a drastic action on the road but are prevented by the system from doing-so because it feels that the action is unsafe.

tejaswiy··on $1T is leaving Britain because of Brexit
Presumably that means less jobs in the UK and more jobs in the EU to manage that wealth for one. I'm not sure what that means for future growth of the UK financial services industry.
tejaswiy··on Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana to Win World Chess Championship
Just to throw it out there in case people are looking for good chess commentators, my favorite is agadmator: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL5YbN5WLFD8dLIegT5QAbA
tejaswiy··on Ask HN: What are you thankful for?
I have to say, every time I come across this book, it seems like bullshit not backed by any science at all and yet it gets rave reviews on HN. As a one-time thing, I can put it off towards some propaganda campaign ala Tim Ferris / The four hour body but this is a pattern. Don't know what to make of it really.
tejaswiy··on Practical Deep Learning for Coders
How do you mean? As a side project? I've seen and built several ML products that are used widely inside Amazon atleast.
tejaswiy··on John Hancock will include fitness tracking in all life insurance policies
If enough people subscribe to the idea, this might become the standard operating procedure and you won't even have the option of saying no.
tejaswiy··on Amazon's Bezos Launches $2B Fund to Help the Homeless
You didn't really answer the question.
tejaswiy··on Amazon's Bezos Launches $2B Fund to Help the Homeless
So you'd rather have him hoard his wealth and do nothing? Or somehow handicap Amazon so it doesn't compete? Your argument doesn't really hold up.
tejaswiy··on MKS: Mechanical Keyboard Simulator – Bogdan's Blog
Cool idea, but how do I know you're not a Keylogger in disguise?
tejaswiy··on You don’t need standups
Then it becomes completely meaningless - It's the equivalent to saying to someone - "Be good" without defining anything about what good-ness involves.

Once you start defining specifically what you mean by good, if your initial premise falls apart and there's no practical way to be good, then what's the point of saying be good?

tejaswiy··on You don’t need standups
That is just bullshit though. I don't find value in anything that agile offers, can I just throw it out entirely by your argument?

Standups - You can simply claim that, hey you don't want to do standups, don't do standups but if you take a concrete implementation of Agile, say scrum for instance, it specifically asks each person in the team to answer:

"What did I do yesterday that helped the development team meet the sprint goal? What will I do today to help the development team meet the sprint goal? Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the development team from meeting the sprint goal?"

These questions are effectively a way lay out a very clear path for management to basically micro-manage developers and they add pressure on developers to come up with some contrived explanation to make it sound like their day was productive. Hardly builds any trust when your work is being supervised and judged by a team every single day even if the goal of the meeting is not to do so specifically.

I can go deeper into each individual process that agile variants impose and take each of them apart. I have nothing but spite for this godforsaken process, the only thing it's good for is to give management an illusion of control on software development process.

tejaswiy··on OpenAI Five Benchmark
Could you go into some more detail on the actual engineering mechanics? Does each bot have an instance of the neural net model it runs a separate PC? How often do you feed game state into the net? What's the output of the network (bunch of movement / item / spell commands) that are fed in through the game driver?
tejaswiy··on Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact
Just out of curiosity - what open solutions are you referring to?
tejaswiy··on Stopping the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career (2016)
I'm not sure how much I agree with this post but what personally worked for me was simply using the mouse with my left hand instead of my right. I play a lot of video games and 15 years of intense clicking has taken its toll on my right hand so I just limit the mileage I put on it now.

That's not to say never use your right hand at all - If I was playing some FPS I'd happily switch to using my right hand again but giving it extended periods of rest (by not using the mouse) and hitting tough key combos with my left hand (Cmd + Shift + 4 + Space for a screenshot anyone?) were what made things better for me.

tejaswiy··on College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
I think the argument is to not prevent people from getting art history degrees - just to make all art history courses in the US artificially limit the number of students they take in to match the actual demand.

So if someone's super passionate about art history and is also able to meet the (presumably) more stringent entry criteria, they will still be able to get that degree.

tejaswiy··on India Wants to Give Half a Billion People Free Health Care
The govt. of Andhra Pradesh (a state in India) has pioneered a state backed insurance program several years ago with reasonable success (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarogyasri). The problem however with these programs is that corruption within the healthcare industry is still endemic and doctors create fake diagnoses and perform unnecessary surgeries on patients to get their reimbursements from Aarogya-sri. If this program is to be rolled out a national scale, the govt. needs to address the systematic corruption in the healthcare industry first.

That said, I think Aarogyasri was overall a huge success in my state and has saved millions of lives and I'm excited to see it being adopted at a national level.

tejaswiy··on India’s TCS Faces U.S. Trial in Anti-American Bias Case
Your argument would be correct if no American from the company was re-hired by TCS which I don't think is the case.

Outsourcing efforts at companies usually start with part of the workforce / couple of projects outsourced to a major outsourcer. This gives them partial insider information on the competence / political scenario / compensation in the company. I wouldn't be surprised if TCS worked with company management to figure out who would be retained based on these 3 variables and let others go without their fair shot even if they were qualified.

While this sucks for a candidate, I don't think you can allege discrimination based on this.

tejaswiy··on India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year
That is still very much a small minority. For the average Indian programmer in the US, there's very little incentive to move back to India purely for professional prospects. Let's face it, I'd much rather code for Amazon in Seattle than Flipkart in Bangalore.

Other factors like the shitty visa situation (more and more people are chosing to move to Canada because of their permanent residency requirements), family ties and some more ethereal things like the pull of the motherland come into play. As an Indian in the US with maybe 70-80 people from my undergraduate class in the US, a grand total of one person went back to India to build a startup despite having a succesful career.

tejaswiy··on Truffle: Ethereum Dapp Development Framework
I generally agree with you, but would like to know about your specific concerns, what did you dislike about it?
tejaswiy··on Soylent’s Next Chapter
Oh no, it was definitely a serious question. When the product came out, I was excited about replacing atleast one of my meals (probably dinner) with Soylent. I held off because I was uncomfortable switching to something that can potentially have negative long term health consequences. I was just wondering if there were any studies done on people that were purely on a soylent diet to feel more comfortable about drinking it.
tejaswiy··on Soylent’s Next Chapter
What's going on with Soylent these days? They've been out for a while, so I'd be interested to learn about any (relatively) long term studies that came out about the health effects of a soylent-only diet.
tejaswiy··on ChrysaLisp – A 64-bit Lisp OS with GUI
I started on this path, got through the boot-up, interrupts etc. and to a simple shell. Once that was done, instead of targeting something simpler like malloc(), I wanted to get a VGA driver working. VGA drivers are notoriously hard and I really wanted my OS to have a UI so after a couple of weeks of studying and getting nowhere, I gave up on the whole project.

I think the one major thing that caused me to give up on the project was whenever it became time to refactor or to think about the big picture (for ex. where do the drivers live? what about a libc implementation - can you just get glibc to work on your OS? Or do you have to rewrite the whole of libc?), I found that I was just copying whatever linux had already done. The feeling that I wasn't really doing any original work and am making a shittier version of an existing system demotivated me for some reason even though this was just supposed to be a learning exercise. So some advice for anyone attempting this - be prepared to go out of your way to rewrite significant amounts of helper code that has nothing to do with actually building your OS.

tejaswiy··on Fresh Horrors from Equifax CEO Richard Smith's Congressional Hearing
> Second, Smith blamed a scanning system used to spot this sort of oversight that did not identify the customer-dispute portal as vulnerable. Smith said forensic investigators are still looking into why the scanner failed.

Do these scanners ever work? Without naming names, the only reason we used this at a previous company was to kind of handwave around hey we have this tool doing regular security checks.

> The first excuse Smith gave was "human error." He says there was a particular (unnamed) individual who knew that the portal needed to be patched but failed to notify the appropriate IT team.

How is this one individual responsible for tracking all IT security vulnerabilities in all the technologies that equifax uses across its stack? How do they not have an admin team whose job it is to do these things?

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