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vinutheraj

2,523 karma · joined December 21, 2008

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vinutheraj··on In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature
"The first source of difficulty is this – that it is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. To make progress in understanding we must remain modest and allow that we do not know. Nothing is certain or proved beyond all doubt. You investigate for curiosity, because it is unknown, not because you know the answer. And as you develop more information in the sciences, it is not that you are finding out the truth, but that you are finding out that this or that is more or less likely.

That is, if we investigate further, we find that the statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known to different degrees of certainty: "It is very much more likely that so and so is true than that it is not true;" or "such and such is almost certain but there is still a little bit of doubt;" or – at the other extreme – "well, we really don't know." Every one of the concepts of science is on a scale graduated somewhere between, but at neither end of, absolute falsity or absolute truth." - Richard P. Feynman

vinutheraj··on [dead]
I remember watching a movie the other day, which had a plot element where a muslim guy living in Chicago is arrested by the police because his neighbour suspects he is a terrorist. And the police arrest him and confirm that he is a terrorist when they find a paper in his apartment with some quotation from the Quran on it and they believe it is some cryptic message/map or something. I was laughing at that time, thinking of the stupidity of the plot. Well I am not laughing now !

This is the movie - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khuda_Kay_Liye

vinutheraj··on Little trick for finding the right language construct (using Google)
Doesn't grammar evolve with time ? I don't think any grammar is authoritative in english, and that's one of the reasons english has thrived as a language because it has evolved with time !
vinutheraj··on Sarah Silverman is brilliant
Words themselves do not matter, it's after all just a sound we make. The important thing is the emotion behind the utterance, the context and also the interpretation of the meaning of the word.

Like what you said, the n-word means different things to the old lady and the kids. The kids are at ease using the word while the lady is not. Words which are very acceptable nowadays may turn out to be taboo in the future.

vinutheraj··on What’s Better: Saving the World or Building Another Facebook app?
Your prayers have been answered - http://wappr.com/, surprisingly it was posted on HN just before you asked this question - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1123173
vinutheraj··on Maemo Firefox disables Flash
I was literally afraid of reading pdf files before I came across Foxit pdf reader ! I haven't used acrobat reader ever since !
vinutheraj··on This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post
This is the comment in which I say something which is totally irrelevant to the topic and end up contributing nothing to discussion
vinutheraj··on The work you do while you procrastinate is ...
That's what I am searching for while reading HN
vinutheraj··on The work you do while you procrastinate is ...
I watch movies/read HN while I procrastinate ! :(
vinutheraj··on Google Agrees to Censor Encyclopedia Dramatica Entry in Australia
Yea now you have to try Aboriginal and Encyclopedia Dramatica to get the chillingeffects mention !
vinutheraj··on Search for Google's "New Approach" post, get locked out of baidu.com
Wow, it's the first time I am taking a look at baidu, and the UI seems to be so familiar ... very much related to google!

Maybe this is one of the reasons people are unwilling to shift to google from baidu, both seem similar to them, nothing new in google !

vinutheraj··on Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See
I think our moral viewpoint has changed over time !

When we were in tribes killing animals, that was deemed necessary at that point of time, because of all the benefits of animal food and the shelter provided by the animal skin.

Then we moved into killing other humans, to gain control of their resources, because it was either them or us. I think it was correct from their viewpoint what they did.

It's unfair to judge them using our morality, maybe our descendants will judge us in the future for wasting our natural resources, who knows ?!

vinutheraj··on HN long term change
The green area is marked technlogy and the orange area is marked technology ! Isn't that an error ?
vinutheraj··on Hiring and The Sixth Sense of Experience
I don't understand how this story is a good anecdote for what this guy is trying to say ie, that some people have a sixth sense about hiring

How is it sixth sense that he fired a guy who obviously made such a grave mistake ?!

If the guy was fired before the mistake and he went to a new company where he committed a big mistake, then that would have better suited what he was trying to convey !

Obviously he shouldn't make up stories, but the one he uses doesn't suit the message

vinutheraj··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
Is it something similar to Sahana - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahana_FOSS_Disaster_Management... ?
vinutheraj··on Students Ace Textbook Physics While Struggling With Basic Understanding (video)
Sorry! I waited a day for you or JabavuAdams to post the link, but since you both didn't do it, I posted it myself, because I felt this was good enough to be posted here !
vinutheraj··on Taking account of misconceptions; avoiding rote learning (MIT OCW video)
Then it wouldn't be rolling, you need a surface for it to roll. Atleast that is my understanding !
vinutheraj··on [dead]
eastlinkage, please correct your link, the correct link is http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/24/...
vinutheraj··on --All You Zombies--
Hmm, well I knew what I did was not the best way, but I thought if I just linked the story, not many people would read the whole thing ! So I thought this was the best way to reach out to a larger audience, give them a summary of the story.
vinutheraj··on --All You Zombies--
Here's the story - http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/~mfedder/zombies.html

It's a real fun story exploring the peculiar paradoxes of time travel :), where a man becomes his own father and mother and son :D !!

vinutheraj··on Microsoft rips off Plurk
Well, at the other extreme the gnu people also try not to look into other code, even if it is open-source !

http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-help/2008-08/msg00009.html

vinutheraj··on Notes about Go
and there's no 9P library in sight

Well, it so happens that someone wrote one just in time - http://bitbucket.org/f2f/go9p/

Funny coincidence that I was reading ths story right now, and I got a mail in the 9fans archive about this 9p implementation written in Go, and to top it, look at the domain name !

vinutheraj··on Google Go started in 1972
I hope you also noticed the R=ken(Ken Thompson) and R=dmr(Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie) in the commit log messages :)
vinutheraj··on Google Go started in 1972
There was a discussion on using emoticons even in serious communication, yesterday I think.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=933585

vinutheraj··on 1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + 5 - 6 + ... made easy
Adding a '+' to the end, before the '..' makes it work again, maybe it needs an operand and the '..' to show that it is an infinite series, maybe !

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+-+2+%2B+3+-+4+%2B+5+-....

vinutheraj··on A very old gcc "bug"
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/376278/parameter-evaluati...

https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/seccode...

Basically, do not depend on the order of evaluation of arguments to a function call, because it is unspecified and left to the implementation to decide according to the C99 standard.

EDIT: Another explanation, pertinent to your example can be found here - http://c-faq.com/expr/evalorder2.html

vinutheraj··on Coin toss not random after all
Well, you can prevent that by stipulating that the orientation should be same on both flips.
vinutheraj··on Ask HN: Are there any very long term genetic programming experiments?
A similar question and its responses - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/396938/computer-simulatio...
vinutheraj··on BFS vs. Mainline Scheduler: Discussion
Well if you can't find the file sched_features in /sys/kernel/debug or in /debug you can mount it using -

  sudo mount -t debugfs none /sys/kernel/debug
and then proceed to doing the echo thing.

Atleast for me, in Ubuntu 8.10 this directory wasn't mounted automatically !

vinutheraj··on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 9
I personally liked this one - Symantec sponsored a study by Dennis Technology Lab which concluded that Norton Antivirus 2009 is superior to Microsoft Security Essentials in on-demand scans as well as real-time protection.
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