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vinutherajon Ask HN: Why cloud computing?

That seems such a dubious reason to do so, just because ignorance is bliss !

vinutherajon A Third of Dinosaur Species Never Existed?

Well the adults are cannnibalistic, known to eat the young ones.

vinutherajon Barack Obama gets Nobel's Peace Prize

Yes, quote the guy who brought in caste-based reservation in India. Quote the guy who wanted a separate electorate for Dalits and other religious communities. Quote the guy who did not understand Gandhi !

Now there is 49.5% reservation now in educational institutions in India, yes 49.5% !!, because that's the highest allowed by the constitution, otherwise they would have gone higher. It's something similar to "affirmative action" in the US, but totally taken over by politicians to play electoral politics, to pump in the votes from the lower sections of society.

Gandhi had the vision to understand that caste-based reservations would lead to caste-based politics and further affirmation of casteism in India, Ambedkar never could fathom that, or maybe he could and ignored it!

Anyway, please don't quote someone who didn't understand the ideas or vision of Gandhi, please don't.

sources - http://books.google.co.in/books?id=RAON5AW4yUEC&pg=PA232...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambedkar

vinutherajon Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?

I like Chris Rock, I like it that he is frank and forthcoming and always thinks a lot about what he says, whatever he says is logical and makes sense, sometimes you get inspired by watching his shows, especially with all the crowd !

Try Bigger and Blacker and Bring the Pain, two of the funniest shows I have ever seen !

vinutherajon The Nobel Prize in Physics 2009

Why did it take them so many years to recognize this ? Or is it normal from their parts ?!

vinutherajon Ask HN - Why was there ever, fork() ?

Yea but I had heard somewhere that the linux clone was based on Plan 9 rfork.

"FreeBSD's rfork(2) and Linux's clone(2) system calls are modeled on Plan 9's rfork(2)"

source - http://catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html

vinutherajon Math Every Day

And that list doesn't mention his contribution to quantum theory, that he laid the foundation of mathematical quantum theory !

He was a true genius in all senses of the word !

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-nvd/

vinutherajon Ask HN - Why was there ever, fork() ?

On a related note, the Plan 9 system call rfork() gives a system call by which you can create new processes or lightweight processes(threads) with a single system call, deciding on what resources are to be shared between the new processes. There are no 2 discrete entities called processes and threads, just processes !

"In Plan 9, fork is not a system call, but a special version of the true system call, rfork (resource fork) which has an argument consisting of a bit vector that defines how the various resources belonging to the parent will be transferred to the child. Rather than having processes and threads as two distinct things in the system, then, Plan 9 provides a general process-creation primitive that permits the creation of processes of all weights." - Rob Pike.

You can read more about it here - http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.research/browse_threa...

vinutherajon HN: share your unneeded Google Wave invites

thank you !! :)

<username> [at] gmail [dot] com

vinutherajon [dead]

hey mikejuk, why do you keep posting just i-programmer.info links here in HN, can't you be more ingenuous and post some links that you really found good and would like to share with us, than posting links from the same place everytime, please !

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mikejuk

vinutherajon Grand Central Dispatch: The Sleeping Barber Problem

Here's a good discussion on a related topic in the 9fans archive - http://www.mail-archive.com/9fans@9fans.net/msg10581.html

vinutherajon Persuade xor Discover

"Learn how to tell them to go to hell in such a way they'll want to go." - heard in the 61st Emmy Awards, forgot who said it though !

vinutherajon Andy Tanenbaum hasn't learned anything

Does commercial success or popularity imply technically sound and superior ?

vinutherajon Linus says Linux has become 'bloated and huge'

"Mac OS X is sort of microkernelish. Inside, it consists of Berkeley UNIX riding on top of a modified version of the Mach microkernel. Since all of it runs in kernel mode (to get that little extra bit of performance) it is not a true microkernel, but Carnegie Mellon University had Berkeley UNIX running on Mach in user space years ago, so it probably could be done again, albeit with a small amount of performance loss, as with L4Linux. Work is underway to port the Apple BSD code (Darwin) to L4 to make it a true microkernel system." - Andy Tanenbaum

reference - http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/reliable-os/

vinutherajon Robot hand ties knots, dribbles a ball, and uses tweezers (video)

Throwing the cell-phone to regrasp it is kinda cool !

vinutherajon Does any animal besides humans commit suicide? (2001)

Animals that Commit Suicide - http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9F03EEDC10...

article from 1895 nytimes

vinutherajon How Many People Are In Space Right Now?

Where does he really get the data from ?

vinutherajon Tips for Startup Companies (2006)

That works when your aim is to find out the behaviour of character of a person, which is not the aim of a technical interview question. Basically the aim of the technical question is to find out how the person thinks and how creative a solution he works out, and how his thinking process works, not to find out his behavioral characteristics.

So it doesn't depend whether if it is an actual situation the candidate has gone through or if it is a hypothetical situation. In the case of a candidate applying for a first job for instance, this is a pretty good way of questioning I think !

vinutherajon Cheating the App Store: PR firm has interns post positive reviews for clients

He is just saying that the Free Market isn't always good in and of itself, some kind of regulation is always needed, though in an inflammatory tone !

Anyways, what is the proportion of doctored/fake reviews with respect to all the 5-star reviews of these apps, did anyone get that info ?

vinutherajon The true story of audion

Yea, it has been on HN before - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22936, but that was some 825 days ago! So I posted again by removing the / at the end.

Funny thing, when I did a searchYC, it shows http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620698 with the same link as the previous one posted 825 days ago, while I tried to post this one, it showed the old one, instead of showing the new one.

I think the duplicity check should be time bound though, maybe a year or something like that !

vinutherajon Flickr yanks image of Obama as Joker

This will become another example of the Streisand effect most probably - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

vinutherajon Ask HN: Trivial etiquette question - can he touch my laptop screen?

I don't think your favorite line will work if it's a female co-worker though !

vinutherajon Want to write a paper involving maths and comp sci. any ideas?

Computational Number Theory or Computational Geometry ?

vinutherajon Ask HN: New research topics in networking ?

1.Trust Models in VANETs,

2.Attack Graphs in VANETs/MANETs

I was kinda looking for some info on other research areas, other than these though !

vinutherajon Ask HN: Where do you live?

Kharagpur, India ( currently studying here )

vinutherajon The LED's Dark Secret: "droop"

A light-emitting diode (LED) (pronounced /ˌɛliːˈdiː/[1], or just /lɛd/), is an electronic light source. The LED was first invented in Russia in the 1920s, and introduced in America as a practical electronic component in 1962. Oleg Vladimirovich Losev was a radio technician who noticed that diodes used in radio receivers emitted light when current was passed through them. In 1927, he published details in a Russian journal of the first ever LED.[citation needed]

According to wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode

vinutherajon China Embarrasses US in TopCoder Contest

I get this when I try to open the link -

WebKnight Application Firewall Alert

Your request triggered an alert! If you feel that you have received this page in error, please contact the administrator of this web site.

What is WebKnight? AQTRONIX WebKnight is an application firewall for web servers and is released under the GNU General Public License. It is an ISAPI filter for securing web servers by blocking certain requests. If an alert is triggered WebKnight will take over and protect the web server.

For more information on WebKnight: http://www.aqtronix.com/WebKnight/

AQTRONIX WebKnight

vinutherajon Ramen Profitable

Yea, joining a real company may seem to be responsible to the outside world, but starting a startup entails more responsibility than joining an already successful company. And PG here is talking about the actual responsibility which comes with starting a startup which discourages people from starting one, rather than the perceived responsibility of the society.

vinutherajon What You Learned About How Planes Fly Was Probably Wrong

A better more scientific and mathematically detailed explanation can be found if you google "how wings work" - http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0031-9120/38/6/001/pe3_6_001.p...

Thank you to the OP for pointing out the flaw in the popular explanation !

vinutherajon [dead]

I just saw this and was really moved, so just wanted to share it and see what people here thought about it. Yea I know that its really one sided and I am not advocating vegetarianism. I just wanted to share and hear what you guys had to say !!

Sorry if it isn't appropriate here !!