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vinutheraj

2,523 karma · joined December 21, 2008

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vinutheraj··on The Tyranny of the Clock (2012) [pdf]
Related talk by the author (Ivan Sutherland): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR9pAaQlVRc
vinutheraj··on Span<T> in C#
Nice. Seems very similar to https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/types/...
vinutheraj··on Lyft Set to Claim Third of U.S. Market in 2017
Most drivers I have talked to use both and shift between them based on the number of rides they are getting.
vinutheraj··on It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do
Then the question becomes: can there be a really random number generator ?
vinutheraj··on Forecasting at Uber with RNNs
There's TensorFlow Serving [0] and the SavedModel export format [1] to help with this.

[0] https://tensorflow.github.io/serving/ [1] https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorf...

vinutheraj··on Skin in the Game as a Required Heuristic for Acting Under Uncertainty
> That pilotes die in case of a plane crash is probably the main reason why air travel is so safe.

Then what about driving ? By the same logic, car accidents should be much less. Flights are much safer due to the amount of research done in air-travel safety, in general, and also after every accident. And also because in roads you have too many cars interacting together at the same time, where any one person's small mistake can cause an accident, which is not the case with aeroplanes.

vinutheraj··on Ask HN: Best Movies you saw in 2012?
Moonrise Kingdom was the best. The Hobbit was great.

Looper was good, but the ending wasn't logically consistent I think.

Since no one has mentioned it, I would recommend Dredd. It was a good movie going experience. Don't know it would make good viewing outside a cinema, though.

Cloud Atlas was interesting, but not as insightful as it was made out to be.

vinutheraj··on Google's "Bacon number" search
David Mitchell of Peep Show fame has a Bacon number of 3.
vinutheraj··on The Woman Who Needed to Be Upside-Down
Great story. But I wonder what would have happened if she was not five feet and him seven feet tall !
vinutheraj··on Facebook’s stock should trade for $13.80
John Maynard Keynes said that.
vinutheraj··on Innovation and the Bell Labs Miracle
Richard Feynman. An essay about his work on computing machines - http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...
vinutheraj··on Half Life of a Tech Worker: 15 Years - Slashdot
It it's my last day in general; I wouldn't be working at all.
vinutheraj··on DJB: Network and Cryptography Library (efforts against timing attacks)
I was first confused by the NaCl name. The NaCl nomenclature is used by another popular project - chrome Native Client.
vinutheraj··on Indian Railways stations, trains and schedules database in JSON and SQL formats
Error (509) This account's public links are generating too much traffic and have been temporarily disabled!
vinutheraj··on Indian Railways stations, trains and schedules database in JSON and SQL formats
Is there a way to get such data ? Other than going out an actively contacting the taxi companies ?
vinutheraj··on How Entrepreneurs Can Create Their Own Luck
People thought that Google would never succeed because search was cornered by Yahoo and AltaVista.

I'm pretty sure we have a Coca-Cola in the social space. It's called Facebook.

Aren't these arguments contradictory ?

vinutheraj··on A Celebration of Steve Jobs' Life
Audio link which will also work on Linux - http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/oct/10oiuhfvojb23/memoria...
vinutheraj··on Steve Jobs Worked on Apple Until His Last Day
The way you define altruism, would be the correct way to describe what Jobs did. Even though he was ousted from Apple he continued to work on his passion. His actions were at its core self-serving. The side-effects were the good things he added to humanity.
vinutheraj··on One of the Best Bits of Programming Advice I ever Got
Aren't all words which end in -er, and used as class names, nouns ?
vinutheraj··on The Immutable Laws of Computer Security
I thought you wanted them to say bad guy or gal.
vinutheraj··on History made in India: Govt agrees to anti-corruption bill
I don't think such deterrents are going to influence corruption.

Does one decide not to harm someone, just because we have laws against it ?

By the way, don't we already have laws against corruption, why hasn't this stopped anyone yet ? Are more laws going to stop it ?

vinutheraj··on History made in India: Govt agrees to anti-corruption bill
I think the constitution also has a process mentioned, on how to remove an MP, but that system is not working well. So how are you sure that this system will work. Why are we not urging them to fix the former system, instead of adding more.
vinutheraj··on History made in India: Govt agrees to anti-corruption bill
Yes, that is right, we have to make things more transparent. The RTI was one act towards that goal. Though, this particular act in the current form is not the right path in my opinion. People elected into the Jan Lokpal will be no different from people elected into parliament. There is no foolproof way to prevent them from corrupted themselves.
vinutheraj··on Experiments Show Gravity Is Not an Emergent Phenomenon
Feynman has expressed his opinion on this in one of the Messenger lectures on the Character of Physical Law that he gave at Cornell.

This is an example of the wide range of beautiful ways of describing nature. When people say that nature must have causality, you can use Newton's law; or if they say that nature must be stated in terms of a minimum principle, you talk about it this last way; or if they insist that nature must have a local field - sure, you can do that. The question is: which one is right? If these various alternatives are not exactly equivalent mathematically, if for certain ones there will be different consequences than for others, then all we have to do is to experiment to find out which way nature actually chooses to do it. People may come along and argue philosophically that they like one better than another; but we have learned from such experience that all philosophical intuitions about what nature is going to do fail. One just has to work out all the possibilities, and try all the alternatives. But in the particular case I am talking about the theories are exactly equivalent. Mathematically each of the three different formulations, Newton's law, the local field method and the minimum principle, gives exactly the same consequences. What do we do then? You will read in all the books that we cannot decide scientifically on one or the other. That is true. They are equivalent scientifically. It is impossible to make a decision, because there is no experimental way to distinguish between them if all the consequences are the same. But psychologically they are very different in two ways. First, philosophically you like them or do not like them; and training is the only way to beat that disease. Second, psychologically they are different because they are completely unequivalent when you are trying to guess new laws.

vinutheraj··on History made in India: Govt agrees to anti-corruption bill
There will be corruption as long as there are people who want to make a quick buck without working hard. We can only try to reduce and discourage it.

The problem in India is lack of development and education and poverty. As long as these issues are not addressed we will never touch the root of the problem, and will be just trying to treat the symptoms.

vinutheraj··on History made in India: Govt agrees to anti-corruption bill
IF the act is going to be the same/similar to what is mentioned here - http://www.annahazare.org/pdf/Jan%20lokpal%20bill%20by%20Exp... then I will be very disappointed.

Creating an extra-body which itself can act as the police and be outside of the parliament and be a concentration of power not elected by the democratic process would be the wrong way to go I feel.

I feel the people have good intention behind coming up with this act, but that alone doesn't mean that this law is the right thing to do. We are trying to solve the symptom and not the disease. Corruption is just the symptom created by the way our society and culture functions, we will have to fix the root cause to fix corruption. I don't think increasing punitive measures is going to curb corruption in the big scale. Corruption as a whole is weaved into our social fabric. We would need a lot more than just a law to remove it.

vinutheraj··on Poll: Google+: Like it/prefer it to FaceBook
Keep trying. Didn't work for me 2 days ago. Worked today.
vinutheraj··on Suggest good sites/books on probability
Downloadable pdf and other links are available here - http://www.archive.org/details/philosophicaless00lapliala
vinutheraj··on If I haven't succeeded in my mid 20s, could I be successful?
Wow. I didn't know that. I thought that Alexander had the largest empire (in terms of land area). In fact, Genghis Khan beat by a very long way according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires#Largest...
vinutheraj··on Video: Well-Designed Buildings Sway, But Stay Standing in Japan Quake
Was the video taken after the earthquake had stopped ? The camera seems to be fixed, no movement at all ?!
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