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vpj

1,616 karma · joined March 23, 2009

blog.varunajayasiri.com
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vpj··on [dead]
Clickable links

Client library (GitHub): https://github.com/lab-ml/labml

App (Github): https://github.com/lab-ml/app

Sample: https://web.lab-ml.com/run?run_uuid=d4722546f58411ea8addd3f9...

vpj··on Altair – A declarative statistical visualization library for Python
We started using custom charts with Altair instead of Tensorboard and it has been amazing. Thanks!
vpj··on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
Coded up a PyTorch GPU implementation to rank Texas holdem poker hands (7 cards), and some models to predict the poker probabilities.

https://github.com/lab-ml/poker

vpj··on Elon Musk: Should Have 1000 Ventilators Next Week, 250k N95 Masks Tomorrow
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1241056851032043523?s=20

>>> That won’t work for our auto parts suppliers, so, no, our US factory can’t stay open

vpj··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2019)
Location: Colombo, Sri Lanka

Remote: Yes (Part-time preferred)

Willing to relocate: May be

Technologies: Deep Learning

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vpjayasiri/

Email: v p j a y a s i r I [a t] g m a i l . c o m

Spent around 8 months full time learning machine learning. Worked mostly on reinforcement learning projects for games.

vpj··on Tesla is raising up to $1.5B through convertible note and share sale
"Tesla will need to raise $2.5bn to $3bn this year, according to Jefferies, a bank"

This was the tweet (April 2018) Elon has replied to.

vpj··on Should we switch from CoffeeScript?
Thanks You are right, I meant static typing
vpj··on Show HN: Open sourcing nearby.lk data models library
fixed it, thanks
vpj··on Ask HN: Describe your first enterprise sale
How we got our first enterprise customer (a company in Sri Lanka)

http://vpj.github.io/b2b_customer.html

tl;dr; We got the contact from one of our investors. First meeting was a product demo and a short presentation. There were long time gaps between meetings (it took several months to get to the trial). We didn't have a simpler way of doing the trial.

vpj··on Show HN: Markdown for Edward Tufte style layout
Wanted to keep the syntaxes consistent accross a other features in wallapatta, like inline images ([[ ]]), super script (^^ ^^), etc
vpj··on Show HN: Wallapatta static blog generator
The setup or the syntax?
vpj··on Book design inspired by Edward Tufte
Thanks!. It's written in Coffeescript. I didn't think much about the name when we started this. Didn't want to call it markdown because we didn't want to make it compatible with standard markdown, especially because of indentations. Will probably change the name in the future.
vpj··on Book design inspired by Edward Tufte
It is in development. Started working on it last week. Still experimental. Thinking of changing the syntax a bit to be a little more intuitive. It's on github:

https://github.com/vpj/docscript

Will add a command line compiler and stuff soon. We are using it to generate documents at our startup. So it will be in active development for sometime.

vpj··on Book design inspired by Edward Tufte
I was working on something similar but with a markdown like syntax instead of latex. Project is still in initial stages though.

http://vpj.github.io/docscript/

vpj··on Show HN: SeaLion 2 – Linux Server Monitoring, Alerting and Debugging Tool
Was very easy to install. But could not figure out how to monitor more than one indicator at the same time.
vpj··on My year with a distraction-free iPhone
I dropped and broke my nexus 4. Now with a small dumb phone, a notebook and a mechanical pencil. Feels kind of good that the phone broke.
vpj··on Making of Aprilzero
I am not the designer, I just shared the link.

Author: https://twitter.com/aprilzero

vpj··on Show HN: Hacker News Redesign
Here is a redesign (as a chrome extension) that is sort of based on the comments here http://vpj.svbtle.com/hacker-news-redesign
vpj··on Show HN: Hacker News Redesign
I feel the Y meter is too complected to the eye; especially if you are doing a quick scan to see the top voted posts that you've missed. Even with a number you can make a rough guess without actually reading the number by the length (number of digits). I think a subtle horizontal bar, or a boxes with varying color intensity would do a much better job.
vpj··on Show HN: Weya - Fast CoffeeScript markup
> But I'm confused about how it handles updates. Do you just rerender the whole thing?

Here is how I use it in such scenarios:

  elems = {}

  Weya elem: document.body, ->
   for k, v of data
    elems[k] = @div "#{v}"

  #when element k changes
  onChange = (k) ->
   elems[k].textContent = "#{data[k]}"

If the change is more complex Weya can again be used to render the content of the changed element (not the entire dom).
vpj··on Ask HN: What does your home office look like?
Anyone tried deskless workstations (sitting on floor)?
vpj··on A Colombo Show HN Meetup
Why this meetup was different http://vpj.svbtle.com/colombo-show-hn-meetup
vpj··on Stop Writing JavaScript Compilers, Make Macros Instead
You can also use C macros with Javascript http://vpj.svbtle.com/coffeescript-and-macros-clean-and-fast
vpj··on Data looks better naked
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/

http://www.perceptualedge.com/

I've read books by both these authors and they were very good. Their websites cover most of the important content found in the books.

vpj··on Data looks better naked
They could have used horizontal bars instead of vertical. It takes up much less space and easier to place the labels. This GIF shows a similar animation, but with a 90 degree rotation and a little more information.

http://blog.bissantz.com/images/2008/01/tod_der_businessgraf...

I wonder why they add the table grid at the end. A grid could have been useful if there were a lot of columns, but certainly not in this case.

This is a similar idea I was working on http://vpj.svbtle.com/variable-length-underlining-to-help-se...

vpj··on Moving from Google Appengine to NodeJS on Amazon EC2
We started using app engine because it was easy to start with. We did some basic math on how much it'll scale with our architecture (which I too agree wasn't that good), and thought it would work reasonably until we grow quite big (at least half a million locations). I was/am new to app engine and was learning along the way.

The problem was when it started giving trouble even before 10K records, and not even more than 60 requests per second, which even a very low resource PC would handle without a problem since it won't even take a few milliseconds to compute (probably even without an index, just a sequential search). And we had to make changes to fix this.

It went on and on; every few weeks, users and content would grow and our app would fail. We didn't want to move away; just like you said, we thought the solution wasn't to avoid it, but to solve it.

Finally, after changing/improving the design a number of times, we considered using app engine backends to do central stuff such as maintaining the main index. At the same time, looking back at what we've been doing so far, it was quite clear that we were spending our time, which for sure we should have spent on building something that adds value to users, on learning some platform and trying to alter our architecture to fit into it. And we were going deeper and deeper in the hole, and we knew it would be hard to move.

Our vision is simple, and it has nothing to do with picking up some technology and figuring out how to make use of it. Instead, we try to start from the customer and work backwards. While on app engine, we once stopped taking new low paying customers (listings), until we fixed issues - I think this was a terrible.

Decision of moving away from app engine wasn't easy. We had to literally rewrite everything, and the fear of similar problems coming up was there.

Also, I never recommended anyone not to use it, I was just telling our story. In fact, I still use app engine for some work, and we would switch back to app engine if we are convinced that it's the way to give a better user experience.

About data store being slow, they charge us per data store read. It slowing down as the number of reads increase, for me, sounds like saying it's your fault if your calls drop because you are making a lot of calls.

About search API, we didn't use it for auto completion; we maintain a small dictionary for that.

Just to clarify we were building the index at the start up.

About scaling, we have given some thought to it. But not so much since it's not something we will require in the near future. We can create multiple instances and balance the load as long as the index is small enough to fit in memory.

I'm sure there is a way to get this working on app engine. But we are glad that we moved, and it runs smoothly. And more importantly, we have been able to give the users a lot more benefits during the past couple of months than during an year on app engine, because we had more time to focus on users. And if we had moved earlier, we would have been able to do more.

vpj··on Ask HN: What Setup You Use?
Vim Ubuntu Google Chrome

I use C and Coffeescript.

vpj··on Heart Surgeon Speaks Out On What Really Causes Heart Disease
I did some research and couldn't validate what was said in the article. That was the main reasons for submitting - to get feedback from HN. Some people I know seemed to be believing this very firmly, and was changing their diets. Thanks
vpj··on Internet Problem Solving Contest
wish it was in the evening for california :P
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