Hacker News: sateesh

New comment by sateesh in "A Man Who Reads Books for a Living"

sateesh — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:03:29 +0000

That is the point I am making: how hard communication is, grokking reality as whole are some of the core themes of the story (is what I felt). The movie doesn't focus on these aspects at all, maybe these are hard to adapt in a mainstream Hollywood movie.

New comment by sateesh in "A Man Who Reads Books for a Living"

sateesh — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:43:22 +0000

I don't think it is cut and dry as that. Of the top of my head I can think of "Jorge Luis Borges" who was a voracious reader and much of his career involved reading (literary adviser, librarian etc.). I don't think (can't know for sure) he hated his job.

New comment by sateesh in "A Man Who Reads Books for a Living"

sateesh — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:32:15 +0000

I think "Arrival" as a story is better than the movie. I think the movie misses on the part on how hard communication can be, and how different is the way aliens grok the reality as a whole. Also did you watch the movie first and read the story or the other way. I read the story first and then watched the movie with lot of anticipations, and was tad disappointed.

New comment by sateesh in "How we index images for RAG"

sateesh — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:17:42 +0000

The article do mentions why they don't use multimodal retrieval. Also I think this approach is cheaper (compute wise) than multimodal retrieval. From the article:

  Multimodal retrieval does not suit this domain. CLIP-style embeddings wash out exactly the fine detail that matters in charts, tables, and annotated screenshots, and short technical queries ("how do I configure X") give too little signal to match against image vectors

New comment by sateesh in "The worst job interview I ever had"

sateesh — Wed, 27 May 2026 08:29:45 +0000

What if the team they're interviewing for doesn't has any parents. I think probably it is fine to ask about their life/interests outside of work. But if the interviewee isn't comfortable answering those it is better not to push

New comment by sateesh in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

sateesh — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:11:20 +0000

I don't get it, why would operating a datacenter needs massive amount of high skilled blue-collar labor. Datacenters are resource hungry. With so much automation in place I don't think there would be a need for large pool of labor.

New comment by sateesh in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

sateesh — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:18:59 +0000

In my effort to better understand Deeplearning I built this project (https://github.com/sateeshkumarb/anomaly_detection) to detect anomalies from a batch of loglines. I use 1D CNN and Siamese network (Triplet loss) to train the model to learn anomaly patterns from logs. The goal was to detect anomalies that emerge across multiple lines (e.g., error bursts) rather than just single-line keywords.

To validate the approach I trained the model on generating synthetic data. I did look at datasets available at: https://github.com/logpai/loghub, https://www.unb.ca/cic/datasets/index.html but couldn't find one that would suit my needs.

The approach seems to work on synthetic dataset (with ROC AUC score: 0.9957) but couldn't try it out in a real world dataset. Seeking feedback on the approach.

New comment by sateesh in "The Raft consensus algorithm explained through "Mean Girls" (2019)"

sateesh — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:20:25 +0000

If the article was intended to be an intro to "Raft" algorithm I would've agreed with your sentiment. But this is what the article starts with:

  Understanding Raft can be tough. In fact, I’ve seen   conversations recently on social media in which actual technical leaders of infrastructure companies demonstrate a lack of understanding (!). Point being, you’re not alone.

Anyway I now notice that the article was written in 2023, probably I'm being too pedantic.

New comment by sateesh in "The Raft consensus algorithm explained through "Mean Girls" (2019)"

sateesh — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:50:44 +0000

As someone who doesn't know/watched "Mean Girls" this seems confusing. Also I don't think it is fair to assume that reading of a blog post makes one to understand Raft better, at best they pique one's interest to learn more about it. IMHO Reading/re-reading of the Raft paper and working through an instructional implementation like (https://github.com/eliben/raft) provides a better understanding.

New comment by sateesh in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

sateesh — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:48:48 +0000

privacy for one.

New comment by sateesh in "Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence"

sateesh — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:08:39 +0000

Presume the reference to trunkless legs is to the Shelly's famous poem Ozymandias (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias)

New comment by sateesh in "Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?"

sateesh — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 14:42:54 +0000

https://jvns.ca/ Not a tech. company blog. Explains technical concepts clearly and top notch technical posts. Fits 1,2, 3 criteria of what you ask, though not the 4th one.

New comment by sateesh in "India scraps order to pre-install state-run cyber safety app on smartphones"

sateesh — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 10:28:49 +0000

I don't know of how digital IDs are used etc. in other countries and how ubiquitous there usage is. (One ID I'm aware of is social security numbers (SSN) is U.S, but that is considered as PII data and usually companies take steps to protect/mask them). But citing that this is how it is done elsewhere is just an appeal to tradition/common practice and not necessarily addresses the points I had made.

New comment by sateesh in "India scraps order to pre-install state-run cyber safety app on smartphones"

sateesh — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 07:03:19 +0000

What you are proposing is too sweeping, it is not just privacy that suffers. Making a single ID (whose attributes can't be changed) an entire identity of a person is a very risky one. This makes it a single point of failure and in cases like an ID theft, misuse the affected person suffers gravely, and onus will be on them to prove who they are, a Kafkaesque nightmare it would be.

New comment by sateesh in "India scraps order to pre-install state-run cyber safety app on smartphones"

sateesh — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 02:31:15 +0000

Not op,I agree that hotels doesn't do any face matching.

However for getting a new mobile connection the flow is similar to what op has mentioned. It seems one can get a mobile connection by not opting for face recognition, but the process is cumbersome. Similarly for property registrations fingerprints (atleast in some of the states) of the concerned parties is matched against the ones that are associated with their Aadhar.

New comment by sateesh in "India scraps order to pre-install state-run cyber safety app on smartphones"

sateesh — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 15:31:14 +0000

I think this point is bit orthogonal. The current outrage was largely because the app has to be pre-loaded and there wasn't an option to disable or uninstall it.

In the later incarnations, if this is an app which you need to access government services that is less of an issue, though I'm not advocating that this is completely fine. There are already apps like these CoWin (during Covid time), or Digiyatra (despite some of the privacy concerns around it [1]) which many are using. I hope if at all this app gets introduced (in the form you mention) there are larger discussions about permissions and the data access the app would need,and it can be disabled, uninstalled.

1. https://internetfreedom.in/digiyatra-who-owns-your-data/

New comment by sateesh in "India scraps order to pre-install state-run cyber safety app on smartphones"

sateesh — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 14:22:04 +0000

The only upshot of this whole saga seems to be an increased awareness (though a small bit) in general public about importance of privacy in the digital world. Most of the media outlets (both English and regional language newspapers) provided a prominent coverage of this news.

New comment by sateesh in "India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app"

sateesh — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:45:47 +0000

The mandate says the app can't be uninstalled.

New comment by sateesh in "India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app"

sateesh — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 06:13:00 +0000

You are drawing a false equivalence. Using Gmail is a choice, but having an app preloaded without an option to uninstall isn't.

New comment by sateesh in "India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app"

sateesh — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:00:11 +0000

Why you think so, pls elaborate. In the current form governments all over the world are increasingly having massive power over what citizens can do, don't and increasing it by degrees day after day.