Hacker News: sg0

New comment by sg0 in "Gmail's confidential mode is not confidential"

sg0 — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 18:20:07 +0000

Since Google has named it 'confidential mode' and not 'secured mode', it is evident (to me at least, the word `confidential` means `me, you and anyone else you tell`) that there is no encryption. I won't use Gmail anyway if I am paranoid about security. I like this feature, hopefully this mode will also give options to decide longevity of incoming emails.

New comment by sg0 in "A book from Alan Turing and a mysterious piece of paper"

sg0 — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 22:47:31 +0000

SW has a tendency to describe features of a person which I find utterly fascinating (for eg: 'Turing used to giggle a lot', now compare that with the somber depiction of Turing in 'The Imitation Game'). In the write up on Ramanujam, SW mentions that he was stocky, apart from many personal tidbits.

New comment by sg0 in "Alan Kay's answer to ‘what are some forgotten books programmers should read?’"

sg0 — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 18:29:34 +0000

My adviser had suggested me a fantastic book for bedside reading - "Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing" by David Harel (https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmics-Spirit-Computing-David-H...).

New comment by sg0 in "How Discount Brokerages Make Money"

sg0 — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 20:02:14 +0000

I really like this article, although I don't fully understand most of the parts, mainly because I don't know much about brokerage and investment. But, I am joining the workforce soon, and it behooves me to have some grasp on these topics. Any non-Michael Lewis type book(s) you fine people would want to recommend?

New comment by sg0 in "Why It’s Easy for a Bounty Hunter to Find People"

sg0 — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 23:09:40 +0000

May be off topic, but is this the reason why BoFA does not need us to issue a travel advisory? Because they are getting our location data and can flag fraud?

New comment by sg0 in "Philadelphia's early-1800s wooden water pipes"

sg0 — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 03:25:52 +0000

This reminds me when I was roaming around Annapolis, MD, I spotted one of the many markers around the historic downtown, about how utility workers stumbled upon clay pipes when they were servicing underground water pipes.

New comment by sg0 in "Show HN: Graph Processing with Postgres and GraphBLAS"

sg0 — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 18:21:23 +0000

Thanks for the clarification. I basically wanted to know if database systems could make use of existing distributed-memory HPC programming models, and it seems that there is a possibility, however engineering efforts might be significant. I really have no experience with database engineering, and I am not sure if MPI and Citus will play out well. I hope you are considering submitting a paper/poster at HPEC'19 for your current work (http://www.ieee-hpec.org/), I think that's a good venue to engage with the GraphBLAS community in person.

New comment by sg0 in "Show HN: Graph Processing with Postgres and GraphBLAS"

sg0 — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 17:39:00 +0000

I am following your discussions on the GraphBLAS email list. Are you interested in the distributed-memory API of GraphBLAS (for clusters, typically over MPI) or can you make use of it if it were available (you may know, CombBLAS already has a distributed-memory implementation)?

New comment by sg0 in "Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure"

sg0 — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 01:06:31 +0000

I just realized upon reading this that I might have car sickness too (and that it's a real thing). It's worse if I sit at the back, usually its a concoction of strange feelings, mild nausea, weird pangs of pain...

New comment by sg0 in "France might be losing its first big information war"

sg0 — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 00:26:24 +0000

Community detection in uncovering fake news FTW!

New comment by sg0 in "Richard Stallman: How I do my computing"

sg0 — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 01:41:49 +0000

"I did write some code in Java once, but the code was in C and Lisp (I simply happened to be in Java at the time ;-)" - heh

New comment by sg0 in "How smallpox claimed its final victim"

sg0 — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 22:44:09 +0000

Indeed it was misleading. "The basis for vaccination began in 1796 when an English doctor named Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids who had gotten cowpox did not show any symptoms of smallpox after variolation. The first experiment to test this theory involved milkmaid Sarah Nelmes and James Phipps, the 9 year-old son of Jenner’s gardener. Dr. Jenner took material from a cowpox sore on Nelmes’ hand and inoculated it into Phipps’ arm. Months later, Jenner exposed Phipps a number of times to variola virus, but Phipps never developed smallpox." from https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html

New comment by sg0 in "How to beat LinkedIn: The Game"

sg0 — Sat, 21 Jul 2018 22:56:16 +0000

Getting job through LinkedIn, does that ever happen? For the past many many months, LinkedIn has been consistently sending me one job posting - "Data Center Operations Intern at Amazon, Boardman, OR".

New comment by sg0 in "Penniless Yogi Baba Ramdev Controls a Billion-Dollar Corporation"

sg0 — Sun, 27 May 2018 18:53:09 +0000

One reason Patanjali products are popular is because they are significantly cheaper than alternatives from Unilever or similar companies. With demonetization in India, middle class is still experiencing cash woes (and have less faith in the government), and will pander to cheaper FMCG alternatives for their daily needs. I believe this company is either going to crash or reduce its operations at some point in the future to remain profitable (unless BJP stays in power for the indefinite future). Either they will have to increase prices (due to raised wages of workers), which will make their products less competitive, or they will have to really spend money on replacing BS products that purportedly contains cow urine and animal remains.

New comment by sg0 in "John Carmack: My Steve Jobs Stories"

sg0 — Mon, 14 May 2018 18:44:35 +0000

About "reality distortion field": https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Reality_Distorti...

New comment by sg0 in "Man Allegedly Used Change of Address Form to Move UPS Headquarters"

sg0 — Fri, 11 May 2018 00:28:36 +0000

I have used this mail forwarding service thrice and every time I have wondered what prevents me from forwarding my annoying neighbors' mails to Denali National Park. The answer is, fear of jail time.

New comment by sg0 in "H-1B abuse: Bay Area tech workers from India paid a pittance, feds say"

sg0 — Wed, 02 May 2018 06:41:00 +0000

I've seen consultants in Houston enticing Masters students or spouses of H1-B holders (holding some technology degree) with H1-B promises [Masters students on F1 visa are good targets, because they can work for 12 months if their Optional Practical Training (OPT) gets approved]. A company outsources projects to these consultants, and the consultants pay these people following any schedule they like. Someone I know was hired by one of these consultants, and then she managed to get a job offer with H1-B sponsoring. The consultancy created lot of problems when she tried to quit, and threatened all sorts of repercussions.

New comment by sg0 in "The first image on the very first Macintosh (2004)"

sg0 — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 22:20:55 +0000

Very true, I recently bought the book (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596007191/), and my at-home productivity is all time low. I crack up every time remembering -- "I Invented Burrell" (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...).

New comment by sg0 in "A man who spent $100K to remove a lie from Google"

sg0 — Thu, 05 Apr 2018 02:52:58 +0000

Similar to FB Newsfeed recently introducing an "i"-circle for posts by news organizations (QED), that sort of helps to verify the source, we need something similar in Google search results (that would probably make it challenging to return results within half a second).

New comment by sg0 in "Ask HN: What books do you keep on your desk?"

sg0 — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 18:44:42 +0000

These are the ones right next to me now:

1. Design Patterns (GoF) - This book is all about design, someday I aim to really understand all the patterns.

2. High Performance Parallelism Pearls Volume 2 (Reinders/Jeffers) - There are couple of other books similar to this one. But, if you want to know how myriad HPC applications make use of parallel programming models such as MPI and OpenMP, this provides a good introduction.

3. The Annotated C++ Reference Manual April 1995 hardbound edition (Ellis/Stroustrup) -- What a fantastic little book, also got it for $4.95 at Powell's bookstore in Portland :) IMO this books provides a gentle introduction to C++, you can flip to any page and just start reading.

4. Numerical Recipes in C (Press, Teukolsky, et al.) - If I need to quickly prototype some scientific computation kernel, this is my go-to book.

5. Effective C++ 3rd edition (Meyers) - I like to approach this book from the back (i.e., indices), pick up a topic, and then read the contents one by one. Repeat.

6. Discovering Modern C++: An Intensive Course for Scientists, Engineers, and Programmers (Gottschling) - I like and dislike certain portions of the book. It definitely contains a lot of code explanations of C++ idioms, which helps a beginner like me.