October 2012
1 post
6 tags
HDDs and file-systems
This is deplorable. I bought a 1TB HDD three years ago. And I bought a 2TB HDD yesterday. The storage density has increased 6 folds in 3 years. I was ecstatic. My ebullience packed its bags and left for Mexico when I tried partitioning my newly acquired drive. There is no decent filesystem which is supported on Linux, Mac and Windows! It feels like winning a free ride to Disneyland and...
Oct 5th
1 note
April 2012
1 post
1 tag
What are you doing?
Me: How are you?
Princess: Royal.
Me: What are you doing?
Princess: Princessing.
Apr 2nd
February 2012
1 post
2 tags
Computer Scientists
Me: Somedays, I think why can't we have computers which just work.
Me: But then I remember that I am a Computer Scientist.
Me: So, yeah, I guess I understand why.
Bheek: :-D
Feb 3rd
January 2012
2 posts
3 tags
Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?
nickpatrick: Reading David McCullough’s 1776, I found myself wondering: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? If so, when did American accents diverge from British accents? The answer surprised me. Read More
Jan 8th
4,439 notes
3 tags
“Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a...”
– G. H. Hardy (A Mathematician’s Apology)
Jan 4th
3 notes
December 2011
6 posts
3 tags
Dec 28th
11 notes
Dec 28th
12 notes
1 tag
Dec 27th
2 notes
4 tags
Why most 'official' Youtube videos cannot be...
The reason has to do with the agreement between the music labels and Youtube. Big music labels charge licensing fee for their videos and Youtube generates revenue by showing advertisements in and around its videos. Embedded videos generate less revenue than videos on Youtube main site because the main site has more ads. Hence, Youtube disables embedding these videos to generate enough revenue...
Dec 25th
2 tags
Dec 23rd
1,023 notes
4 tags
Orbit of moon around the sun is convex! →
No loops, not even wiggles!
Dec 20th
9 notes
November 2011
26 posts
3 tags
Nov 29th
7 notes
3 tags
“20 minutes later, #freemona was trending worldwide.”
– zeynep
Nov 27th
2 notes
2 tags
Police on campus
 This is what Columbia University police look like when arresting students: This is what the police at Davis, a public university, looked like yesterday (20th November): It is worth noting that in the Columbia photo, the one without helmets, guns, or chemical assault weapons, the student is being arrested for selling cocaine. In the Davis photo the students were defending public education.
Nov 22nd
11 notes
2 tags
Rash decisions
Go ahead, make rash decisions, that is what makes life worth living. At the end of the day, just remember that the decisions were rash to begin with.
Nov 19th
2 tags
Did tea drinking lead to urbanization? →
Nov 17th
2 tags
“Listerine became a clear and early example of a larger trend: marketing...”
– Wikipedia
Nov 16th
2 notes
2 tags
“Most of the people in the audience literally didn’t know that when people buy...”
– Felix Salmon on Future of online advertising
Nov 15th
2 tags
“If you look at the biggest 50 companies in Australia, only four of them are...”
– Anthony Goldbloom
Nov 15th
5 notes
3 tags
“Wilson and Gilbert have often found that people make powerful mistakes when...”
– Eric Jaffe (on Revenge)
Nov 15th
4 tags
“Yet another one of those design decisions that you don’t really appreciate until...”
– Why the iPhone’s Speaker is on the Bottom of the Handset ~ Cody
Nov 14th
3 notes
3 tags
“Maybe we need a Startups Anonymous to give founders a place where they can drop...”
– ig1 on HN
Nov 13th
1 tag
“The most effective way to do it, is to do it.”
– Amelia Earhart
Nov 13th
1 note
1 tag
Nov 13th
3 tags
“The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is...”
– Brian Eno on the MS Windows 95’s 6 second start-up sound.
Nov 13th
3 tags
Nov 10th
32 notes
4 tags
Why are functions in Ocaml/F# not recursive by... →
And why they can be in Haskell.
Nov 10th
12 notes
2 tags
“The statistician cannot evade the responsibility for understanding the process...”
– Sir Ronald A. Fisher
Nov 10th
3 notes
3 tags
Productivity tip
Find a task to do Find a song you really don’t like Play the song on repeat mode and get to work Don’t stop the song until you are done It works.
Nov 9th
20 notes
tumblrbot asked: WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER WHEN YOU ARE IN A BAD MOOD?
Nov 9th
3 tags
Too old for it
Discovered in an awkward moment. After a coding contest in which you don’t solve a programming problem because you recognize it as a special case of Limpel-Ziv algorithm and choose to solve other easier problems. In the said awkward moment, you realize that there was an embarrassing one-line-of-code way of solving this special case. So that’s how people get too old for it. They...
Nov 9th
2 tags
“I hate hate hate hate hate when people don’t share their data.”
– http://andrewgelman.com/2011/11/insecure-researchers-arent-sharing-their-data/
Nov 9th
1 note
2 tags
“Use acronyms to keep the code terse. Real men never define acronyms; they...”
– http://www.thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html
Nov 7th
2 tags
Banks and databases
CAP theorem says that in a database system, one of these three has to be given up: Consistency Availability Partition tolerance (cannot be given up in any application) Guess what banks give up: If the ATM is unable to communicate with the cardholder’s bank, it may automatically authorize a withdrawal based on limits preset by the authorizing network. They choose availability over...
Nov 6th
3 tags
“I started wondering if maybe the thing to do was to release a new version of...”
– http://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/samples/notes.html#sl-9
Nov 6th
20 notes
3 tags
“This solution [in lispscript] is a little over 2.5 times as long as the AWK...”
– http://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/samples/notes.html#sl-39
Nov 6th
15 notes
1 tag
Nov 6th