Recent submissions

Comment · 8 years ago
In my opinion, the large corporations behind fossil fuels have too much of an economic clout. The governments around the world are dependent on them for a considerable amount of their respective national economy. So yes you are right about government not doing much about this.

Ultimately, unless there is a relatively quick mass extinction event, no government is going to be bothered into action. Climate change and the devastation it's going to cause, is going to play out slowly over the years. The most affected would be the poorest of the world. They are going to die first. The rich will have enough resources to be able to not only survive, but also thrive on these events as new business opportunities are going to be created.

Ultimately, Earth maybe a very different place 100 years from now, but the rich of today are surely going to have their descendants living quite comfortably.

The only thing an individual can do is to strive to get as rich as possible, because that is the only security that's going to save you and your family in the bleak future that lies ahead of us.

Comment · 8 years ago
So we had this idea of a new feature for our product. The only way to quickly do it was to somehow implement a machine learning algo and that would give us the result that we wanted. Viola!! It seemed simple.

Now our company doesn't have any machine learning expert or a data science genius. Going for hiring one would take time. Taking someone up on contract would be very expensive (our CEO wasn't ready to shell out that kinda money). So the task fell on me. They asked me to go through the multitudes of Machine leaning MOOCs out there and get a working prototype ready in 2 weeks.

I had already done Andrew Ng's course back when it came out for the first time. But my memory had faded for the lack of practice.

I re-ran the course again. I went over a couple of online ML books too.

Then I started thinking of the problem at hand. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a chicken and egg problem. For the feature to work perfectly we needed a large amount of training data to train our models. But without the feature actually deployed, we didn't have any way to collect any training data.

So we ultimately fell back to simple algo, that took it's decisions based on a few hard coded rules. Things have been working fine till now.

Comment · 8 years ago
Not much information in the article. Interpol has issued a Red Corner notice, but ultimately it's the French and Chinese governments that have to find what happened.

Now let me get this straight. He was traveling from France to China, somewhere in the middle he disappeared.

What do the flight manifests say?

How about the security cameras at Airports, especially in China, where we have often heard what they allegedly doing with real time facial recognition and stuff.

For someone this high profile, there must have been security, staff etc. What do they have to say?

It's been two weeks since he disappeared. No alarm bells till now, at least the media.

I find this article to be very slim on details. There are some very simple questions not covered in the article. I guess they were in a hurry to publish this.

Comment · 8 years ago
Hey ... Thanks for clarifying. Yes I guess without the mind, cloning wouldn't really be what I supposed it to be.

I am still curious whether some rogue scientist has tried to clone humans.

Comment · 8 years ago
What I am looking forward to is when someone tries to start cloning process on a human being.

When I was a kid, in 1990s, there was a lot of fuss around cloning. Most people rejected it as unethical. I wonder how far the state of the art has come since then in cloning technology.

I am guessing that cloning maybe a real chance for humans to become immortal or atleast live longer lives.

Comment · 8 years ago
How about Internet splitting up based on large companies?

Facebook already tried it with free basics. Google with its hold on Android devices is going to go down the same path sooner or later. Apple has already it's own closed garden. Netflix is doing that to entertainment.

It won't be a surprise if a few years later you have to buy a package web services from your ISPs and you only see what you pay for. Not like the free internet we imagined for sure.

Comment · 8 years ago
Thanks for the information. It's quite amazing and shocking to hear that these guys are able to look at their customers emails.

That must be some kind of violation liable for a court case.

Comment · 8 years ago
I wish I knew at 25 that programming is perhaps not my actual calling.
Comment · 8 years ago
I used to struggle with sleep as well. Infact, I thought that it wasn't natural to be awake while lying on bed in the dark. Then I noticed a pattern. It was that I would always fall asleep within 10-15 minutes of lying in bed, only if I didn't worry about when the sleep would come.

From then on, I have just let go. I let my mind wander wherever it wants to go. And without fail, sleep always catches up within 10-15 minutes.

Of course, it helps if you are tired from the days work and haven't had a very heavy dinner.

Comment · 8 years ago
We had Charles Dickens's Great Expectations in school. I was mesmerised by the incredible storyline and the shocking twist at the end. It introduced me to western classic literature for the first time and I was really impressed.

Then in college, there was an ongoing bet that who could finish the entire unabridged version of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It tool me three months to read the whole of it. It changed me as a person and made me aware of the fact that the problems faced by humans haven't really changed over the centuries, but only their manifestation has changed as per the present times.

And what about The Count of Monte Cristo and other books by Alexander Dumas.

The list goes on ...

Comment · 8 years ago
Poor managment doesn't always stem from ignorance or lack of understanding of how SW works. Sometimes it emanates from pressure to deliver within very tight timelines for the sake of survival of business or standing up to the competition in the market.

I have seen the best managers giving into ridiculous deadlines at the time of project onset just because they know that there is no other option.

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