sg0

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.

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.

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...).

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?

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?

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.

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.

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)?

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...

Community detection in uncovering fake news FTW!

"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

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

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".

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.

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

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.

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.

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...).

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).

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.

This is a case of government authorized genocide. I just don't understand how shifting blame toward Facebook as a data sharing platform solves the problem. If someone sends hate filled letters to public via USPS, is USPS complicit? Yes, FB could have probably done better by monitoring the content, and muted hostile posts. I hail from a small industrial town in eastern India, where very recently racial tensions erupted between pockets of Hindu/Muslim communities. One of the first things local government did was to turn off internet (data and ISP), to control proliferation of rumors and anything that could incite further violence.

Before Netflix stopped showing the number of stars next to content, I used to sort of depend on it for choosing a movie. In fact, I sort of miss it now, and spend more time sifting through content undecided. That's because I am clueless about movies. I believe that there are people who are as unsure about electoral candidates (as in, at a given day, they don't favor one candidate above others) as I am about choosing movies. When push comes to shove (my wife's irritation quotient above threshold) in terms of making a decision, an advertisement that someone saw couple of days back can definitely assist in making a choice at the split second.

I'm paranoid when I'm on a bike. Any road with a dedicated bike lane may be classified as bike-friendly, but I can't consider it so if cars are on the same road. IMO, the only bike-friendly routes are where there are no cars. I wish pavements could be made wide enough for bikes everywhere, so that bikers could be on the road only for a limited amount of time while crossing intersections.

Reading this somehow reminded me of Tokyo Story - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046438/?ref_=nv_sr_1

This is endemic with SO. Particularly, I am not happy with the Python community of SO either. Couple of months back, my wife who is a student and very new to Python (and had to quickly prototype an intermediate part of a Genome Assembler as a PoC, before she could recreate it in C++ and MPI) asked some question in SO, and met with sarcastic comments by an experienced user. She didn't have time to read up a book on Python, since she had a time crunch to finish the work within a couple of days. So the day she posted the question, she told me that she fears snide comments, and that's exactly what happened. If you are in a position to criticize someone's sarcastic comments, then please take the time in doing so.

Well, this news that came out last year is somewhat relevant. MD Anderson Cancer Center's IBM Watson project failed, with $62 million paid to IBM and PwC for essentially no results. However, I don't blame IBM, I blame people who dove in without clearly thinking it through. https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson-cancer-...

If office issued electronic devices (which presumably have to undergo routine organization-specific scrutiny, and may contain non-public info) are snatched by the TSA for random sniffing, why can't an organization sue the TSA for compromising security?

I can imagine a Netflix movie about the Colonel with Jack Black playing the role.

I was just seeing "The Falcon and the Snowman" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087231/?ref_=nv_sr_1) on Hulu, where David Suchet plays the wily Russian agent Alex (his father's side of family is originally from Russia, however in that movie his accent sounded quite British to me).

I admit that despite of the ubiquity of Indian fonts these days, I still use English to write messages conveying Bengali/Hindi words, because I'm more comfortable that way. I don't remember the last time I wrote a letter in Bengali/Bangla or Hindi, and when it comes to electronic communication, it has always been English for me. So it feels strange for me to start writing in Bengali using my keypad all of a sudden.