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adi92

170 karma · joined November 1, 2008

Hi, I'm an ML engineer who currently works at Airbnb. http://stackoverflow.com/users/25990/adi92
submissionscomments
adi92··on Ask HN: What's your favorite online course?
HBX Core

http://hbx.hbs.edu/hbx-core

Its a paid online business course by Harvard Business School with 3 modules - Business Analytics, Economics for Managers, Financial Accounting

Material is not super challenging (maybe except for Accounting), but its still a lot of work and very rewarding. There is a strong social element to the course because they incentivize students to ask and answer each other's questions. At the end of it, you have to go to a testing centre and give a 3 hour exam on everything they have taught you. I finished this course a few months ago and really enjoyed the material and all the people I met through it. Highly recommend!

adi92··on OhLife is shutting down
:( Been using this service for 4 years.. have grown so much thanks to it. Everybody seems to be recommending Day One as an alternative, but that looks way more complicated than a simple daily email.

Edit: I take that back.. day one looks pretty awesome Found https://twitter.com/kylesethgray/status/513476424955482112 which let me import all my OhLife data into this.. and this is backed by my DropBox account which makes me feel safe about my data

adi92··on How to find an apartment in San Francisco during the tech boom
I had the same problem a year ago. For the apartments you really like, send in a cover letter with your application explaining your situation and offering more references and a larger deposit. I was really desperate and even put in my resume into the application (which had a bunch of fancy sounding NLP/CS terms). Ended up getting a studio in Pacific Heights.
adi92··on A few things to remember while coding in Python
Thanking you for showing me the 'dis' module. Dis is going to be fun to play with!!
adi92··on The Game Of Go: A Programmer's Perspective
I learnt Go by watching this anime on Netflix called 'Hikaru no Go'. Its pretty kiddish, but fun, and really inspires you to learn the game!
adi92··on Tell HN: Frustrated and feeling pretty useless at this point.
Don't worry too much. Life is like that. Had you taken care of this problem beforehand, I am pretty sure some other major problem would have turned up. When you create something new, you have to deal with 100s of problems. No one gets it right in version 1 itself. What you need to do is to be able to calmly work through all the issues that come up and think about what you can do to recover the traction your app initially seemed to be getting.

Your app is tricky because I can derive value from not when I install it, but when all my friends install it as well. This implies you guys should make it really really really easy for me to get my friends on it as well. Perhaps you can take my phone contact list and show all those users as my friends within your app the moment I install it, and send the other users an SMS (using twilio) or email if I try to interact with them using your app. This way you can disguise your cold start from the user and make it more useful to him from day 1.

adi92··on Grub with YC alumni
I have been to 9 grubwithus dinners so far and loved every one of them.. this is a really awesome concept!! Eventually they should come up with 'Grubwithus Now' where people can join impromptu organized meals with a bunch of random strangers whenever they want to, instead of having to plan the thing in advance.
adi92··on The science of science
They are talking about Latent Dirichlet Allocation which was made by Blei in 2002 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation )

Here is video by him where he explains the basic model as well timeline-related hacks the article talks about - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3077213787166426672#

You can very easily play with LDA yourself with this toolkit - http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/

adi92··on What happened to studying?
1) People had fewer distractions earlier

2) Thanks to the Flynn effect, people are growing smarter, so need less time for the same content

3) Thanks to the internet, its a lot easier and faster to learn something than it was earlier (more cliffnotes type resources)

4)People today can probably make much better assessments to what things will actually help them in their professional lives, and what things are random rites of passage i.e. hoops they have to jump through to get their degree

adi92··on Facebook Adds Face Detection To Photos
it seems like to much of a risk, in terms of the controversies that might get raised every time the recognition software screws up.. imagine the system tagging somebody's ex girlfriend on their current partner's face, or interpreting a picture of Saddam as some random friend of the poster
adi92··on Stack overflow knockoff for machine learning, NLP, AI, ...
Awesome! Really excited about this.. Stackoverflow hasn't been that great of a place to ask ML/IR/NLP questions and expect good answers

Maybe this site will bring together all the ML people and do a better job.

Visually, the site is not that great. The logo is unreadable at first attempt

adi92··on EA Sports Locks Out Multiplayer Modes On Used Sales
i don't know much about how this works, but why cant people just bypass this by creating a separate account for every game they purchase and then pass on that account's details to whoever they sell the game to
adi92··on The Weaver, the Princess and Goldman Sachs
http://panchatantra.org/

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/jataka.html

adi92··on Opera Mini takes over the App Store Charts
How are they making money from this? They need to run fast servers that cater to each and every phone that has their app installed anywhere in the world.. won't that be pretty expensive?
adi92··on Yelp Increasing Transparency and Eliminating 'Favorite Review'
This might be a pretty good PR move..

Most of the filtered reviews I have seen so far are, in fact, pretty spammy or blatant advertising..

This will definitely make people appreciate the filter more

OTOH people, not machines (thanks to the captcha), could read tons of filtered reviews and come up with cleverer ways to beat it

adi92··on Ask HN: I'd like to find Co-Founder(s) / Developers
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgCvDTyBjHdOdDFfMEN...
adi92··on Unvarnished: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place For Defamation
people with more friends could quickly down-vote each other's negative reviews and write scathing reviews for whoever they wish to bully

unless they explicitly bar people below a certain age, this site will wreak havoc in children's social lives

adi92··on Why I'm rejecting your email attachment
I mostly share Google docs these days.. the user can download it in any format he likes, if we he wishes to download it at all.

.odf may not win over .docx, but in the long run, both will lose to the cloud.

On a related note, I hope we eventually have some sort of cloud-transfer legislation, that makes it easy for people to move all their docs from Google to say, Zoho without any hassles.. this would foster more innovation in the online office suite space

adi92··on The Dense States of America (Map)
Somebody could nuke that small area and effectively kill of the entire country..
adi92··on Wikipedia, Notability, and Open Source Software
While dwm probably does deserve to have a wiki page.. most pages do not..

If every OSS project, anime character, street gets its own page, the whole thing will grow too large for any group of people to effectively maintain..

The deletionists are also probably the people who end up deleting spam, prank edits, etc .. which is a pretty thankless job with no end in sight, and I can understand their sentiment, when they advocate for a smaller but higher quality wikipedia.

adi92··on The extortionists at Yelp
Should Yelp just tell people how it decides what is spam?

This would alleviate some of its reputation problems but, then adversaries would know exactly how to game the system.

adi92··on How I develop Clojure with Vim
Tiling a vim-dow beside a REPL-window in a GUI works for me
adi92··on How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac
You could ssh onto a cloud/unix server and write all the scripts and tools you want.

I used my iphone once to code small scripts and start/stop batch jobs on a work server while on the go.

adi92··on Implementing Scheme in F#
are all languages implementable in every other language?
adi92··on Ask HN: Any startups offering summer internships?
Thank you for starting this post.. i see a lot of great job boards on the net but very few for CS internships

I am a Junior CS Major in the US looking for internships related to Machine Learning / NLP

adi92··on Rubrics And The Bimodality Of 1-5 Ratings
I think a closed forum with users who have established definitions for the difference between what each number of the scale implies would have a bimodal distribution. Sites like youtube ( http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-domina... ) and amazon ( http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1562764.1562800&co... ) have more of a J-curve
adi92··on [dead]
Happiness = (Desires Actualized)/(Desires Harboured)

Increasing the numerator tends to cause the denominator to increase as well

Craving for fewer things i.e. working on the denominator is usually more effective

adi92··on How I explained REST to my wife
Feels like this guy has married ELIZA
adi92··on Markov & statistical models unlock ancient script
such an approach might teach them everything about the language's syntax but nothing about its semantics.. but i guess deciphering that would be a lot easier once they can identify the structural components of the sentences
adi92··on Textbooks must die
this is the author in question - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stewart_(mathematician) .. his book was actually pretty good and I could use it for about 3 classes in my calc sequence.. pretty good value for money
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