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avani

275 karma · joined February 12, 2010

Research @ Cloudflare
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avani··on Find the flattest route between any two points in SF
A minimize grade and grade cap would be incredible for folks pushing wheelchairs (or strollers even!).
avani··on Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness (2022)
Given its lower melt point and ductility, silver is actually much much better to make jewelry with than stainless steel. Especially if you are also trying to include gold in your piece!
avani··on Cloudflare is rethinking cache for the AI era
Hi! Author of the blogpost here. Happy to chat with anyone who wants to follow up/know more.
avani··on Ask HN: What is a physiically disabled person to do in this job market?
Are you familiar with Tapia: https://tapiaconference.cmd-it.org/ ? It is a reasonable place to grow your network and find leads.

Also, it helps, in my experience, to be incredibly up front. "This is my diagnosis. This is the prognosis. Here are my achievements." You shouldn't have to reveal anything, and certainly no one can ask, but it breaks the ice.

avani··on Love after life: Richard Feynman's letter to his departed wife (2017)
To the majority of humans (women), he was distinctly not all around friendly and approachable. That is the point.
avani··on Escaping High School
One of their parents' social circle. The other is too busy feeding them and making sure they don't run into traffic or disappear somewhere to play video games. So you've suddenly halved the number of people who can get real work done.
avani··on EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers
I am not speaking on behalf of the company, but if someone involved with EasyList can contact me (avani@cloudflare.com), I'll see if there is a way to help out.
avani··on Ask HN: How do you and your spouse handle big income differences?
My husband and I have always had a deal where we live off the higher salary, and the lower is allocated as our "fun money" (dinners out, travel, etc.). We've swapped back and forth over 20 years, but it worked well for me psychologically when I was making less, since everything we did that wasn't grown up stuff came from "my" side of the budget,
avani··on Swag in the Tech Industry
I'd love to hear more about your contact and process for this.
avani··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2022)
Cloudflare Research | Research Engineer | Remote US/Canada, Several offices in major cities

https://research.cloudflare.com/

We are a tiny, growing team of researchers who are heavily involved in both academic and standards body efforts to make the Internet a better place. The team was originally all cryptographers, but we've built out to include people from other corners of computer systems and networks. I am the manager for the US/Canada side of research, and am happy to answer any questions people have : avani@cloudflare .

https://boards.greenhouse.io/cloudflare/jobs/4279604 (US/Canada) https://boards.greenhouse.io/cloudflare/jobs/4026860 (Europe)

avani··on Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
There is an argument that without Pitts, you'd never have seen a Von Neumann architecture. Not nothing.
avani··on Paris to ‘get rid of 70k parking spaces’
The metro stations are not accessible, though. Getting around Paris without a bike or metro is tricky without a car.
avani··on Worries grow over a K-shaped economic recovery that favors the wealthy
Canada manages pretty well with a "porous southern land border with a country that has a major outbreak". I wonder what the difference is. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/i-crossed-...
avani··on Amazon is delivering nearly two-thirds of its own packages
I know you've almost certainly heard this, but USPS does not receive any taxpayer funding: https://facts.usps.com/top-facts/
avani··on Why Every City Feels the Same Now
> completely inaccessible to the mobility-disabled?

>>Completely inaccessible to a mobility-disabled person without help.

Same thing.

avani··on Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
"qualify" is nebulous. When professors accept PhDs, they are looking for people who they want working in their specific labs. It is much more like applying to a job than applying to undergrad. I have pulled candidates from the pile who had sub-par test scores but excellent writing skills, for instance, because teaching good writing to adults is much harder for me than teaching computer science. Similarly, I've taken students who reached out to me with ideas for followup on my papers over students with great test scores who didn't seem to care what they worked on. Random sampling is a terrible strategy for PhD admissions.
avani··on In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds have not improved
I think you may be referring to Jevon's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
avani··on How real are real numbers? (2004)
In a similar vein, Cantor's original diagonalization proof of uncountability is one of the most satisfying results in real analysis. From https://www.cs.virginia.edu/luther/blog/posts/124.html:

"Any real number can be rep­re­sented as an inte­ger fol­lowed by a dec­imal point and an infi­nite sequence of dig­its. Let’s ignore the inte­ger part for now and only con­sider real numbers between 0 and 1. Now we need to show that all pair­ings of infi­nite sequences of dig­its to inte­gers of neces­sity leaves out some infi­nite sequences of dig­its.

Let’s say our can­di­date pair­ing maps pos­i­tive inte­ger i to real number r_i. Let’s also denote the digit in posi­tion i of a real number x as x_i. Thus, if one of our pair­ings was (17, 0.651249324…) then r_17^4 would be 2. Now, con­sider the spe­cial number z, where z_i is the bot­tom digit of r_i^i + 1.

The number z above is a real number between 0 and 1 and is not paired with any pos­i­tive inte­ger. Since we can con­struct such a z for any pair­ing, we know that every pair­ing has at least one number not in it. Thus, the lists aren’t the same size, mean­ing that the list of real numbers must be big­ger than the list of inte­gers."

avani··on Georgia Tech professors revolt over reopening, say current plan threatens lives
If Tech CS students and faculty revolt, we'll welcome them with open arms at Emory, where the entire CS department is teaching online this fall.
avani··on New iPhone SE
This actually happens. Ask your flight attendant friends about “miracle cures” walking off their flights after using wheelchairs to board.
avani··on Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads
Um.. I think most luxury goods stores are in inner cities.
avani··on The ReMarkable Tablet: A Review
It is a perfect device for those of us who spend a lot of our days reading and annotating scientific papers. The refresh rate on the screen is not relevant at (at least my) paper reading speed, and I can email marked up documents to collaborators and students.
avani··on A Son’s Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality (2017)
You need to read Clifford Simak's "The Way Station"
avani··on Is Line Editing a Lost Art?
I was too. Not having used ed by necessity since a hilariously bad upgrade from Solaris 7 to 9 left me without a compiler in ... 2001?, I'd argue that line editing is most definitely a lost art.
avani··on DNA sequencing progress has stagnated
It's not quite _discovering_ a target from NGS, but lots of existing cancer drugs are targeted based on genotyping tumours. Breast cancer is the classic one, where, say, if you can quickly determine if your sample is Her2+ your treatment plan drastically changes. Now, getting enough cancer cells in your tumour sample to reliably genotype at that stage is a separate hard problem.
avani··on How much are professors paid?
There is also a large difference between disciplines. Professors in professional schools such as law, medicine, or business tend to make significantly more than professors in the liberal arts (note: this includes math, engineering, and CS many places).
avani··on What’s New in Apple Filesystems [pdf]
Expect about 30%, most of it in smaller system files and libraries. Block-level dedup is great for pretty much anything where you have a consistent workflow.
avani··on Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight
I don't know about op, but airbnb is crap for accessibility so I've learned my lesson and always choose hotels.
avani··on Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students
Student reviews are also ridiculously sexist in the average case. In a recent study, the students rated identical teachers differently enough by gender that actual teaching performance was lost in the noise: https://academic.oup.com/jeea/advance-article-abstract/doi/1...

Another pair of studies showed that identical courses where students thought instructors were male rated higher than those that had a female professor, and their qualitative answers were also very different: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/14/study-says-st...

I'm grateful to be a computer scientist, where the consolation prize for not getting tenure is a cushy industry job, but I feel deeply for my pre-tenure colleagues in the life sciences who have to work twice as hard for their evaluations while still maintaining their research and service requirements.

avani··on Pseudonyms to protect authors of controversial articles
Ostensibly this is what tenure is for.
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