birbal

I have shared my experience of teaching kids geometry in spare time, in this post. Would love to hear from others who have tried this and have learnt things that work vs things that don't

This is IMO a big deal because MSFT will now own business identity. Linkedin will become your business ID regardless of which company you join. Owning identity that travels across companies is incredibly powerful. This is a huge upgrade to AD. It's provisioned, verified (socially) and serves as a huge data source.

this is so awesome. My wife and I have been thinking and working on how can family productivity be improved. It's not an easy task as we are figuring out. There was a recent blog post that became reasonably popular. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-slack-moms-slackformoms...

The challenge I feel is to determine if one should take a broad-based approach to family productivity that addresses all aspects or should one take a narrow high-value problem and solve for improving the productivity of that task. We have approached it from the point of view of making kids' activity planning as a task easier. We are going into beta in a week or so. We'll know if this works.

One of the analogies i gave to the kids was that why did man have to learn to travel by water. Because walking on land wouldn't get them to the other island. Complex numbers sometimes sometimes are used to get to islands that aren't accessible from working with regular numbers. I was obviously referring to finding roots to cubic equations using complex numbers. Using complex numbers is in some cases like walking on water :-). These are not exact but they make kids excited. The fact that Math is replete with hacks just like real world is something that needs to be made more vivid and interesting

Great job Kalid. I try to do this with kids. Simple ideas like why anything to power zero is 1 ? why do we need complex numbers ? Why is limit of something tending to zero/infinity even an interesting and useful concept ?

I think in general working with large IT firms is always going to be a CF regardless of where they are from. This is especially true if you are a product dev shop as against enterprise IT. I think a better comparison would be small sized companies in India with the ones in Romania. I am not defending Indian outfits. I tend to agree that it is hard to find great tech companies to work with in India. But I suspect some of that has to do with just the sheer volume of tech outfits in India. As with anything its hard to keep average quality high with scale. Infosys used to be a top company on top tech campuses like IITs in mid 90s. I can tell you some of the guys who joined where absolute top notch tech guys back then. Those days are long gone. The issues that you point often are an outcome of working with incompetent or unmotivated folks. The best talent in India now works for companies that are catering to the local market (Snapdeal, Flipkart, Ola Cabs). So you may be better off looking at countries where top talent still is in the outsourcing business because local market doesn't offer enough returns for their talent.

What about search going social. It seems to me that I find a lot of my information on the social media now like Facebook. It just seems like i search a lot less now than i used to. Its not that people search on social media. I get fed information relentlessly and i have little time or energy left to google anything.

How do i up vote this. I have the genius but lacking the opportunity i think

An idea who has time has come

I think my points are made at a macro level and not at a specific company level. There is no fool-proof proof to any business/economic hypothesis. Oracle, MSFT and SAP aren't the only companies that make up on-prem software. But even with these companies shelf-ware is rampant. It took large internet companies to come up with competitive stacks to break these virtual monopolies. Having said that your point on making a stronger case is well taken. My bigger point is that the the current trend is less of a bubble than the era of on-prem software - this is a macro level observation. There were company level bubbles then and there are now. I am not commenting on specific companies here at least.

This is a bit of shameless plug but i think quite aligned with Sam's post but makes a slightly different argument. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-have-been-bigger-tech-bubb...

Would love to get critiqued by this uber smart and opinionated crowd here.

This was 7 years back my friend. We built software prototype for measuring dimensions, classifying grain type and measuring color / brokenness. For hardware we had some initial designs where the objectives were - to easily put grains on a platform so they are separated from each other, easy cleaning and lighting uniformity. We had conceived some rotating or vibrating disks for grain separation. But the mechanical part of the hardware wasn't actually built. I have moved on. There is nostalgia around that was triggered by this thread, but nothing more at this point. Sorry to disappoint.

I actually love the sentence but I wouldn't expect it in spoken english. (That part is ironical in the sense that it goes against the core of the article.. Seems like an exception that proves the rule). Written word gives the reader more time to absorb the content than spoken word and hence I feel it is OK to use metaphorical language to make the point and make the reading experience delightful. But Paul's point is well taken that it's better not to use flowery language for most of the time. It takes a lot of skill to not go overboard with that thing.

"Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas" The irony in this sentence from the article is breathtaking.

The nature vs nurture debate will go on. But I think the question needs to be framed differently. Its not about comparing one person with the other but the approach that best maximizes ones own potential. When framed this way, the answer becomes very clear - you have to believe that you can become smarter. This is not just blind belief but is practically the way brain works (neuroplasticity)and we see it every day. If you can learn to play the guitar at 60 means you can change your brain. I am sure there are 60 year olds who are smarter than 20 year olds just like there are 60 year olds who can run for longer than 20 year olds. As engineers we tend to downplay psychological factors compared to physiological factors. But the connection has been established beyond doubt in neuroscience. It hasn't gotten to a point where we can formulaically impact outcomes through calibrated intervention but the linkages are clear. Our definition of smartness is very narrow. Here is a conversation between a 50 year old scientist and a 70 year old poet https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/04/27/when-einstein-met-t...

I have some personal experience with applying computer/machine vision techniques to assessing rice quality. In India, rice quality assessment is a high value activity as the difference in per unit weight price is dramatic across different varieties of rice. The longer the grain, as an example, the pricier it is. Discoloration is also an indicator of bad quality rice. Since there is such a huge difference in price, there is naturally cheating, subjectivity and sampling driven errors. We had developed a device that would objectively and quickly measure the rice quality based on a multitude of factors. This was not just software because there had to be way to cancel out any variance due to ambient conditions and it had to be a device that was easy to maintain in a highly rugged rice factory environment. We did really well but where we failed was our inability to break through the powerful rice quality inspectors cartel and even the rice suppliers who were worried about being "found out". Manual inspection was strangely seen as way of having some control over the proceedings.

My kids don't think its normal. They actually complain when i have the phone stuck to my ear. Our assumptions on what and how kids learn from us are over-simplified.