HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

pramalin

56 karma · joined July 15, 2013

Java Developer living Jacksonville, FL. Scala enthusiasts. Implemented Liferay portal for two employers.
submissionscomments
pramalin··on Ask HN: What maths are critical to pursuing ML/AI?
I found this study plan very useful for me. https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2017/01/the-most-compre...

Provides a very good idea of the courses required and their time frame. I roughly followed along this path but took "Analytics Edge" https://www.edx.org/course/analytics-edge-mitx-15-071x-3 for introduction into ML algorithms.

pramalin··on Ask HN: What maths are critical to pursuing ML/AI?
You can also dive in first and then cover the math behind ML, by taking Andrew Ng's courses. https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning
pramalin··on On Loneliness
I have read many of his books and listened to his video talks with his followers while I was in Chennai. The "Commentaries on Living" series are easy to read and my favorites. http://www.jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en http://www.jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/commentaries-on-living-...

His teachings are just the opposite of Gita (and other Hindu scriptures), which prescribes caste based society as the act of God.

I moved on from his abstract teachings to practical life changing works of Osho, Ambedhkar and finally to E.V.Ramasamy (Periyar).

pramalin··on Fat-fueled brain: unnatural or advantageous?
Not all calories are the same. For example, body excretes excess dietary fat, but stores excess carbohydrates adding 4 times the amount of water to it. You can find the details in any Paleo Diet related site.
pramalin··on Angular 2 Final Released
I have used Angular in multi-page application, using Angular as a better JQuery in Spring MVC application. This setup worked well combining the best of both frameworks. Angular provided two-way binding, rendering templates (in loop), dialog box interactions, better AJAX, etc. Angular based component libraries provided calendar controls, dynamic tables, etc. Spring took care of the routing pages, handling UI requests and returning JSON response from services.
pramalin··on China’s tyranny of characters
//As a comparison, India, which teaches Hindi and English in school, both of which much simpler scripts than Han, has achieved an average of 74% literacy rate in the most recent census.// The reason for lower literacy rates in India may not anything to do with how complex their scripts are. Elites just passed on their Sanskrit scriptures orally among themselves to exclude others from learning them. Their laws also denied education to the working class. In modern times, many children just can't go to school for many reasons. There are no schools accessible or affordable, they may need to fetch firewood, water, may need to take care of cattle, family members, and so on. (My mom curse their parents to this day, because they stopped her school in her 4th grade, to take care of her baby sister). In south India, there are free meal schemes for school children to alleviate these problems to some extent.
pramalin··on Diabetes: can you really eat to beat it?
There is an Indian Facebook group about Paleo diet, where dozens if not hundreds of people followed simple LCHF diet and reversed their type 2 diabetics and got type 1 under control among other improvements. Few physicians also got cured and they started advocating the diet. These doctors are working towards getting Indian Diabetes Association to recognize LCHF diet as a viable remedy.

You can see many medical reports posted by the members for your reference. https://www.facebook.com/groups/tamilhealth/

pramalin··on When to Rewrite from Scratch – Autopsy of Failed Software
Survived a complete rewrite for a client just now.

The previous team blindly relied on a single method from Spring framework's RestTemplate for every rest service calls with SAP backend.

    ResponseEntity<T> exchange(String url,
        HttpMethod method,
        HttpEntity<?> requestEntity,
        Class<T> responseType,
        Object... uriVariables)
        throws RestClientException
(ref: https://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/javadoc-api/org/s...)

This forsed them to create object models structured to match the complicated and inconsitent request and response JSON strings that SAP used, instead of creating the objects modeled after the business domains. The result was no surprise was a disaster and the client wasted five months with them and I had to redo and complete the project still on time.

I still see many teams make their function signatures in Java so convoluted like below and don't know what hit them.

    interface ToDoService {
        ListToDoResponse listToDo(ListToDoRequest request) throws ListToDoException;
        AddToDoResponse addToDo(AddToDoRequest request) throws AddToDoException;
        .. and so on ..
    }
pramalin··on It’s gotten harder to lose weight and not for the reasons you think
Calories in calories out, hypothesis is proven wrong by many people.

In a Low Corb High Fat diet, excess dietary fat is burned out and excreted. On the other hand High Corb diet, corbs are stored as fat causing obesity.

I have personally seen many people who have transformed their heath with this basic understanding. Ref: http://thepaleodiet.com/stop-counting-calories-start-assessi...

pramalin··on How Wasps Use Viruses to Genetically Engineer Caterpillars
//Maybe one day we will have crops that infest with viruses their predators?// Not viruses, but crops already do that according to Loren Cordain see: http://thepaleodiet.com/grains-and-toxins/
pramalin··on The Hidden Connection Between Morality and Language
// “the use of a foreign language, as opposed to a native language, elicited less harsh moral judgments.”// I thought this is a common observation.

Indian movies, writings, conversations openly curse in English, but the exact words in native language would be considered as blasphemy.

pramalin··on Soylent 2.0
Soy is a big no within the Paleo diet group I know. This is because it's potent with Phytic acid which binds to other nutrients and turn them into waste. Consumers beware.
pramalin··on Ask HN: What are the books that changed the perspective of your life?
From Sex to Superconsciousness - Osho A great stress reliever for an Indian who was feeling guilty all the time waking or sleeping.

Many articles by rationalist and reformer Periyar E.V.Ramasamy http://Periyar.org

pramalin··on Artoo: Ruby on Robots
I have started and coached a new FIRST Robotics Competition team last year for 2014-2015 season and wanted to use Java. Initially I thought the programming would be very complicated for the high school students, many of whom didn't have any prior programming experience.

How can you control the speed of the robot proportional to the pressure applied on the joystick for example?. However, I was very pleased with the WPILib framework that comes with the kit. This can be accomplished by essentially a single line like (ignoring the variable initialization),

    myRobot.arcade(stick);
http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/4485/m/13809/l/145307-cr...
pramalin··on VLC 2.2.0 multi-releases
I know this is not the most appropriate place to ask. Last year I tried creating subtitles for a movie in Tamil and VLC rendered the texts incorrectly like in the very old browsers. Is the unicode rendering improved in this release?
pramalin··on The Knapsack Problem
May be relevant: there is a cool game - knapsack on a radial graph, with Scala source code. http://krishnanraman.github.io/scala-js/examples/helloworld/...
pramalin··on What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL
I have also used MyBatis in few projects and recommend it for applications that are database centric. I would use ORM only if the requirements call for object persistence and be DB/SQL agnostic.
pramalin··on Java Developers
I think the author is out of touch with modern Java development practices. Any decent Java developer would have got exposed to POJO based development[1] by now. [1]Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB - Rod Johnson, 2004

These days even the much hatted EJBs are POJO based and lot easier to work with. Not to mention Lambda support in Java 8 and the hybrid approach of Scala, my favorite.

pramalin··on A Gentle Introduction to Monad Transformers – or, Values as Exceptions
Try[1] in Scala standard library is also similar in concept. Erik Meijer covers this subject very well in his talks[2].

  [1]The Try type represents a computation that may either result in an exception, or return a successfully computed value. http://www.scala-lang.org/files/archive/nightly/docs/library/index.html#scala.util.Try
  [2]http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Keynote-Duality
pramalin··on Large Round of Layoffs Expected at Microsoft
One example of right layoff I have seen is at the rail-road company in my town. They hired consultants to help with the process. My friend explained me how it went. Each person was given a questionnaire asking whom they are reporting to and who are reporting to them. The organization was so bad that many managers did not know who are all the people reporting to them. These people and others many people who were working from home most of the time were the first set of people to go.
pramalin··on The Death of the Urdu Script
Tamil and probably many other Indian languages have various examples: Love as in parental (anbu), as between couples (kaadhal). "How many -eth" (ethanaiyaavathu) child are you to your parents? Many forms of family relationships: younger brother (thambi), elder brother (annan), etc.
pramalin··on The 33-year-old virgin: Life without sex is only torturous if you let it be
Someone like him would be treated as a most eligible bachelor in Indian circles. I know an American girl who is happily married to an Indian she selected through online matrimonial sites. Considering Indian's family values, that may be a good option for him as well.
pramalin··on ChucK: Strongly-timed, Concurrent, and On-the-fly Music Programming Language
I have toyed a bit with CSound http://www.csounds.com/toots/index.html to synthesize Indian classical music.

How does ChucK compares to CSound?

pramalin··on How many 32-bit RISC CPUs fit in an FPGA? Now vs. 1995?
Intrigued by FPGA's capabilities, when checking out my classmate's profile http://orangesorter.com/, I started looking into some development kits to learn.

I found great documentation and economical boards starting at $55 available here: http://www.xess.com/store/fpga-boards/

BTW, I also found Scala based hardware construction language Chisel very interesting https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/.

pramalin··on Homeopathic remedies recalled for containing real medicine
My be because there are many government homeopathy colleges and hospitals.
pramalin··on How were the first microprocessors programmed?
I used cross assemblers in DOS to program 803x series of micro-controllers in 80's. To debug the hardware, I used a toggle switch to single step the programs and a LED probe to check the address lines to verify that the program branched to correct location, keeping a printout of the intermediate output from the compiler which showed assigned address for each instructions.

To avoid stepping through several hundred lines of instructions before reaching a particular routine say floating-point arithmetic, I would set beginning of the routine in question at a convenient address like 0x400, and wire the address line (A10) to break the program.

I have created several useful products using these humble tools.

pramalin··on SimpleCV – Computer Vision platform using Python
I'm looking to measure dimensions of objects using computer vision libraries. I think it is impossible to do this without a reference scale in the same image.

What is the unit of measure for line.length()?

pramalin··on The broken-down grace of Bill Murray
This movie inspired a Tamil movie named Thenali. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thenali
pramalin··on Deconstructing Functional Programming [video]
Have you read "Monads are Elephants"? That helped me a great deal.

http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2007/09/monads-are-elephants-p...

pramalin··on 3D-printed skull simulates sensations of brain surgery
Wow. It is one the best application of 3D printers I have seen.

One nitpick: The name of the professor is incorrectly split in the article. His actual name is Vickneswaran A/L Mathaneswaran. I have learned that A/L stands for "son of" in Malaysia. Westerners get confused because many people of Indian origin have only one name and use their father's name as last name.

Page 1 of 2Next →