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vchak1

88 karma · joined May 7, 2019

Twitter: @vchakrav
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vchak1··on Scientists use optogenetics to help a blind patient see again
At least the patient has a view, however dim.
vchak1··on Dynamicland
I gave Bret the same feedback. My point was that if he could package up a smaller version of it (say with a pico projector and a simple webcam) then you could have a ton of creative efforts happen in parallel. There are a ton of use cases for the home and for schools and I'm sad that the potential there is not fully realized..
vchak1··on An English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8k Years
Create in English, Krit in Sanskrit, ecrit in French. Death is Mrit in Sanskrit, and morte in French. Is is astu in Sanskrit, Ast in Farsi (if I recall correctly).
vchak1··on List of Generative Art and Live Coding Tools
Also missing shadertoy. https://www.shadertoy.com/
vchak1··on Cellmate: Male chastity gadget hack could lock users in
Perhaps Protecting Penitent Persona.
vchak1··on Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke
And sometimes the legacy is just that the world is a better place thanks to their efforts, and has not much to do with having your name all over the place.
vchak1··on New Zealand is about to test long-range wireless power transmission
With this, could you not also use say balloons to get the rocket up till a particular point, and then switch to beamed power?
vchak1··on Do we really travel through time with the speed of light?
What is so special about the speed of light? As a thought experiment, if everyone on the planet was blind, would c have been replaced by the speed of sound?
vchak1··on Apple blocked Facebook's attempt to tell users about 30% App Store 'tax'
Even for the app - if its a cost argument, then allow others to compete on a cost basis. Of course, apple will not let you set up your own app store with the same guarantees that apple provides around privacy security etc. If its a discovery and cost of marketing argument than I dont understand the perpetuity of payments, you can pay a first time purchase fee but subscriptions afterwards should not have any fees tacked on.
vchak1··on Show HN: Olaf – Acoustic Fingerprinting on the ESP32 and in the Browser
It would work if you can sing out the phrase ;). Basically a real life version of a musical.
vchak1··on Leaked S-1 screenshots show Palantir losing $579M in 2019
I think here you need to look at their main weakness, which is strong reliance on government contracts. If Trump loses the next election then there will be a major change that will likely adversely affect them. Peter Thiel is one of the founders of Palantir.
vchak1··on A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity (2012)
Actually, it seems that compilers is a domain that APL can potentially excel at.. https://github.com/Co-dfns/Co-dfns
vchak1··on Study finds learning music won’t make children smart
Not to mention that the main benefit of playing an instrument is... playing the instrument!
vchak1··on No, you couldn't have made more money than the Twitter hacker
Why not combine the methods? Use the BTC stuff to fund the stock stuff, and have different twitter accounts do different things. Biden's for BTC, and Musk's for stock market manipulation. Plus steal the DM's for sale on the dark web.
vchak1··on Behind tech layoffs lay cash flow-negative companies
I believe they are trying to make it up in volume.
vchak1··on Thermoelectric Stoves vs. Solar Panels
They do, if you power a solar panel making plant with solar panels.
vchak1··on Building a patient monitoring system with Go and Vue in 3 days
IMHO, this would be a perfect application to build using Elixir and Phoenix LiveView. I think it would provide really robust realtime capabilities, and fits well with things like binary pattern matching that Elixir and Erlang handle well.
vchak1··on The Intensional Spreadsheet
Very interesting. I believe that Bret Victor does the time part really well (visually) here: http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/ (in demo 4). Also, Mesh apreadsheet is very interesting in this regard, especially with K (Array based language) embedded in it. You can then write a bunch of expressions as {function} scan over initial values, both time based or otherwise. http://mesh-spreadsheet.com/
vchak1··on Ode to J
While I really like array programming languages in general, I think what is really an elegant balance of readability and conciseness is the nile language and its application to rasterization. Highly concise, yet very readable.

See this Bret Victor talk, at 25:03. https://vimeo.com/67076984

vchak1··on Ode to J
I think its important to distinguish between something that is a core piece vs all the other things that make the system usable. For example once you start adding error handling, and good error reporting, the complexity goes up by an order of magnitude. And in many cases the approach for the core does not necessarily scale out to the other contexts.
vchak1··on Ode to J
I'd also suggest looking at Pike's ivy as a simple example of an apl like system in go. https://github.com/robpike/ivy
vchak1··on Why I’m Leaving Elm
It's definitely harder. I have been doing O'caml for about 20 years now, and we have probably one of the largest Elm apps out there. I looked at Purescript, especially because it also compiles to other languages (C++, BEAM) but the learning curve is a bit steep.
vchak1··on Covid-19 Will Kill a Ton of Startups (Or So It Will Seem)
I'm still trying to figure out which side is Katherine the Great.
vchak1··on Smart Algorithms beat Hardware Acceleration for Large-Scale Deep Learning
You can solve around this by using cuckoo or robin hood hashing. See for example: https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/148064...
vchak1··on On Voice Coding
This would go very well with APL.
vchak1··on Google veterans: The company has become ‘unrecognizable’
You can have higher ratios at the CXO and SVP level, and need lower ratios below director because at the higher level most people dont need as much day to day oversight.
vchak1··on A lot of complex “scalable” systems can be done with a simple, single C++ server
Need to understand your domain better, but in many cases, the 250GB csv can be compressed down quite effectively using a columnar representation. And the columns can (potentially) be processed using simd/gpu based approaches to where a single server would outrun a cluster. Food for thought..
vchak1··on Build Your Own WebAssembly Compiler
I found this one pretty interesting. https://maierfelix.github.io/mini-c/
vchak1··on Show HN: An experimental distributed SQL database from scratch in Go
Have you seen Perkeep? https://perkeep.org/ Mainly build by Brad Fitzpatrick, in Go.
vchak1··on Downsides to working at a tech giant
The analogy does not hold because you still lose time, which is IMHO the most valuable commodity because it represents opportunity cost.

In built into a lot of these discussions is a major assumption - that a startup is a "typical" silicon valley startup with the goal of being a massively valued entity. That changes the risk structure dramatically. If instead you tried to bootstrap something into a 2M annual revenue enterprise with minimal (say 200k) worth of investment, the equation changes quite significantly.

I'd assert that in that situation, playing the role of "early tech adopter" into new problem spaces dramatically reduces the risk as well.

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