https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/ Recent content on Krishna's words Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sun, 28 Feb 2021 00:15:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/writing-helps-me-think/ Sun, 28 Feb 2021 00:15:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/writing-helps-me-think/ Non reasons Let me first mention reasons that aren’t why I’m writing posts on this blog Becoming a thought leader. My readership is pretty low, unless it reaches the top of HN/reddit. This has only happened once or twice, so I’m in no danger of achieving popularity. Becoming a paid writer. Writers who cultivate a following generally stick to a topic, even if it’s a broad one. There’s no theme to my writing other “whatever is on my mind right now”. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/quitting-twitter/ Thu, 25 Feb 2021 00:15:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/quitting-twitter/ I’ve only used Twitter for a few months and I did like a lot of it. The best part by far was following and listening to some incredible people. Patrick McKenzie is one among many, but if you look at what he says on a daily basis, you’ll know what I mean. I can be endlessly entertained and learn a lot from what folks like him say. There’s also the feeling of being the first one to know things. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/understanding-my-privilege/ Tue, 09 Feb 2021 00:15:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/understanding-my-privilege/ I studied in a school with high academic standards. That’s another way of saying, we had exams all the time and they were insanely difficult. It was common for more than half the class to fail some exams. The idea was, we’d see a low score and it’d motivate us to work harder because we’d want 100%. The final exam set by the government would be much easier, and we’d all pass that with ease. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/software-isnt-bloated/ Tue, 05 Jan 2021 12:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/software-isnt-bloated/ A common complaint I’ve heard often expressed is that software today is too complex, that it could and should be dramatically simplified. We could throw out a lot of the old crap and simply start afresh. This is most definitely the case whenever a modern text editor like VS Code is discussed. Why do we need this bloated thing when Dennis Ritchie built a text editor editor in a thousand lines? https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/underusing-the-nhs/ Thu, 31 Dec 2020 02:21:15 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/underusing-the-nhs/ This was a conversation I had with my sister (Akka) around the middle of 2019 Akka: Want some tea? Me: Nah, I’m good. Akka: Didn’t you used to like tea? Me: Yeah, I do but I can’t drink hot things because of a mouth ulcer. Akka: Wait, didn’t you say the same thing a few months ago? You got another ulcer? Me: No it’s the same one, I’ve had it for a while. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/rust-2021/ Thu, 17 Sep 2020 16:39:15 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/rust-2021/ People who end up using the Rust programming language are overwhelmingly satisfied with their choice, as indicated by Stack Overflow’s annual survey (2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016) where Rust was voted “most loved language/technology” for 5 years running. The % of Rust users who love the language has actually increased in the last 3 years - from 78.9% to 83.5% to 86.1%. Clearly the teams working on Rust are doing a good job. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/wealth-tax/ Sun, 13 Sep 2020 16:39:15 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/wealth-tax/ What is it? A wealth tax works this way. A person pays a part of their wealth every year to the government. Take an example of a person worth $110 million being assessed by Senator Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax, which would take 2% of all wealth above $50 million. Such a person would pay 2% of ($110m - $50m). That’s a $120k. Not that much, some might say. Senator Warren sells it as “just two cents! https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/factorio-and-software-engineering/ Sun, 16 Aug 2020 00:15:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/factorio-and-software-engineering/ I’ve been a software engineer a while now and I can say this with confidence - it is fun. It’s great and I wouldn’t trade it for anything else. It’s so much fun that some folks try to capture the most enjoyable elements and put them into games. I’ve played two such games. The first is Shenzhen.io. This one looks similar to what an engineer working on embedded devices would see. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/why-bother-arguing/ Tue, 26 May 2020 00:15:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/why-bother-arguing/ A good friend of mine jokingly asked me this last week. They were thinking my tendency to do this. The driving force behind this behaviour is the theory of network science. This interactive simulation explains how it works. It takes a while to read that, but I promise it’s worthwhile. There’s more useful info in there than the rest of this article, certainly. The gist of it is - our thoughts and opinions are shaped not by any objective truth, rather by the weighted average of the opinion of the people we like and trust. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/discriminating-against-left-handers/ Fri, 22 May 2020 00:15:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/discriminating-against-left-handers/ Left handers aren’t succeeding A simple statistic. - 90% of people are right-handed, 10% are left-handed. And a simple idea - in any large enough population, we should see a similar distribution. Take a 100k civil servants or soldiers or travelling salesmen, and 90k of them will be right-handers and the rest lefties. Let’s say we find a hypothetical sawmill where this isn’t true. Almost everyone, close to 99% are right handed. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/keto-faq/ Thu, 21 May 2020 04:57:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/keto-faq/ Keto is the diet where you burn a bunch of calories explaining to everyone what keto is. MouseK801, commenting on Youtube. In 2018 and 2019 I experimented with the Keto diet. It was a good experience. I often get asked questions about it, so I thought I’d put them down here. What is the keto diet? You stop eating carbs. Since your body prioritizes getting energy from carbs and only uses energy from stored fats as a last resort, this diet forces the body to burn fat. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/intelligence/ Thu, 06 Feb 2020 15:57:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/intelligence/ [//]: # I should make this shorter. Instead of talking about specific skills, talk about broad skills. There was a good section in this article about people who love “facts and logic”. Another common characteristic of these “logickier than thou” movements is a narrow focus on the type of skill that can be classed as “intelligence.” Affinity for things like social interaction, languages, or the arts (or at least certain types of art) often don’t get a look-in. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/books-i-read-in-2019/ Thu, 02 Jan 2020 11:46:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/books-i-read-in-2019/ Exceptional books A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. This follows the lives of 4 ordinary people during the Emergency of the 1970s. It gave me a fresh perspective on a difficult time in India’s history, as well an appreciation of the difficulties faced by Indians less privileged than me. Reading this drained me emotionally, but it was worth it. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra Vogel. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/books-i-abandoned/ Sun, 27 Jan 2019 12:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/books-i-abandoned/ I rarely speak about the books I don’t finish, because I generally finish books even if I don’t enjoy them. I’m starting to rethink that policy though. Life’s short, no sense putting myself through something I don’t enjoy. The other reason I don’t write reviews of such books is that I try to avoid speaking poorly of books, following the lead of fictional critic Anton Ego. It’s mean to dismiss years of work with a pithy 2 paragraph review. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/setting-up-this-blog/ Wed, 09 Jan 2019 12:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/setting-up-this-blog/ This blog is generated by hugo, a static site generator. My flow is to write it markdown files on my laptop, commit it to a git repository and push it to the machine that’s hosting the blog you’re reading. Once the push is successful, a post-commit hook runs hugo and generates HTML pages. Nginx serves these pages. Next, the firewall needs to be configured and optionally, SSL certificates can be provisioned using Let’s Encrypt. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/skin-in-the-game/ Sun, 06 Jan 2019 03:03:37 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/skin-in-the-game/ There are some books that are bad, and you know they’re bad immediately. They’re long-winded, or they make factual errors or they mistake the complex for the complicated. Once you realise they’re bad, you can write off the book and move on. Then there are bad books that appear good. They have all the markers of good books. They have a simple idea, they use the same simple idea to explain multiple issues. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/books-i-read-in-2017/ Mon, 25 Dec 2017 12:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/books-i-read-in-2017/ Bill Gates posts reviews of books he’s read every year (2017, 2016, 2015). His recommendations are solid, and I usually pick up at least 2 books from his list every year. Read on for my recommendations for 2017. There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different. ― Lemony Snicket https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/mans-search-for-meaning/ Sun, 24 Dec 2017 19:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/mans-search-for-meaning/ I’ve read and seen many accounts of the Holocaust, so I was interested if another book on the same subject could offer a different perspective. It does. Frankl splits into 2 halves - anecdotes from his time in the death camps and the theory behind his psychotherapy I’ve read histories of the Holocaust which try to help the reader understand the scale of the atrocities. They into detail of the camps - where they were located, how people were transported, how many died immediately and how many over time, the purpose of each camp and so on. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/and-then-there-were-none/ Wed, 20 Dec 2017 06:11:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/and-then-there-were-none/ In my opinion Christie’s detectives, for example Poirot and Marple, are officious, pompous and insufferable. This book thankfully does not have one of these characters and thanks to that, might be Christie’s best book. What’s more, I think its possible for the reader to solve this mystery if they really put their minds to it. Great story. On a meta level, I found the amount of casual racism interesting. Examples - “that was the damnable part about Jews, you couldn’t deceive them about money” and “natives don’t mind dying, you know. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/should-i-buy-bitcoin/ Mon, 11 Dec 2017 03:03:37 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/should-i-buy-bitcoin/ Right now, the price of Bitcoin is soaring through the roof. Maybe you heard last week that 1 BTC was trading $10,000. Yesterday your friend told you that it had breached $15,000 and it showed no signs of slowing. Now you’re thinking - if I had invested even $100 last week, I’d be up $50 right now. As an investor, this is one of the worst feelings - the knowledge that you’ve missed out on an opportunity. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/ready-player-one/ Sun, 26 Nov 2017 19:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/ready-player-one/ Not bad, but not very good either. Here’s what the author does well - referencing an unbelievable amount of 80’s video games, movies and TV shows. If you’re an 80s kid or you’d like to be, you’ll enjoy the detailed play throughs of games, the discussion of finer points of movies but most often simply the constant references. Here’s an example of a reference I loved - when the good guys need to attack the bad guys’ base but are waiting for someone to destroy the protective shield one of them says “we need to give Han more time! https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/six-easy-pieces/ Thu, 23 Nov 2017 19:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/six-easy-pieces/ Feynman gave a series of lectures to first year students in the 1960s and the ones in this book are the 6 easiest topics. I was already familiar with these because I elected to study physics in school, so what I really after was understanding what made Feynman such a good teacher. After all, I had been taught the same matter by different teachers, some of whom taught in the conventional way, one of whom was heavily inspired by Feynman (shoutout to Prof Raavi! https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/the-brothers-karamazov/ Sun, 19 Nov 2017 19:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/the-brothers-karamazov/ If I said I enjoyed reading this book, it would not be quite true. It was heavy going at times, especially in the second quarter. It took me several months to get through that, while I usually finish books in a sitting or two. However, after the halfway mark the pace did pick up and I was done in a few days. If you give this book a shot, you owe it to yourself to get to that halfway mark. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/born-to-run/ Tue, 31 Oct 2017 19:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/born-to-run/ 3 words - low quality pseudo-science. The author sets the tone with a clickbait style paragraph (“a beautiful forest ranger who slipped out of her clothes…”) and it goes downhill from there. He has an agenda - barefoot running and he pushes with the tried and tested Malcolm Gladwell playbook - deciding a conclusion and then cherry-picking evidence to support it. According to him, barefoot running is the solution to every problem that mankind faces - physical, mental, emotional. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/born-a-crime/ Thu, 19 Oct 2017 19:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/born-a-crime/ In my opinion, the good books are the ones that engage you while you’re reading them. They might make you laugh out loud, or feel grief, or rile you up till there’s steam coming from your ears; they elicit visceral emotional responses. You can’t put these books down, because you can only do that if you’re still here, but you’re not. You’re in the author’s world right now. Noah manages this with ease. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/the-crusades/ Tue, 17 Oct 2017 19:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/the-crusades/ Why this book is relevant today - too many people today seek to spin some of the events of the 20th and 21st century as a continuation of the Crusades. In their eyes, Islam and Christianity have always fought each other and always will until one eradicates the other. What this book shows is that in reality, our lack of knowledge of the Crusades allows a person to make any conclusion they wish. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/the-remains-of-the-day/ Sat, 07 Oct 2017 19:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/the-remains-of-the-day/ Stories can be told in many ways, say with an omniscient narrator or first person narrator. Authors have had success experimenting with this, for example with George RR Martin choosing to have each chapter narrated by a different character. In The Remains of the Day we see a butler who’s a reserved man, rarely sharing his thoughts or feelings with anyone, tell us a story while taking us into his confidence. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep/ Fri, 29 Sep 2017 19:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep/ I want to love Philip K Dick’s books but it’s difficult. I do appreciate that this was pioneering work at the time it was written and has inspired a generation of science fiction storytellers. For example, Ex Machina (2015) seems in retrospect to be one long Voight-Kampff test. That’s just one movie, there are myriad others where robots begin to think and feel like humans, blurring the lines between man and machine, forcing us to ask ourselves what really makes us human. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/deaths-end/ Thu, 10 Nov 2016 19:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/deaths-end/ “It’s a strong book, an AMBITIOUS book, a worthy winner [of the Hugo Award].” So said George RR Martin in an interview last year. I think George has good taste, so his endorsement was enough for me to pick it up. In my experience, reading authors who aren’t British or American provides a very different take on characters, settings and worldview. So it is with Liu’s trilogy. Each book of the the trilogy is self-contained, providing a satisfying conclusion. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/implementing-aes/ Thu, 30 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/implementing-aes/ The Advanced Encryption Standard is the most widely used encryption algorithm today. Its fast and secure but also easy to understand and implement. If you’re interested in learning about AES, look at this comic - A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard. He splits his comic into 4 Acts: brief history of crypto crypto basics implementation math. He did a great job with all 4 parts, but I thought elaborating on the implementation would be helpful. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/how-goroutines-work/ Sun, 23 Feb 2014 11:09:37 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/how-goroutines-work/ Introduction to Go If you are new to the Go programming language, or if the sentence “Concurrency is not parallelism” means nothing to you, then check out Rob Pike’s excellent talk on the subject. Its 30 minutes long, and I guarantee that watching it is 30 minutes well spent. To summarize the difference - “when people hear the word concurrency they often think of parallelism, a related but quite distinct concept. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/just-in-time/ Sun, 16 Feb 2014 11:02:33 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/just-in-time/ Rita was running late for her job at the call centre. She stuffed the rest of the stewed apple in her mouth and rushed out the door. She hadn’t been able to run fast of late and it bothered her, since she had been an athletic champion at school and college. Still it, helped that the call centre wasn’t far off. When she got there, she was relieved to find that she was on time. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/empty-room/ Sun, 09 Feb 2014 14:18:02 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/empty-room/ Angela entered the empty room. It had stayed empty for 11 months and 16 days, after everything had been put away into drawers, cupboards and drawers within cupboards. A person who didn’t know better would mistake this room for a guest room that was never used, but Angela knew better. She shut the door carefully behind her She knew the clothes, the novels, the diaries, the posters and a few nondescript odds and ends had been filed away carefully by Aunt Heidi because no one else could bring themselves to do it. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/smart-people-play-chess/ Sat, 01 Feb 2014 17:16:09 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/smart-people-play-chess/ Yes, you know that its true - really smart people play chess. More than any other game, chess requires raw intelligence to analyse situations and plot moves in several directions while anticipating the attacks of his opponent. A good player has the capability to do all this and then decisively execute his strategy with elegant and ruthless tactics. I agree with all of that, except the first part - you don’t need to be intelligent to play chess well. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/the-book-thief/ Mon, 20 Jan 2014 19:02:20 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/the-book-thief/ “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also”, wrote Heinrich Heine, a German author. He wrote this more than a century before Hitler seized power, so his words proved prophetic. Ironically, his own works were targeted by Nazis in their book burning ceremonies. It is at one such event that the Book Thief steals her second book - saving it from the flames. Leisel, the eponymous Book Thief, is a 9 year old girl at the beginning of the story, and though she can barely read at first, her love for books grows with time. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/books-in-2013/ Tue, 19 Nov 2013 12:12:07 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/books-in-2013/ This blog is private for now, which means that if you’re reading it, you’re probably good friends with me and you’re used to me bragging all the time by now. You should be able to get through this post somehow. If you don’t know me that well, then I’ve got you covered - press (Ctrl + Shift + W) for a modified version of this post. I got into reading when I was around 5 or 6, making a spectacular debut with a book starring Noddy by Enid Blyton. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/on-history/ Sat, 19 Oct 2013 19:58:37 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/on-history/ Boring details of my childhood I’ve always been a bit of a history buff. It probably started in 4th grade, when I downloaded the demo of Age of Empires: Rise of Rome. Normally my gaming hours were strictly regulated, to prevent me from “wasting all my time” on Dave, Mario, Prince of Persia and the like but this game was different. I managed to play up the educational aspects of the game, portraying it as essentially a history lesson with a few game like elements thrown in and that was enough to convince my parents to allow me to play as much as I liked. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/first-post/ Sat, 19 Oct 2013 02:21:15 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/posts/first-post/ Introduction Hi, I’m Krishna. Now that we’ve got the awkward introduction out of the way, I can tell you what this blog is about. It will be filled with mundane observations about my pastimes, which happen to be reading, programming and gaming. Though these hobbies might strike you as very interesting and worth reading about, I have other plans. I hope to post now and then, rambling about whatever I’m doing at that point of time. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/drafts/draft-leaders-followers-notes/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/drafts/draft-leaders-followers-notes/ Mr Obama also stressed it was a personal opinion, saying he still supported states deciding on the issue. On other issues he might have been leader or follower at various times. I’m speaking only on marriage equality. weak sauce https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-18013432/barack-obama-supports-same-sex-marriage What was left unsaid, of course, was that he and Clinton are among those who used to run against same-sex marriage but have since changed their tune. https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/drafts/draft-stagnating-software/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog-hugo.nindalf.com/drafts/draft-stagnating-software/ We’re not stagnating Rewrite this without focussing so much on that shitty post. Write it as a positive thing. This can probably be split into two articles - Software Isn’t Stagnating and Software Isn’t Bloated. This post upset me a great deal. A short summary Look at a narrow subset of technology - the tech we use to create software We had great stuff before 1996. Nothing worthwhile or groundbreaking invented after 1996.