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ksolanki | 13 years ago | on: How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

Most of the "security questions" can be answered by looking at the Facebook profile (of the person or his/her friends -- at least some have the info public). A motivated hacker can possibly crack even bank accounts using the facebook profile. The account/security is indeed in a big mess.

ksolanki | 13 years ago | on: When Bad Theories Happen to Good Scientists

My bad theory is that Thomas Kuhn's theory of "paradigm shift" itself could be an example of bad theory as presented in the original article. As in, there might not be too tough to find a few obvious counter examples, essentially (proving?) the theory wrong...

ksolanki | 13 years ago | on: The real reason we’re upset about Sparrow’s acquisition

We (most in this discussion) seem to forget that the advent of $10 or $0.99 app actually expanded the market. As in, more people paid money for software than before, thus paying for more indy/non-indy developers.

So let me say this again. The App store, with its $1-5 apps, is a good thing for the developers as well as the users.

ksolanki | 13 years ago | on: Advice for Marissa Mayer from an ex-Yahoo

I really like and admire #2 Spend $$ in finding great talent all the way down to the front-line product managers and engineers. This will often mean paying some hot-shot 23-year old coder 5x more than what she would make at Google or Facebook and beating ridiculous counter offers. Do it. That one great engineer will be worth more than the five engineers you have on the payroll today.

However I do not know if there is a easy way (a "litmus paper") that could say she is 5x better. In all seriousness, I'd like to ask how to make such a determination. I think this advise looks good on paper, but really really hard to implement.

ksolanki | 13 years ago | on: Face.com API shutting down

While you are at it, I'd like to point to some popular existing datasets for object recognition:

The labelme dataset: http://labelme.csail.mit.edu/instructions.html This is close to what you were thinking (and I liked) -- having annotation done by public.

A list: http://www.computervisiononline.com/datasets

PASCAL VOC: http://pascallin.ecs.soton.ac.uk/challenges/VOC/voc2011/

CALTECH 256, and several others. Many papers presented in CVPR 2012 (http://www.cvpr2012.org/) were indeed on very large datasets.

Do note that some of these datasets are fairly large (may or may not be as broad though).

The algorithms you use will depend on the complexity you can handle. OpenCV, IPP, and CCV (which was on hacker news few days back) could provide good options for algorithms with a training dataset you choose/create.

ksolanki | 13 years ago | on: Face.com API shutting down

I really like the idea of "open source"-like project for training data. Such a concept would be applicable to almost any machine learning based project. Although there are academic datasets for most domains, they have their own limitations.

Often the secret sauce is not the algorithms themselves, but the availability of (massive/broad) training data.

ksolanki | 13 years ago | on: Face.com API shutting down

OpenCV is not too difficult to setup, but is not as accurate w.r.t. face recognition -- it is not OpenCV's fault (in fact, it is an amazing project, thanks to folks who contribute to it!) -- the accuracy has lot to do with the size and breadth of the training data.

ksolanki | 13 years ago | on: Steve Jobs on Average vs Best Software Developers

I think there is a lot of talk about hiring an "A" developer, but almost nothing on what makes an A developer an A developer. More likely than not, it a continuum, and that a lot of engineers have the potential to be an A, but don't end up getting there due to one reason or another. It would be great to see some discussion on what environment could one provide that would enable A players to thrive and reach their potential.

ksolanki | 14 years ago | on: Recently Open-Sourced Django Apps from Eldarion

Is there a post/tutorial/anything that explains the best practices in customizing and/or extending these apps into our own projects, using or not using pinax?

Should we create new apps that subclass parts that we want to extend?

ksolanki | 14 years ago | on: This photograph is free

If say a well known media organization says, "You should let me use this photo for free, because I will give you credit and that might help you get business later"

Why won't the "well-known media organization" pay what the photo is worth? Almost by definition they can afford to. If they still negotiate in this manner, that is an insult. No?

ksolanki | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: Startup promised me a job, then backed out after the internship

Let me address the visa part (with a disclaimer that I am not a lawyer, but have gone through the visa-related ups and downs myself).

1) You CAN come on tourist visa and try to look for a job -- it will give you about 90 days with a max of 180 days at a stretch. Super strictly speaking, tourists are not supposed to look for jobs, but I know people who have done this.

2) H1B visa allows premium processing so you can get it approved in 14 days, if you or your future employer can pay $1225 premium processing fees. You can get more information from uscis.gov -> forms -> premium processing. Let me say this again: H1B process does not have to take several months.

As others have mentioned before, I would suggest you to contact companies that offered you jobs but you declined.

ksolanki | 14 years ago | on: Racism in Tech

The probable reason why you see 50-80% Indians in the in the team, but few in management or team lead positions is that, they somehow put up with this bias, that they somehow are happy with what they get. Aren't there a majority of agricultural workers of Latino descent, often working at below minimum wage? Why? They put up with it, and are mostly happy to have the job. The fact is, many Indians, especially those who are "new" in the country, are happy to do what it takes, at the salary and position that they get, even if it is below market rate. Both sides are at fault, no doubt.

Then, of course, there are those who go out and take risk to do extraordinary things, like starting companies. There is no dearth of famous companies founded by Indians, is there?

ksolanki | 14 years ago | on: Steve's Google Platform rant

This is what I am taking home:

1) There IS no perfect product for everyone.

2) Making something a platform has some chance of addressing the above.

Me trying to make sense of it, but meanwhile let me say it aloud again. There IS no perfect product for everyone. Thanks, Stevey.

ksolanki | 14 years ago | on: Hiding your data in plain sight: USB hardware hiding

The best way, if you really want to hide data, is steganography. Embed the information into innocent looking pictures and video. The trick, of course, would be to either download decoding software or upload somewhere when you want access the hidden data.

ksolanki | 14 years ago | on: Google paper comparing performance of C++, Java, Scala, and Go [PDF]

We find that in regards to performance, C++ wins out by a large margin. However, it also required the most extensive tuning efforts, many of which were done at a level of sophistication that would not be available to the average programmer.

I am a fan of C++, so I liked the first part (that C++ wins, which is not really surprising). However it was not clear if the sophistication they talk about is regarding the Google's internal data-structures or the list of optimizations listed in Section VI-D? Many of these optimizations are not big surprises to a C++ programmer (where possible use hash_map, vector instead of list, initialize data structure outside of loop and try to reuse, and so on).

Overall, I do greatly appreciate the effort and their sharing the results.

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