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nym3r0s's comments

nym3r0s | 1 year ago | on: We're bringing Pebble back

I agree that a single outlier is more stressful - but many times these aren't medical grade devices anyway so the actual data you're looking for is the trend (not the absolute values.

A solution could be to measure it but not really track / visualize it day to day.

nym3r0s | 1 year ago | on: We're bringing Pebble back

I believe the value add is a combination of both factors - ability to measure and (as a consequence) induce more exercise.

An example here is how I made sure my parents are getting their exercise in by making completing their Move rings and 10K steps every day. This pushes them to take a walk in the evening instead of doom scrolling / watching TV.

Another example - Check trends like resting heart rate to see if my body has fully recovered from covid19, SP02 at night indicating potential sleep apnea etc.

nym3r0s | 1 year ago | on: We're bringing Pebble back

The primary use for a smartwatch for myself (and many of my family, friends) is fitness and health tracking. Card payments, notifications, WatchFaces etc. are all secondary.

Basically what Whoop is doing with their strap - but minus the subscription model. I know a ton of people who tried the whoop but felt it was extremely pricey and didn't have the accuracy of an apple watch.

I would be happy to pay ~$400-500 up front for hardware that integrates with Apple Health and provides solid, reliable health tracking without a need for a subscription.

And by health/fitness - features expected would be sleep tracking, activity (gps), heart rate, Sp02, skin temperature sensors, fall detection. Then secondarily - additional things like ECG/EKG, apnea, AFib detection

The in-accuracy of some of the devices in the market is why I still choose to remain with my Apple Watch.

This youtube channel may help understand a consumer's perspective on health accuracy - https://www.youtube.com/@TheQuantifiedScientist

nym3r0s | 2 years ago | on: Testcontainers

Something that improved developer experience by far and also sped up our builds is starting the container dependencies via docker-compose and connect to it for integration testing. This allows reuse of containers, you can connect to it after/during an integration test to debug without having to keep searching for ports constantly.

With TestContainers - I've perceived that running integration tests / a single test repeatedly locally is extremely slow as the containers are shut down when the java process is killed. This approach allows for this while also allowing to keep it consistent - example, just mount the migrations folder in the start volume of your DB container and you have a like-for-like schema of your prod DB ready for integration tests.

I've found the https://github.com/avast/gradle-docker-compose-plugin/ very useful for this.

nym3r0s | 5 years ago | on: The new Google Pay repeats all the same mistakes of Google Allo

Person living in India here. GPay gained success by offering scratch cards (giving you money) and cashbacks for making payments through GPay.

From a UX perspective, it has been notoriously slow and is prone to failures. For example, if the transaction could not go through, it remains pending for 3-ish days while Google retries internally. For real-time transactions, like buying groceries from a street vendor, it isn't practical to wait so long to find out - and mostly results in people paying twice for a product.

Aside from marketing gimmicks and usage by vendors, who by the way use a single QR across 5 different UPI vendors, I'm not sure it really is a "runaway success".

Edit:

Another point to note is that GPay (and other vendors like PhonePe) went around sticking their own QR codes on every shop. This meant that if you wanted to pay by UPI at that shop, you had to install GPay.

This prompted NPCI to issue a circular and ensure QR codes were interoperable across UPI apps - but as I've seen, there still remain tons of shops which have only the GPay proprietary QR Code. Ref: https://razorpay.com/blog/npci-circular-on-upi-interoperabil...

Lethargy by vendors to move over to the new QR could also be one of the reasons why these 2 players hold the lions share in the UPI market.

nym3r0s | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2021)

Backend engineer here. I've dabbled a bit with SRE and UI/UX as well.

Right now I'm focused on building out a globally distributed API platform. I'm looking for a challenge.

I learn fast.

---

Location: Bangalore, India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes - after the pandemic. Preferably to a country with good healthcare and low/no racial discrimination.

Résumé: [link here](https://bit.ly/3bb15kY)

Technologies: mentioned on my résumé.

Email: mentioned on my résumé.

---

nym3r0s | 5 years ago | on: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

I've worked in two of these top investment banks and the amount of red tape that needs to be crossed is just breathtaking. Something as simple as provisioning a kafka topic? Go raise 2 requests, have it approved by these 4 people including your manager, then create multiple system accounts for each environment, each with its own approval steps. Agreed that these approvals and audit trails are necessary - but surely they can be simplified.

In office - you always knew someone who knew someone in that team. It was just a matter of picking up the phone, calling them and getting them to expedite your request. Now that everyone is WFH, you ping them on IM and wait for them to respond. With back-to-back zoom calls, it's honestly the last thing people want to do.

Couple that with the fact that there isn't a divide (like commute) between work and home anymore - so there's just more fatigue and higher levels of irritability.

nym3r0s | 5 years ago | on: Going to elite Indian colleges improves earnings, but not test scores

Disclaimer: I graduated in CS from one of these "elite" colleges. I also took the JEE in 2013 when it underwent significant changes.

Back in 2011, the government decided to revamp the educational grading system by introducing "Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation" (CCE) for class X. We were the first batch to go through it and every assignment/internal exam had some weightage in your final grade. Fast forward to 2013, there was a repeated attempt to bring similar change to this system. The central government merged the AIEEE and the IIT-JEE into two sets of exams - the JEE Mains and the JEE advanced. They also introduced weightage to your XII grade marks in the final rankings - meaning you had to do well in your boards in addition to the one-day exam.

Admittedly, this was less radical than year-round performance, but it was still significant enough to tell everyone - "Hey, you need to perform all across our evaluations, not just in one exam". This meant that you could have gone through all the folks who took the CBSE XII exams in my class - and they would have been in the top 5% (maybe even top 1%).

Having said that, at the end of the day - apart from signalling, the main reasons to get into the IIT/NITs were infrastructure, the environment and the network. The infrastructure was way better than a smaller, private university and your entire class is filled with the top people from your batch.

Even if we conceded that the curriculum and the faculty were not at par with the top universities in the world, the talent surely is. The extra-curriculars and the competition within ensured that you constantly honed your skills to remain relevant - we took MIT OCW courses, participated in global hackathons etc.

TL;DR - High-school test scores were relevant when it mattered in college entrance exams. The moment the weightage was lost, the relevancy was lost.

nym3r0s | 5 years ago | on: Teacher's low-tech laptop hack to display handwritten notes for online class

While it is mind blowing how less we've invested in modernizing education, the biggest barrier I've seen in recent times is - educating the educators.

For reference, I helped set up my high school with a <insert-suite-for-education> for free and they were very happy as there were folks charging them to get it set up. But next biggest problem I saw was - teachers who have been using a blackboard all their life trying to do their best to teach with a powerpoint presentation.

Problem is exacerbated when you throw in more variables like - flaky internet connection, inconsistencies in UI all across, hardware failures, zoombombing and a certain lack of features. Now do this in India - where the student:teacher ratio is absolutely crazy.

Really goes to show how we should get the fundamentals right.

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