As promised at the end of Part 1, I will list the number of people who were affected by these incidents that were heavily reported on in the Indian news media to the point where I was actually wondering whether it was even safe to travel in the Railways anymore. If I had only had a look at the numbers I am going to show you, I would never have had that fear.
The full data can be found here. The sources are listed at the end of this post.
First, let’s look at the list of deaths and injuries over...
Read More
I am fresh off the Factfulness dose. The authors articulate one thing about the news media:
I cannot even see the highest-quality news outlets conveying a neutral and non-dramatic representative picture of the world, as statistics agencies do. It would be correct but just too boring. We shouldn't expect the media to move very far in that direction. Instead it is up to us as consumers to learn how to consume the news more factfully, and to realize that the news is not very useful for understanding the world
This got me to thinking about how much I...
Read More
For the last 5 years, I lived in Kharagpur, West Bengal. It is a town, no more no less. There’s nothing to expect there, and it lives up to that expectation. A movie theater started flourishing in my last year there. Apart from that, there was nothing to do there.
After those 5 years, and even in between during Summer and Winter vacations, I was in various cities: Chennai, Bangalore, Coimbatore briefly. But I never did anything that I was unhappy about being unable to do when I was in Kharagpur.
Now, I am in Pune until the first week of September. I am in the training period for a job, and my weekdays are not free in any sense...
Read More
Primer: Donna Tartt is a 53-year old writer from Mississippi. She has written only three novels and she released them in 1992, 2002 and 2013. Each of those novels is nearly 600 pages long. She rarely gives any interviews.
This was one of my major goals for this summer. I had already read The Secret History by Tartt and after reading that book, I seriously believed that she was an author unlike anyone I had ever read. Some thoughts from right after I finished the book:
An attrocious act, on the face of it, but surprisingly towards the end, I was empathising with their situation, and although, I...
Read More
One fine Monday evening, I was absent mindedly scrolling through Twitter, which was when I came across this tweet from TRAI, the Telecom Regulator in India:
Stakeholders sharing their views on Landing Page Issues in Open House Discussion on Consultation Paper on 'Issues related to placement of TV channel on landing page' at TRAI HQ, New Delhi @TRAIpic.twitter.com/6ZQPKMkitk
Understandably, I was confused. Mainly, I wasn’t sure this topic needed such a formal open house discussion which no doubt made executives from the stakeholder companies fly to Delhi to sit in and make sure their voices were heard. So, I retweeted this and forgot...
Read More
Back in August 2017, I hadn’t yet dipped my feet into OpenSSL’s command line yet. That’s when I ended up finding out about a set of OpenSSL commands that have a solution for most cryptography related requirements. Secondly, it’s a great way to just explore and find out about new technologies. So, here’s a list of commands that absolutely floored me when I first found out about them:
1. openssl x509
$ openssl x509 -in ~/Downloads/twittercom.crt -text | less
This command inspects x509 certificates from the internet. Firefox has a great certificate inspector, but for every field, you have to go and highlight it and then the value for that field...
Read More
P.S. I had my masters thesis presentation today. I started writing this on 14th April, but of course I didn’t get around to publishing it. After a month and a half without a post, I don’t even think I can make a proper excuse. But I am done with college, and I am going to be free till the second week of July and there will be regular posts until then. (I am thinking twice a week. Forced-sort, so that I don’t have the choice to not write. Kind of like a short re-run of 100 days of writing. Enough blabbering, on to the post now)
Anyone who has been a student in India for more than 10 years will...
Read More
This graph shows the commits made in the cutouts repository over the past 1 year. I have been rather dormant the whole year on this project. In fact, the last time this project saw some heavy development was back in October 2016 when I was working on adding tags to the system and making it a better product that I could use.
The surge in development during February was right before the Metakgp Demo Day on February 15th. There were same gaping problems in Cutouts that I had never considered. And the main reason behind this was that there were no users except me. And I was using the application just as it...
Read More
I follow Casey Neistat. I have watched everything he’s made, and everything he continues to make. There’s one constant character in all of his work: his studio.
He has had the space for nearly 10 years now. And everything in it is outfitted exactly as he likes it. He never searches for things in his studio, he just gets them.
Hang on, this is not just a rave about Casey Neistat’s studio
I have been thinking about what the equivalent of a studio would be for a programmer. The studio is the home for all the tools that you would use in your work and life outside of work. That has got...
Read More
There is this approach to consuming information online. I don’t know what it is called or who came up with it. The approach is to look at a topic, write down the solid questions you would like to answer about the topic, consume the material about this topic that’s in front of you and after you are done, answer the questions that you had started out with. With several blogs (esp Slate Star Codex), this approach has helped me a lot. Especially because it gives me an idea about what I would like to know, what my presumptions / beliefs about the questions are before I read the article and am influenced by the author’s presumptions and beliefs.
