DeeKaying @ Nettle

En route to the Golden Gate Bridge Let's move away from the techie nature of this blog for a bit. I've been out biking with friends lately. A couple of weeks ago, Siddharth , Divya , Karthik and I went biking. We took the famous Fisherman's Wharf to Sausalito route in San Francisco, going across the Golden Gate bridge and coming back by ferry (passing the famous  Alcatraz Prison Island ) to The Port of San Francisco . The route was extremely picturesque - the only issue was that my phone was dead. Therefore, please forgive the few pics that I've got of the occasion. At the Golden Gate Park Today, I went biking with Venkat and Eric . We're on the same team at Google. Venkat is a super fitness enthusiast - he runs and bikes for miles at a time. A little known fact - he's done some classes on Martial Arts too. Eric's the workaholic who finds it preferable to be working at midnight on a Saturday night than going out and partying (please note...

So, this evening, I finally took some time out of my really busy schedule of snacking on Pop Chips and drinking free soda at the Google microkitchens  to read the Facebook S1 filing ( PDF ) (yes, I read that whole thing from cover to cover). It was an interesting read: full of financial mumbo jumbo that doesn't quite feel interesting until you start keeping track of who earns how much due to what deals struck between which parties. It's all pretty convoluted, yet pretty simple too. To make sense of everything in that document, all you need to do is to keep in mind the character played by Jesse Eisenberg  in " The Social Network " ( Trailer ). Yeah, everything that that movie depicts - very likely true. So, before going ahead with my deconstruction of that opaque document full of legalese, here's my first reaction that I was about to post to Google+  before writing this post: Compare the S-1 IPO filing documents for Google  ( PDF ) and Facebook ( PDF ...

It's interesting to look at how my blog has grown over the years. It shows how lopsided the internet is in terms of traffic. The data speaks for itself:

Manish Sharma asked me an interesting question over chat regarding recurrences and computational complexity estimation. The question was interesting enough that I thought that the answer would be of use to many more people in general so I'm posting it to my blog. In any case, a post to my blog was long overdue. So, here it is: The original question was: How do you find the computational complexity of the recurrence: T(n) = a.T(n . r) + b.T(n (1 - r)) + O(n) or, when pretty printed: Well, technically speaking, this question is phrased slightly ambiguously, so I'm phrasing it as below: T(n) = a T(n r) + b T(n (1-r)) + cn + d a > 0, b > 0, c > 0, d belonging to R Pretty print: and while I'm at it, I'll point out to you that without loss of generality, I can impose the additional restriction that r is in the range of 0.5 to 1.0. Pretty print: This is possible because I can simply take a recurrence equation where this isn't true and ...

I've always looked at Genetically Modified foods with a wary eye. Also, the fact that the US GM seed market is dominated by a single company - Monsanto - makes me even more suspicious (the obligatory Wiki Link -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto ). It is well known that Monsanto spends tons of money lobbying the US Food and Drug Administration (US-FDA) to ensure legal status for GM foods and to guide American legislation such that GM foods remain legal and no adverse regulatory laws are passed against GM foods. Source: http://www.panacea-bocaf.org Nowadays, every supermarket I've been to in the US keeps GM foods next to non-GM foods. There are no clear label markings mandated by law that would allow a consumer to distinguish between GM and non-GM foods at a glance. Consumers are forced to read fine print on labels to determine if GM products have been used in the food chain of the product they're buying. Then too, things are hampered by the fact that there i...

I was just browsing on Facebook and I was surprised to see a link to a video posted in the comments being shown inline. Here's how the new interface looks: Suprisingly, the video player also seemed to be updated. See the new style controls? Hmm... It seems okay... Though the whole site could do with a big makeover... 

I just came to know of the FBI chargesheet against Americans for channeling funds from the ISI for lobbying purposes. Read the entire chargesheet below. Fai Ahmad Complaint Affidavit