Family Ties in Your DNA: Some relatives are closer than others

Both genders propagate their genes, but they do it in a gender-specific way

Doctors per capita

Doctors per capita

A doctors per capita comparison misses out on the nuances of how healthcare is delivered in different countries

View from Town Hall Tower

Two days in Tallinn, Estonia

I started from trip on an evening ferry from Helsinki, Finland. Tallinn, like Budapest, is a charming Eastern European castle town. Day 1 Starting with a walking tour, Tales of Reval is amazing. After the Danish Christian king established his control over this region, he invited German traders to set up trading outposts. The original name of the city, “Reval” comes from German Reh-fall, or a deer that fell off the cliff during the hunt. ...

Ship tools as standalone static binaries

Open AI is ditching TypeScript to rebuild Codex in Rust. This is a great example of why you should always ship tools as standalone static binaries using compiled languages. Reddit Comment The biggest advantage of such tools is not speed or efficiency. Rather, it is the ability to not install the full tool chain to just use a tool. Compiler provides additional safety check Compilation is an additional guardrail that reduces the likelihood of shipping non-functioning code. ...

Made in America

Made in America

The figs are from Greece. The dates from Tunisia. The mangoes from Mexico. The blueberries from Chile. The grapes from South Africa. I explained to my mother while showing her the kitchen. “And what’s American?” she asked. “The pieces of paper with Benjamin Franklin’s portrait given to those sellers in return”, I replied.

Senate Square

Two days in Helsinki, Finland

Finnish are considered the happiest people in the world. In less than two days, I learned the secret of that. I spent about two days in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, where roughly 30% of the country’s ~6 million people reside. Day 1 - sauna and walking tour Compared to Oslo, Helsinki seemed more lively. Still below Copenhagen in my ranking, though. One thing stood out, and that’s Sauna. The Finnish sauna goes up to 100ºC! And that is the lovely enjoyment in the city of Helsinki. There are two Saunas that I tried, one of them in a public sauna called Sompasauna, a free, 24-hour sauna run fully by volunteers. If you are planning to go here, then go at 9 or 10 PM during summer to see the full crowd. ...

Android Logo

Maintaining an Android app is a lot of work

There was recent news about 47% decline in the number of apps on Google Play Store. As a hobby Android developer, who has been developing MusicSync, a Google Play Music + Podcast replacement for the last five years, I thought I would share my experience of maintaining an Android app. And why this reduction in the number of apps is not surprising to me. ...

USA flag on a boat

The land of good deals

“The apartment rents are high right now, but we got a good deal”, he said, smiling alongside his roommate. Another friend said, “We got a good deal on a car loan, so, we took the loan, it’s good for building credit history to buy a house later”. “The instructor was super-happy with our amazing group. He taught us a few special tricks that he says he rarely taught.” “The bartender was super-nice to us and made us a special drink” ...

Oslo Opera House

Two days in Oslo, Norway

Oslo is one of the weirdest Nordic cities that I visited. It is dull compared to Copenhagen or even Stockholm. The Baumol effect of the oil-funded economy makes it a really expensive place to visit as well. Infact, it is one of the few cities which feel more expensive than San Francisco. To get from the airport to Oslo city, just take a 124NOK train ride. There is a faster 240NOK train ride as well which isn’t worth it. ...

FastAPI vs Flask performance comparison

FastAPI vs Flask performance comparison

If you are running Python in production, you will almost certainly have to decide which web framework to use. Let’s consider a rudimentary Hello world based test comparing the performance of two popular web frameworks for Python - FastAPI and Flask. I will intentionally use Docker for benchmarking as most deployments today will explicitly or implicitly rely on Docker. For Flask, I will use this Dockerfile 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 # Build: docker buildx build -t python-flask -f Dockerfile_python . # Size: docker image inspect python-flask --format='{{.Size}}' | numfmt --to=iec-i # Run: docker run -it --rm --cpus=1 --memory=100m -p 8001:8001 python-flask FROM python:3.13-slim AS base WORKDIR /app RUN pip3 install --no-cache-dir flask gunicorn SHELL ["/bin/bash", "-c"] RUN echo -e "\ from flask import Flask\n\ app = Flask(__name__)\n\ \ @app.get('/')\n\ def root():\n\ return 'Hello, World!'\n\ " > /app/web_server.py ENTRYPOINT ["gunicorn", "web_server:app", "--bind=0.0.0.0:8001", "--workers=4", "--threads=32"] And for FastAPI, I will use this ...