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Nillion and one-time pads

When Americans say spicy, they usually mean chili. For some weird reason, other spices that are more aromatic like Turmeric, cloves, cardamom, etc. do not seem to fit the definition of “spicy”. That’s why in a typical Indian/Thai restaurant in the US when the waiter ask how spicy, they mean “How much chili should I put in” However, when an Indian says that the spices were good, s/he usually means that the food had an aroma and a balanced composition of contrasting tastes. ...

The Mom Test is an intriguing book by Rob Fitzpatrick about how to do user research and validation of one’s product idea.

Guardrails are meant to protect us from tripping over. The same can be said about engineering guardrails.

Writing a blog post in plain text isn’t fun. Neither is writing it in a bulky word processor like Microsoft Word. The former is too constrained, the latter too unbridled. Writing in Markdown is fun. It has sufficient features without creating bloat. Building a backend in lambda functions has a strong lock-in. On the other hand, deploying web services on Virtual Machines (or physical machines!), while having little lock-in, is complicated. Docker, however, treads the middle path. Sufficiently robust without pulling in the complications of maintaining a full-fledged virtual/physical machine. ...

Day 1 Start the day with a free walking tour to get an idea of the important places and the history of the city. Then, we decided to check out the Gefion Fountain and one of the most disappointing tourist attractions, The Little Mermaid. ...

The early adopters of Instagram were not VCs.

The book talks about what it means to be a staff engineer. It is an interesting read for those who would prefer to stay on the engineering as opposed to the management track of career growth.

Generics in Go were added about a year back in Go 1.18. In my experience they are great and they fix one of the biggest roadblocks in terms of writing reusable code in Go. I’ll illustrate that with an example. First, do ensure that you have at least Go 1.18 Bash 1 2 $ go version go version go1.19.1 darwin/amd64 Let’s consider a simple case of implementing a Map function in Go that maps an array (well, a slice) to another array (again, actually, a slice). ...

The book takes a nuanced take on the uncanny marriage of corporate America and the “woke” social justice movements. The author, Vivek, was born to an immigrant Indian family, studied at Harvard, worked on wall street, and started his own biotechnology company before writing this book.