Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Getting an American work visa is not exactly easy, as anyone who has applied for an H1B visa knows. A qualification to operate in that field in the US (some are country-specific qualifications, like lawyers and doctors, whereas others are universal qualifications, like engineers), and/or specialized occupations (generally science, tech, or management jobs fill that bill). Then there’s the other side of the story – the company sponsoring the visa (after all, the US government doesn’t fake companies setup as a backdoor for immigration).   What happens then if a Silicon Valley startup founder is a foreigner? With a startup, the company-side criteria is a big problem – the company is barely started! That’s the situation Instagram faced when its founder, Kevin Systrom tried to enlist his Stanford-mate from Brazil, Mike Krieger, write Sarah Frier in her biography of Instagram .   Before we get to how that went, let’s take a detour of how Krieger told his parents in Brazil of...

One view of religions is that they are very good memes, ideas that are very good at spreading themselves. If you agree with this view, then it is correct to conclude that religions should probably be gotten rid of. (Note that in this view, we’re not bothered by what specific harm it causes; rather, the conclusion is drawn as there is no benefit and either a small or a high cost to the host/believer).   But what if that view isn’t right, wonders Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind . What if religions evolved as “cultural innovations that spread to the extent that they make groups more cohesive and cooperative”? In this view, the “purpose” of religion was to persuade individuals to be less selfish, to convince them to work as groups with all the associated benefits and sacrifices. The gods “can be used to promote cooperation and trust within the group”. In such a setup: “The gods of larger societies are usually quiet concerned about actions that foment conflict and division ...

Guess which is India’s most valuable unicorn today? It’s the educational app, Byju’s. As Ashish B writes in his biography of the company, COVID-19 helped the company’s growth as online education became common.   The company’s founder, the eponymous Malayalee named Byju Raveendran did his schooling at a government school in Kerala – both his parents were teachers (in Maths and Physics). Rote learning did not appeal to him at all; he preferred to visualize concepts, a technique that would become part of Byju’s teaching system.   He did engineering, not medicine, because only engineering would give the “time to play sports”. Having completed his Mechanical engineering, he started working as a service engineer for a shipping company and got to see the world.   His friends, who were preparing for the IIM (CAT) exams, sought his help with the Maths side of things - He had an aptitude for teaching. In Bangalore, he was soon taking classes for around 40 students. It ...

In The Joy of x , Steven Strogatz talks of something all of us have struggled with in maths: word problems. Translating them into maths equations is quite a challenge for many. Ironic, isn’t it, that kids and parents complain that academics has no connection to the “real world”, but that’s what word problems are…   The root cause of why many struggle with word problems in maths is: “(They involve) thinking not just about numbers, but about relationships between numbers… (and of course) relationships are much more abstract than numbers.” But they still need to be understood, if not mastered: “(Relationships) are also much more powerful. They express the inner logic of the world around us. Cause and effect, supply and demand, input and output, dose and response - all involve pairs of numbers and the relationships between them.”   Calvin, on the other hand, raises a different issue with word problems:   Jokes aside, Calvin’s point is the same as what Keith...

As the DarkNet Diary podcast explained, $81 million dollar had been stolen from the Bangladesh Bank. But how do you cash out that much money? If you just keep transferring it electronically across banks, it leaves a trail. The thieves had planned that out too.   They emptied the accounts in the Philippines almost immediately (almost certainly, someone in Philippines was in on the crime). The money was then taken to casinos in the region, where it was converted into chips. But if you gamble with that much but don’t play for long, it draws attention. The thieves chose a game where one doesn’t lose much, around 10% on average (They were willing to write off the 10% as the cost of doing “business”). Having played long enough to avoid suspicion, they cashed back their chips and walked away. But it’s still a lot of cash. The money trail of subsequent investigations led to Macao, China. But after that, the trail just vanishes.   This seemed to be an exceptionally sophistica...

The joke above reminded me of the Bangladesh Bank heist which was described in this excellent DarkNet Diary podcast . We’ve heard of million-dollar heists in so many Hollywood movies. That’s a lot, but when you go for digital robbery, the sky’s the limit. The amount they tried to rob from the Bangladesh Bank? A billion dollars. No typos, that’s indeed a billion dollars.   You’d rightly be asking the question the podcast asks: “Who would have a billion dollars lying around for someone to grab?” National banks, that’s who (the equivalents of RBI). That’s why the hackers picked the Bangladesh Bank as their target: “The plan was to hack into the Bangladesh Bank and transfer out as much money as they could before anyone could catch them.”   How did they get into the bank’s network? Good old phishing mails (yes, the ones we are warned not to click on) got them in. From that one computer, the hackers hopped around the bank’s network, familiarizing themselves with detai...

As James Metzl wrote in his book, Hacking Darwin , worldover, gene editing is not banned. Or well-regulated. Thus we had China’s He Jiankui announce he had edited the genomes to produce the world’s first such babies. And as later day checks into what had been done showed: “The first application of genetic engineering to future humans was sloppily planned, poorly executed, medically unjustified, secretive, and potentially dangerous.” And UK based scientists declared that they had created the world’s first living organism with an entirely synthetic genome.   Some might ask: “Why wouldn’t we just take the safer route of trusting nature and our own biology – even with all its bugs, shortcomings, and sometimes even dangerous mutations – that’s evolved over billions of years?” The short answer is that nature is red in tooth and claw: “Nature conspired to kill us through hostile weather, predation, starvation, and disease, and we fought back with everything we had… We would ...