Kirubakaran Athmanathan
Recent content on Kirubakaran Athmanathan
Latest posts
Life Ascending
The Small Bachelor
Laughing Gas
Seeing Like a State
India : US :: Spreadsheet : Webapp
I’m in India for my mom’s medical care. Watching how everything here, from hospital processes to one-way streets, bends around circumstance reminds me of the difference between spreadsheets and webapps. It’s hard to foresee everything when writing validations into a webapp. This leads to frustrating rigidity. But since spreadsheets let anyone change anything, it could become a mess in a…
Chip War
The Dream Machine
Writing on the Go
.expandable-code summary { cursor: pointer; color: #0969da; font-size: 14px; padding: 4px 0 12px 0; border: none; background: none; } I often don’t carry my laptop when I roam around a city when I’m travelling. Especially if I’m somewhere like Italy, without much of a “laptops in cafes” culture. So when I feel the urge to write, I jot down some points on my phone. I…
Poems That Stayed With Me
We had to read, analyze, and memorize a lot of poems in school. Some of them had a huge impact on my world-view and life. Adam’s First Night This one had the biggest impact on me. I’m unable to find this poem online, so perhaps it’s a lesser-known one. In it, an angel visits Adam in Eden and tells him night is about to fall. Adam feels fear. How could he see or live without the…
Team Wiki
Introduction It’s 2025, and I think that we still don’t have even the basic knowledge tools that will be considered indispensible soon. I’ve been working on histre since 2019. To be frank, it’s still quite far from what I imagined it would be. Other knowledge tools have gained traction, and even been financial successes, but have not solved the fundamental problem.…
CryptoRover
Between Sep 2017 and Apr 2018, I worked on “CryptoRover” (aka “CoinParse”). I never launched this product. I was trying to predict the price of cryptocurrencies, primarily using social media sentiment analysis. It was a SaaS app where you’d plug in the currencies of interest, and you’d get “prediction alerts”. I learned a bit of ML doing it, which…
Machine Learning vs Statistics
Insightful comment on HN from 2017 (slightly paraphrased): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14944613 Machine Learning: Everything that focuses on dealing with problems with a complex structure and low noise Statistics: Everything that focuses on dealing with problems with a large amount of noise The whole comment is interesting, especially this part: Most machine learning techniques focus on…
The Dream Machine: Reading List
I’m reading1 The Dream Machine. Noting down the interesting books he’s referencing, as well as the other books and papers that come to my mind too: Few other books by Waldrop look interesting too Complexity Man-made minds Life on Edge of Chaos Cosmic Origins John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener Double biography. I didn’t know this existed. I remember reading somewhere that…
The Hallmarked Man
It was no doubt gripping. But there were way too many characters without much of character development, so it was hard for me to remember. And the ending was sort of rushed. Still I enjoyed most of it, so four stars.
Bill Atkinson: Pull
Local Archive: Download / Watch MP4 Okay. Here’s a little thing I learned about design. To design something, think about what you want to be there, rather than what you don’t want. You can look at the current time and say, what do I not want? Or you can imagine a time where things are better in some way, and then pull toward that. Here’s an example. I’ll use a deck of cards…
Moving into the Walled Garden of Eden
Just a couple of years ago, I would’ve sworn that my main dev setup would never involve an Apple device. Deep philosophical differences, you see. But I’ve been using a MacBook Pro 1 since Nov 2023. A few different things came together to precipitate this. Valerie started gifting me Apple products for Christmas. First an iPad 2. Then Airpods 3. I would’ve never bought those on my…
Learning Goals till the End of 2026
I’m turning my general learning goals into specific books to read. Here is what I’d like to read and thoroughly understand by the end of 2026: Our Mathematical Universe - Tegmark - 432 pages Meta Math - Chaitin - 240 pages Spacetime and Geometry - Sean M Carroll - 750 pages Annotated Turing - Petzold - 372 pages (+ 432 240 750 372) =1794 (/ 1794 365) =4 4 pages per day sounds doable.
On Brand
My 6-year-old nephew asked my sister to take this photo and send it to me. I’m delighted that he thinks of me for these silly shenanigans… I must be doing something right if I’m the go-to person for this kind of thing. Our balloon-hat model is Alice.
About Sirius Business
I used to be a regular at sfsfss, a local sci-fi book club. One time, instead of the usual discussion, we all wrote short stories and then went around discussing each other’s. Mine was Sirius Business. I had about a month to write. As usual I did it kind of last minute. I was procrastinating as it was surprisingly stressful even to start. That’s nothing new. But unlike other tasks, it…
Sirius Business
I couldn’t believe that the planets in the Sirius system are called Dash, Buddy, Goldie, Rusty, and Max. Planets of the Dog Star with these names? When I asked my coworkers about this, they laughed like I was the silly one. Turns out their thinking went something like this: Dash for the fastest revolving innermost planet, Buddy for the closest neighbor, Goldie for their home planet –…
Travel Wishlist
Here's where I've been already. I'd love to see these places: Near Term Sicily, Italy ✓ Greece ✓ Goa, India China UK Ferry from Spain / Gibraltar to Morocco Medium Term Darjeeling, India Everest Base Camp, Nepal Romania Berlin, Germany Indonesia Singapore ✓ Norway Sweden Finland Iceland Long Term Everywhere else!
Places I've Been
Lo bailado no te lo quita nadie (No one can take away what you’ve danced) I absolutely love traveling. Thankfully it's a lot easier now, without visa hassles. There are still other constraints on me though, of course. Here are the countries I've been to so far, in alphabetical order. I plan to write more about some and link from here. (function () { var map = L.
I'm Back!
After six short years, I’m back baby! histre took up all my time and attention. Between the last post and now, I also put in an intense two and a half years at Walmart, traveled to many countries, went on several backpacking trips, took care of family, found a way to stop stressing so much about my startups, got better at snowboarding, and also read several books. I lost interest in writing…
Permutation City
Are Your Lights On?
Gateway
I practically have Stockholm syndrome with this book series due to sunk cost fallacy. I did mostly enjoy this one, but a lot of the Skippy - Joe interactions are repetitive as hell! But I can't stop. I need to know what the hell happens next.