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💡 The coffee grown in present-day India dates back to seven beans smuggled out of Arabia in the beard of a Muslim pilgrim. Coffee is a very sensitive plant to grow. It requires ideal conditions of high altitude, adequate rainfall, shade, and a cycle of hot days and cool nights for a healthy crop. With the Western Ghats and the Eastern Ghats in the south of India providing these unique climate conditions, it is inevitable for Coffee to come to India and boom. India is currently the sixth-largest producer of Coffee in the world. ...

The first step is to nail their intuition for randomness. Here’s how I will do it. I will ask them if I flip a coin once, will it be heads or tails. The answer would be It will be heads! or It can be either! (smart kid). If it is former, I can prove them wrong in 1-3 tries and lay the path for explaining randomness. If it is later, they already have some intuition for randomness. ...

💡 This is a humor piece. I am using the scenario to communicate the use of MAB’s. Please take it with a pinch of salt. A manager at a tech company that sells Alphonso mangoes online is stuck with one of the most difficult decisions. What should the color of the “Buy Now” button be? She recently came to know that data-driven decision making is the new fad and wants to follow suit. She has a meeting with her team of data scientists and marketing folks. ...

Running a half marathon is difficult, but running it under an ambitious time target is a whole different ball game and sometimes is a matter of seconds. Every piece of information can help in shaving off those seconds which can be a difference between 1.59.24 and 2.00.34. This is a post for those who play with those margins. This is by no means an exhaustive list and is completely based on my experience alone. I made an 8 week customized Hal Higdon’s Novice 2 plan targeting a first-ever half marathon, that too a sub 2 hr one. I failed miserably on the race day with a time of 2.24.27. I noticed my mistakes, corrected them, ran another one a week later with a time of 1.59.24. If you care about the backstory of how this all came to place, read below, else, jump to the list of tips. ...

Thompson Sampling is one of the most popular Multi-Armed bandit (MAB) algorithms - the main reason being its explainability (imagine explaining upper confidence bound to your manager) and decent performance in practice [1]. Many blog posts on the Internet show how to implement Thompson sampling (here, here, here and here). Almost all of them consider Bernoulli outcome distribution (e.g. click or no click, purchase, or no purchase) and use the Beta-Bernoulli Bayesian update procedure for simulations and usually compare the performance (Regret) to other MAB algorithms like UCB or sometimes to A/B testing. However, none of them consider Gaussian outcome distribution and especially the case when both mean and variance of the distributions are unknown (which is usually the case when you are conducting an experiment where the outcome is continuous, ex: dollars spent, time spent, etc.). ...

This is a collection of unique and awe-inspiring videos I came across on YouTube. These are the videos that I come back to and watch them with the same enthusiasm as I did the first time. These are the videos, the ideas of which I discuss with my friends, and show them. I wish I could give detailed descriptions for each and why I love them, but, I would be doing them a serious injustice. ...

I traveled from Minneapolis to Duluth and around for the third time yesterday and each time I go, I find that it has something new to offer. Duluth sits on the bank of Lake superior, the largest fresh water lake in the world by surface area. It is huge and spectacular. The view of Lake Superior itself is worth a trip. Duluth could be considered the northern frontier of Minnesota as Interstate-35 ends there. But, there is an entirely new world beyond. It definitely takes more than a day to see every place in and around Duluth, so, if you were to take a day trip, I would suggest visiting 3–4 places, else, you feel like you are always in a hurry and these places definitely deserve your full attention and a peaceful mind. Start early, come late, have multiple drivers so you have a relaxing day trip. There are too many beautiful spots in northern Minnesota to cover in a day. This guide is by no means comprehensive. It is for those who want to visit Duluth from Minneapolis, have a decent trip and want to be back by end of the day. Here are some places in the order that I loved. ...

💡 I wrote this when my brother was just entering the workforce after graduating from IIIT Hyderabad with a Masters’. I was doing PhD at the time and I felt I should write to him something that he can hang on to during difficult times and also encourage him to give his best. Dear Little Brother, I cannot tell you how proud I am of your accomplishments so far and the fact that you will soon be a software engineer at Nvidia. You have now grown into a full fledged adult and life will change so much so fast. I have been adulting since I graduated college in 2013 and I came to realize a thing or twenty and I thought I should share some with you. As always, I am all for exploring and making your own path and decisions as the last thing I want is you to be a clone of me. So you can ignore this completely. But if you feel lost, I thought this might help you a bit. You already know some of these, so, this is just to reinforce the fact that they work and you should continue doing them. ...

Day 10 of #SocialDistancing #Quarantine. It’s hitting me a bit, the isolation, the silence. Things I am doing to cope. News: Starting the day with this. Anything else seems impossible. Looking at the John Hopkins dashboard and then Google news. The pattern is similar. Shit’s hitting the fan, No. of stupid people are not decreasing. There are some really good memes though. Exercise: I go for a run around the block to reset my mind from the news. On average I see 5–6 people walking their dogs and it’s decreasing. But, the small 15 min run definitely helps with starting the day. ...

Over the years, I have come across multiple resources I learned things from with ease. This is a page to track those resources. Please reach out to me if you think something belongs to this list. I will add it. General Julia Evans has online zines for topics ranging from SQL, Shell scripts to Linux. These are hand-drawn explanations of stuff related to a particular topic. I stumbled upon here twitter post about how SQL actually executes a query and have been a fan ever since. ...