Infinite Craft: Hacking on an infinite generative AI gameFeb 14, 2024 • Today • 7 min readInfinite Craft is a viral addictive game made my one of my favorite creators on the internet. Powered by deterministic large language models, the game involves combining two elements to create an infinite set of things. In this blog, I hack on the API to programmatically explore all the elements. I ended up creating ~10,000 elements and discovering ~1,000 entirely new ones, most notably "chana masala".
Deedy's Best TweetsJan 21, 2024 • 3 weeks ago • 141 min readTwitter is the de facto outlet for my thoughts so I used their API to mine a list offline to make browsing older content easier. I tweet about tech, AI, business, immigration, India, humor and fitness. In ~4yrs, there's been 500+ tweets that garnered 100+ likes totalling to over 100 million views.
The Ultimate Guide to get an EB-1ADec 19, 2023 • 1 month ago • 28 min readI went through a long 3.5yr journey to get my EB-1A. For Indians, the EB-1A is one of the few remaining paths to a US green card. I've scoured every single resource on the internet, spoken to many lawyers and seen 10s of applications and RFEs first-hand. I wanted to accumulate all of my learnings for free to share with everyone.
Wait times for Indians not just on EB-2/3, but EB-1 USA green cards looks bad [2023]Nov 28, 2023 • 2 months ago • 28 min readA commonly thrown out number for India's green card backlog for standard employment visas, EB-2 and EB-3, is 150 years. In this blog post, we'll derive where that number comes from using publicly available data. Further, we show that the future of not just these visas, but the priority date of the EB-1 visa for extraordinary ability, outstanding researchers and multinational managers may also retrogress indefinitely!
How I got my EB-1A as an Indian engineer (after a denial)Oct 15, 2023 • 4 months ago • 19 min readEmigrating to the US is an arduous 150+ year wait for most Indians on standard visa paths. I talk about my (needlessly prolonged) 3.5yr process of getting an EB-1A visa in October 2023 after over 18 years of living in the USA, including a surprising denial.
Don't compare India-US compensation using Purchasing Power ParityMar 17, 2023 • 11 months ago • 10 min readEvery few months, I come across a viral post online that uses PPP to compare salaries between the US and India. They claim a $100k salary in the US is only ₹22lakh. In this post, I breakdown how PPP is calculated for India, why its an inaccurate way to compare and postulate that a $100k salary in the US is roughly equivalent to ₹37 lakh in India.
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Joy of Reading in the Age of TechnologyJun 9, 2022 • 1 year ago • 9 min readIn the last 6 months, after a decade long hiatus, I started reading fiction books again. I'm on my phone less. I'm more at peace. In a world where technology provides countless distractions, I make a case for reading books to help your mental health and how to leverage technology to elevate your reading experience. I even dream more, and vividly, often even upto six impossible things before breakfast.
Common mistakes from reviewing 1000+ Tech resumes: Kleiner Perkins Fellows 2022Mar 5, 2022 • 1 year ago • 17 min readThe Kleiner Perkins Fellows program is a technology fellowship program across Engineering, Product and Design roles that has over 700 alumni since its inception in 2012. Ex-fellows have gone on to do some amazing things, including founding Figma, OpenSea and Persona. Having conducted 100s of interviews and reviewed 1000s of resumes, I wanted to share some interesting statistics and advice around creating your own resume.
San Francisco Marathon 2008 - 2021: Open Data and StatisticsSep 26, 2021 • 2 years ago • 15 min readOn September 19, 2021, I ran the San Francisco Half Marathon, my first official half-marathon in America, at a personal best time of 1:58. To better calibrate my own performance, I decided to grab all the data myself, and I present some basic statistics, interesting breakdowns, distributions, trivia and an interesting statistic particularly about Indian runners. The entire dataset of 200k+ runners is available for public use.
Why I Left Google (2019)Nov 20, 2019 • 4 years ago • 14 min readIn the nearly 4 years that I've been at Google as an engineer on the Search team, I've had the privilege of working with the coolest technologies across Mountain View, New York, Tel Aviv and Bangalore on a product I love. In Aug 2019, as I was all set to join my dream team - the Planning team at Waymo, New York. But something didn't feel right, and in an unforeseeable series of events, I decided to leave to do something else.
Bengaluru Marathon 2018 - Open Data and StatisticsOct 22, 2018 • 5 years ago • 10 min readOn October 21, 2018, I ran my first full 42km marathon, the Bengaluru Marathon. In preparation for my run, I found myself delving into data and statistics around marathons in India only to find a few uncited claims. I decided to grab all the data myself, and I present some basic statistics, interesting breakdowns, distributions, completion rates as well as opening the entire dataset for public use.
Opening data for over 22,000 Indian CBSE and CISCE schools.Mar 21, 2018 • 5 years ago • 8 min readIndia has two national boards of education - the CBSE and CISCE. As of 2018, CBSE has 20,367 schools and CISCE 2,341 schools affiliated with them. Every year, over 1.1 million students in India take either the CBSE Class XII or the ISC exam to graduate from high school. In this post, I parse, scrape, clean and open more than 3 million data-points for the 22,000+ schools affiliated with these boards.
A Layman's Guide to Buying Contact Lenses (2017).Dec 1, 2017 • 6 years ago • 15 min readAs somebody who wears contact lenses, I'd fallen prey to the cheap $1/day Hubble contacts without much thinking. I soon realized that there were far higher quality lenses at cheaper prices. I do a price-per-daily-wear and quality comparison between almost 100 brands of contacts, and show how they vary in per-day price by type and duration of wear. In the end, I recommend the best ones according to the data.
On Privilege.Nov 26, 2017 • 6 years ago • 7 min readAlmost every community of humans have organized themselves in a hierarchy. We look back at many of these past hierarchies - slavery, the caste system - with disdain today. Yet, if a fictional society of the future were to look back at how divisive today’s society is, they too might find themselves in equal disbelief. Today, you may have equal rights in theory, but there are many factors that leave you inherently disadvantaged. What are those factors, and why is knowing them important?
My Transformation II: Maintaining a 6 pack for 8 months.Sep 12, 2017 • 6 years ago • 18 min readIn 8 months ending Feb 2017, I'd lost 30kg (66lbs) and slimmed down to 65kg and saw a six pack for the first time at 8% body fat. Many had said that this kind of physique seemed completely unsustainable in the long run. However, in the next 8 months, despite 3 whole months of travelling, a full-time job and many nights out, I managed to maintain my physique, keep my weight in the 66-68kg range, and significantly improving my powerlifting strength.
NFHS-4: Opening, Structuring and Visualizing India's latest and largest National Health DatasetMay 12, 2017 • 6 years ago • 17 min readNFHS-4 [2015-16] is India's largest and, as of writing this, latest aggregation of national health data. 93 metrics were collected from nearly 650 districts for a variety of issues ranging from literacy, nutrition, maternal health and more. I structure the data that is locked up in PDFs, make it available and visualize slices of this data on the Indian map.
My Transformation: How I lost 66 pounds and gained a 6 pack in 8 months.Feb 17, 2017 • 6 years ago • 17 min readOn June 2016, I was 24 years old, 5' 9" and weighed 95kg. I knew I'd let go of myself. In the next 8 months, I lost 30kg (66lbs) and became the fittest I've ever been. I measured in at 8% body fat and had a 6 pack for the first time in my life. Using data and YouTube videos to guide me, I changed the way I ate and started training while trying to balance a fair share of fun and a full-time job.
Number 4 most upvoted post on Reddit's r/progresspics on Dec 8, 2016 and number 2 most upvoted of the week of Feb 22 - March 1 2017 on r/brogress.
Which Delhi University colleges will I get into?Jan 18, 2017 • 7 years ago • 8 min readThe University of Delhi, or DU, is one of India's largest and most sought after universities. However, with an admissions procedure wrought in complicated calculations, innumerable quotas, sieving through multiple cut-off list pdfs, and working through websites stuck in the 90s, it's not an easy or transparent one. In this article, I make an easy to use form where you can input your CBSE or ISC or any other board marks, and it will give you an exhaustive list of which colleges in DU you're eligible for admission in.
Why are Adults so busy?Jul 11, 2016 • 7 years ago • 9 min readAs a kid, I'd always wonder what it was about adults that made them so busy. What could they be possibly doing with all their time? After I (kinda) became one, it hit me. There's an alarmingly large list of things adults do that we never quite grasp until we're there.
The 50 Most Popular Party Spots in New York CityDec 2, 2015 • 8 years ago • 13 min readIt's Friday night. It's been a long week. You just want to unwind. What do you do? Use data. I used the dataset of 1.1 billion taxi rides in New York City to figure out where the people of the city stayed late into their Fridays and Saturdays, extrapolated the exact venues, and show them in a usable, beautiful way.
The Grad School Admissions Statistics We Never HadNov 17, 2015 • 8 years ago • 28 min readGradCafe has 372 thousand graduate school admissions results. I scraped 93% of that data, including 80 thousand GRE scores and 75 thousand undergraduate GPAs. I also extensively deduplicated the user provided university names to over 98% cleanliness, and compiled a hyperclean Computer Science specific set of 28 thousand results. Let's dive into these never-before-seen numbers!
The Top 100 Hacker News Posts of All TimeNov 8, 2015 • 8 years ago • 26 min readA list of the top 100 submissions to Hacker News along with short sentence-long descriptions of what they were about. HN has had amongst almost 2 million stories since its birth in October 2006, and only 1 in 20,000 made it to this list.
Looking back at 9 years of Hacker NewsNov 8, 2015 • 8 years ago • 17 min readHacker News, the Y Combinator tech forum, has exploded from its humble beginnings in 2006 to one of the primary sources of news in the tech community. Looking through the data, we can see how HN grew, the things people talked about, the most shared domains, the most influential contributors and more.
Visualizing Cliques amongst your Professional LinkedIn ConnectionsJul 19, 2015 • 8 years ago • 10 min readWe often add connections on LinkedIn that we distantly know and eventually forget about them. What if you could leverage the information in your professional graph to cluster connections according to their experience and interests. In this post, I used some techniques to visualize my LinkedIn connections and find latent professional cliques between them.
The Perks of Interning at GoogleAug 8, 2013 • 10 years ago • 6 min readHollywood exaggerated what interning at Google is like in The Internship (2013), and having been interning there that very summer, I wrote about some of the Google interns' actual perks.
Originally published on Quora, received over 125k views, and then published in Business Insider.
Hacking into the Indian Education SystemJun 4, 2013 • 10 years ago • 18 min readIt turns out that one the biggest boards of education in India, the CISCE, which holds two examinations for students - the ICSE in the 10th grade and the ISC in the 12th grade has fundamental unexplicable grading anomalies. Every year, these examinations decide the fate of 200,000 young students.