Favorites

FAQ
  • Favorite data-structure: segment trees

  • Favorite alogrithm: Edmond's blossom algorithm for maximum matching on general graphs

  • Favorite word as of Feb 2022: Interop

  • Favorite job title: Technical Sourcerer

  • Favorite end among the ends of the things that have ends: Business end

  • Favorite Persian word: شکاشک (به معنی صدای پا در هنگام راه رفتن)

  • Favorite English word: Submerge

  • Favorite action from the subconscious mind: The sounds/gestures that we make after an unintentional action to communicate to the other human beings around us that we did not mean to take that action. (E.g. in my opinion saying I'm sorry is done too consciously to fall in this category. Blowing air out of your nose when you drop an important piece of paper for the second time, for example, may qualify.)
    Jokes aside, this is one of my favorite behaviors. Here's a mental quiz and an experience:
    • To what extent can you simplify/pinpoint the environment for this protective mechanism to still take place? E.g. We may not say ouch when we unintentionally drop a plate in the kitchen sink in the presence of (only) a cat.
    • Our office in grad school was shared by multiple students from different groups and the lab was library-quite most of the time. One of the grad students from another group once slammed the door very hard when leaving the room. He then proceeded to reach out for his key card, swipe, and open the door, to remark in a moderately loud voice that he did not in fact mean to slam the door and that had been an accident. He then left, closing the door gently.
      The unique set of actions taken by the student has left me wondering whether or not he would do the same thing if he had slammed the door why coming in to the room.

  • Favorite Tom and Jerry episode: The Million Dollar Cat - 1944

  • Favorite statement among those that remind me of C++: Metaphorical tip of the proverbial iceberg (Chapter 5, Effective Modern C++)
    Another similar quote of his: Closing the proverbial barn door after the equally proverbial horse has bolted. (Can you guess what he's referring to?)

  • Favorite sickness (that's in Persian btw): کسالت مختصر

  • Favorite place that you can go down to: Rabbit hole

  • Favorite author from the authors of "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach": Peter Norvig

  • Favorite thing I seriously don't have any idea about: Quantum gravity

  • Favorite uncategorized thing: Universal adversarial attacks against neural networks

  • Favorite Monty Python Sketch: Cheese shop

  • Favorite Rubik's cube-like puzzle: Megamix (the one with twelve pentagonal faces)

  • Favorite systems/programming tasks: Those that I need to pull out the hex editor for (on a side note, let me know if you have a favorite hex editor given that ':%!xxd' is not a substring of your response)

  • Favorite appetizer: pepperspray

  • Favorite cpu architecture: RISC-V

  • Favorite amd64 cpu feature/instruction: Undecided/Don't know enough of it

  • Favorite term that I don't know the meaning of: Deep learning
    Runner up: Smartphone
    Raining champion: Cloud computing
Back