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debarghyadas.com

Where the knowledge is

Debarghya Das

There's a lot of knowledge and content everywhere, but it's really

hard to find quality stuff that interests you. I thought I'd maintain an
eclectic set of content that I read and watch regularly or have been
immensely moved or educated by. The list is a constant work in
progress.

Aggregations of interesting and informative pieces of writing.

Hacker News The one stop source for all the latest news and
information in technology. Far eclipses competitors like
TechCrunch in quality density and speed.
Noam Chomsky's Articles Words from possibly the world's leading
intellectual. His thoughts on media, government, policy, economy,
and linguistics are a formative influence.
Philip Guo's Blog Philip Guo, most famous for The PhD Grind, his
122-page e-book about his PhD experience, gives great advice for
high school, college and graduate students, programmers,
immigrant parents and more.
Five Thirty Eight Nate Silver's data-centric blog, 538, gained
popularity after predicting the 2008 US Elections, and continues to
publish some of the most interesting reads and inferences from

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data.
Essays and Speeches by Charlie Munger The long time friend and
advisor to Warren Buffet speaks and writes of economics, finance,
psychology, and overall worldly wisdom.
Alan Dershowitz' Articles Possibly the world leader in law writes
political commentary particularly about Israel-Palestine and foreign
policy.
Paul Graham's Essays Venture capitalist and founder of Y
Combinator writes the simplest yet most captivating essays about
how to live life, startups, knowledge, and technology.
Farnam Street A blog that helps you go to bed smarter than you
woke up. It speaks of philosophy, wisdom, happiness, knowledge
and meaning.
Moxie Marlinspike's Hacks A collection of software written by the
pretty legendary hacker, Moxie, particularly network security hacks.
Repugnant Conclusions A blog by a Harvard Divinity School
students on reasoning about the ethics and morality of things,
instead or arbitrarily accepting and rejecting them based on social
norms. He deals with issues like bestiality, abortion, necrophilia,
pedophilia, and more.
Andrej Karpathy's Blog Andrej Karpathy is a really smart hacker
PhD student at Stanford, previously under Andrew Ng, and now Fei
Fei Li, who does amazing things with convolutional neural nets and
gives some great concrete advice which I wish I'd followed more
and the best intuitive guide to neural nets I've ever seen.
Schneier on Security Bruce Schneier is the Chuck Norris of the
computer security world, and his blog is read by a quarter of a
million people. He's a former NSA official and long time code
breaker who's widely regarded at the leader in his field. Don't forget

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to catch his beautiful TED talk as well.

Krebs on Security Brian Krebs is a former Washington Post
reporter and a long term veteran reporting on computer security
who writes non-technically about current major security issues,
exploits and hacks.
Sam Altman's Blog Venture capitalist and lecturer of the Stanford
course on "How To Start a Startup" speaks about startups,
technology and entrepreneurship.

One stop source for humor when you can't watch a video.

xkcd Randall Munroe's comic strip about technology, science,

mathematics and relationships. Possibly read by every
technologist, scientist, mathematician, and more.
SMBC Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) is a comic strip
that features atheism, romance, science, research and the meaning
of life.
PhD Comics PhD, or Piled Higher and Deeper, is a comic strip
written by Caltech instructor Jorge Cham that follows graduate
students' lives and stories.
9gag From memes to stories, funny pictures to cute things, GIFs to
NSFW stuff, and even videos, 9gag has all sorts of miscellaneous
humour.
The Oatmeal Home to famous Nikola Tesla and Mantis Shrimp
comics, The Oatmeal, created in 2009 by Matthew Inman, covers
an eclectic range of topics. Inman says it typically takes 7-8 hours
of research to produce one comic.

Every now and then you'll hear of a interesting idea, or a cool

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invention that gets lost amongst other news. I wanted to keep a list
so I could follow up.

Magic Leap Completely unrelated to Leap Motion, the Magic Leap

came into the limelight when Google funded it $500 million in
Series B. This is an unprecedented amount of funding for a
company with no product. Founded by Rory Abovitz, who
previously sold a medical company for $1.65b, and based in
Florida, Magic Leap has invented what they're calling a "Dynamic
Digitized Lightfield Signal" that seems to be a headset-less virtual
reality that your brain processes as part of the real world.
23andMe At $99, 23andMe tests your DNA and reports interesting
things about your health such as the likelihood you'll acquire a
bunch of diseases, your racial break down, and your ancestry.
Interestingly, one of the founders, Anne Wojcicki, was married to
Sergey Brin, of Google.
Oculus Rift The biggest thing in virtual reality, in 2013-14 (at the
time of writing this), Oculus provides a headset that seamlessly
provides a sci-fi like virtual reality experience. It has since been
acquired by Facebook.
Leap Motion The Leap Motion is a sensor that rests on your desk
above which you can use your hand to interact with different
devices. It uses some crazy math to be able to, from unassumingly
resting on your desk, quite accurately detect the positions of all of
your fingers above it with low latency. Many claim it is not as
accurate as advertised.

There's too much bad media everywhere, and it's hard to get the
"real story" in well-phrased readable form. These guys do a good

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job. I personally use Longform to consume news from multiple

sources, and highly recommend it.

The New York Times Largely regarded as the world's leading

newspaper shows news from the US and all over the world, and
has one of the best Opinion pages out there.
The New Yorker An American magazine which not only deals with
the cultural life of New York City, but also covers politics, pop
culture and more.
Quartz Quartz is a web-native news publication that is the first
infinite-scroll news provider. The quality density is high, and the
scroll format keeps you hooked.
The Atlantic An American magazine that contains particularly good
reads in Education and other things.
The Wall Street Journal The top of the line source for business and
economic news.

Manufacturing Consent Noam Chomsky analyzes the market forces

surrounding the media, government, and bodies of influence and
how it results in the media being subject to self-censorship and
serving as a mouthpiece for the government.
An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions Amartya Sen and
Jean Drze explore the post-independence growth of India in an
economic, social and political. They draw attention to some stark,
widely ignored faults in how we look at India's growth since 1947.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century French economist Thomas
Piketty's groundbreaking novel that shows how a successful

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capitalism inevitably increases economic inequality, and

investigates several solutions.
A list of stuff that's inspiring, informative, and exceptionally helpful
in moulding your worldview.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight The very best of video

entertainment ever. John Oliver is my favorite source of news and
political satire. He raises and crushes controversial issues.
DEFCON The hackers' conference is the elite source for all things
computer security.
Noam Chomsky's Speeches While Chomsky may be slightly
monotonous, he is almost indomitable in debate on account of the
depth of his knowledge and breath of his acumen.
Satyamev Jayate Popular Bollywood actor Aamir Khan takes on the
biggest issues plaguing India in this emotion fueled TV show.
INK Talks An India-focused extension of TED that brings together
from very inspirational talks from the likes of Varun Agarwal, Nikesh
Arora, Sheena Iyengar and more.
TED Talks Under twenty minute talks about 'Ideas worth Spreading'
ranging in dozens of topics. Features innovation and inspiration.
The Outsider Debates A series of debates moderated by prominent
journalist Tim Sebastian featuring influential personalities about
major issues plaguing India.

Also known as: how to kill time on Youtube.

Epic Fails A bunch of random videos of people falling, running into

walls, trying to do stunts, and any other physically painful mishap
you can imagine that provides an unprecedented amount of sadistic

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pleasure.
Epic Rap Battles of History This comedy series pits popular
historical and pop culture figures against each other in 3-4 minute
rap battles, or verbal jousts if you prefer, and spans 4 seasons. My
favorites include Einstein vs Hawking and Hitler vs Darth Vader.
The Viral Fever TVF is one of the new age comedy acts that do
short skits, videos, and satirical takes on various aspects of Indian
pop culture.
All India Bakchod AIB is TVF's counterpart. They also do
humourous skits and satire on the overarching theme of India.
Pretentious Movie Reviews Hosted by new-age Indians Kanan Gill
and Biswa Kalyan Rath, Pretentious Movie Reviews reviews
extremely funny old Bollywood movies.
Being Indian Being Indian is an act that does street interviews and
social experiments as well as enactments of popular stereotypes in
India.
Honest Trailers ScreenJunkies' Honest Trailers do comedic trailers
for popular movies and TV shows revealing what they are 'honestly'
about.
Roman Atwood Roman Atwood is part of the new age league of
pranksters that do a variety of entertaining pranks in public.
VitalyzdTv Vitaly also does pranks and social experiments in public.
Ownage Pranks OwnagePranks features a voice actor that enacts
different races from African-American to Asian to Indian and more
while prank calling people.
Jimmy Kimmel Jimmy Kimmel is a talk show host. His funniest
shows involve asking strange questions to the public or asking the
audience to record videos of themselves doing his open
challenges.

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Arnab Goswami's Newshour Debate Arnab Goswami is the Indian

journalist notorious for being boisterous, unreasonable, repetitive,
loud and arrogant. His show is an unintentional satire on Indian
journalism.
Louis C.K. Harsh, un-censored, and to the point about his cynicism
for life, age and being fat, Louis CK is one of my favorite
comedians.
Russell Peters The popular king of Indian comedy, Russell Peters
is Canadian with roots in India (in my city, Calcutta). He talks about
stereotypes all over the world, accents, and immigrant life.

It wouldn't be feasible to list all movies I've watched and enjoyed.

I'm particularly fond of semi-fictional/non-fictional movies and I
watch a ton of documentaries, so here are some that I found
particularly moving.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist Based on the book by the very

inspirational Mohsin Hamid and loosely based on his life. Although
the movie doesn't do justice to the book, it's still a powerful movie
with a strong message.
Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times A series of clips
from Noam Chomsky's talks that counter the populist opinion on
9/11 and expose the propaganda model of the US media.
Gumrah Not a movie. Gumrah is an Indian crime TV series, which
is available online. It recreates supposedly non-fictional crime
stories committed by the Indian youth. It can get very cheesy and
I'm almost certan the stories aren't based on true events, but they
can still be shocking.
Bhutto Bhutto is a documentary that follows the lineage of the most

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powerful lineage of leaders in Pakistan - the Bhutto family in

context of the political history of Pakistan.
Dirty Wars Follows the US journalist Jeremy Scahill, and the story
of how he discovers the inhumane acts of terror that the US military
carries out in the Middle East.
Ip Man A semi-fictional Cantonese movie based on the legendary
martial artist Ip Man, who trained Bruce Lee.
City of God This semi-fictional Portugese movie follows the crime
scene in Brazil and features 2nd on Roger Ebert's list of best
movies of 2003.
Rush Rush is a movie about racing, rivalry and friendship with no
clear antagonist and protagonist that follows the epic competition
between F1 racers Niki Lauda and James Hunt.
Inside Job Inside Job is a documentary and series of interviews that
seeks to explain the corruption that caused the 2008 economic
recession.
Linsanity Follows the inspiration struggle of Jeremy Lin, the smart
Asian kid, who fought stereotypes to become one of the best
players in basketball.
The Square The Square depicts the tale of the Egyptian Revolution
of 2011 in Cairo's Tahrir Square.
Fire in Babylon Possibly the best cricket documentary I've ever
seen, Fire in Babylon follows the journey of West Indies cricket in
the 70s and 80s as the small country fought apartheid for freedom,
and went undefeated for 15 years.
The World Before Her This documentary follows the lives of two
Indian women - one an aspiring model, and the other a Hindu
nationalist member of the RSS - and shows us the cultural
dichotomy India finds itself in.

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Food Inc This documentary exposes the corruption and monopoly

of the food industry in the US that optimizes profits by forgoing the
need to produce healthy food.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room The Enron Scandal was
one of the biggest business scandals in history. This documentary
shows how it all happened.
Midas Formula: The Trillion Dollar Bet Follows the story of the small
trillion dollar hedge fund of Nobel Laureates and financially elite of
the 90s, Long Term Capital Management, that made an immense
amount of money, but eventually collapsed.
Gandhi The story about Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in his
journey and struggle to Indian freedom.
An Inconvenient Truth A documentary meant to educate the world
about the very real reality of climate change and global warming.
Michael Jackson's This Is It A story about one of the greatest
performers and music artists the world has ever seen and one of
my personal favourite entertainers, Michael Jackson.
Pirates of the Silicon Valley The original father of all Silicon Valley
movies, Pirates was released in 1999 and features Steve Jobs,
Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Paul Allen, and even
Mike Markkula.
Randy Pausch: The Last Lecture One of the most inspirational
videos I've ever seen, cancer-diagnosed Computer Science
professor at Carnegie-Mellon Randy Pausch gives his ultimate
lecture about the lessons life taught him and how they can help
you.
Inside the Dark Web A documentary about the internet,
surveillance, privacy, anonymity, Tor, Silk Road, bitcoin, and the
deep web.

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How Anonymous Hackers Changed the World How trolls on

internet's 4chan assembled a large group of internet hackers clad in
Guy Fawkes' masks to use collaboration amongst citizens to
protest against the government.
The Social Network The story of how Mark Zuckerberg founded
Facebook.
The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard The story of yet another very
real effort to promote democracy that meets at odds with
pre-existing law. We see the details of a battle between big film and
music corporates and 3 computer guys who run a torrent website,
each bringing their arsenal of legal and political vs technological
weapons.
Don't Talk to Police This is a lecture in Law more than a
documentary where a formal criminal defence attorney describes in
tremendous detail that given the current US legal system, you
cannot do any positive good by speaking to the police.
How the Economic Machine Works - Ray Dalio Ray Dalio, the
founder of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates,
created this animated 30 minute video explaining how the economy
functions in a very simply way. A must watch for everybody who
uses money.
The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz A riveting story
of injustice served upon a brave-heart trying to use Computer
Science as a means to make political change, Aaron Swartz.

There's obviously way too vast an expanse of academic papers that

are impactful in many ways most of us do not recognize. This
collection merely represents some papers that I found "really cool".

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Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image

Descriptions
Andrej Karpathy and Fei Fei Li [2014] The machine learning group at
Stanford generates natural language English sentences that
describe images, using convolutional neural nets on the images
and recurrent neural nets over sentences in this amazing work.
Spying the World from your Laptop
Le Blond et al [2010] Exposes the privacy concerns in BitTorrent, and
how from a single machine, they managed to collect 148 million IPs
downloading 2 billion copies over 103 days.
Internet Censorship in Iran
Aryan and Halderman [2013] This paper examines the status of Internet
censorship in Iran based on network measurements conducted
from a major Iranian ISP during the lead up to the June 2013
presidential election.
Outsmarting Proctors with Smartwatches
Migicovsky, Halderman et al [2014] This paper shows how students can
cheat on examinations with smartwatches.
Internet Censorship in China
Xu, Mao, Halderman et al [2011] "In this work, we explore where
Intrusion Detection System (IDS) devices of the Great Firewall of
China (GFC) are placed for keyword filtering at AS and router level.
Knowing where IDSes are attached helps us better understand the
infrastructure of the firewall, gain more knowledge about its
behavior and find vantage point for future circumvention
techniques."
Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for Fun and Profit
Wolchok and Halderman [2010] They track 7.9 million IPs downloading
1.5 million torrents over 16 days and present a way to monitor

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pirates' behavior and "negate any perceived anonymity of the

decentralized BitTorrent architecture".
Security Analysis of India's Electronic Voting Machines
Wolchok et al [2010] They "demonstrate two attacks, implemented
using custom hardware, which could be carried out by dishonest
election insiders or other criminals with only brief physical access to
the machines". A diplomatic way of saying they undermined the
world's largest democracy.
Women in Academic Science: A Changing Landscape
Ceci, Ginther et al [2014] Contradicts previous assumptions of gender
bias and says that gender differences in spatial and mathematical
reasoning do not stem from a biological basis, but rather suggests
women have "difference in attitudes toward and expectations about
math careers and ability". Was published in the New York Times.
DeepFace: Closing the Gap to Human-Level Performance in Face
Verification
Taigman, Yang et al [2014] The guys at Facebook AI use a
preprocessing 3D affine transform before running a 120 million
parameter, 9 layer deep neural net on the largest dataset at the
time - 4 million images, with an accuracy of 97.35%, 27% higher
than its predecessor and probably greater than human-level
performance.
ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Krizhevsky, Sutskever, Hinton [2012] They trained a 60 million parameter
large convolutional deep neural net on the classical ImageNet
dataset to obtain an error rate of 15.3% compared to the previous
record of 26.2%.
Deep Neural Networks for Acoustic Modeling in Speech
Recognition

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Hinton et al [2012] Shows that deep neural networks can outperform

traditional Hidden Markov Models and Gaussian Mixture Model
(HMM-GMM) approaches to speech recognition.
Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks
Dean, Corrado, et al [2012] Uses an asynchronous stochastic gradient
descent (SGD) procedure and a framework for distributed batch
optimization to train a network 30x larger than in previous literature
- with 1.7 billion parameters and tens of thousands of CPU cores.
Achieves 15% on ImageNet.
Intriguing Properties of Neural Networks
Szegedy, Zaremba et al [2014] Particularly interestingly, this paper
shows the instability of deep neural networks in high dimensional
space by making random perturbations in correctly classified
images until the net misclassifies it. It turns out that the second
image is visually indistinguishable from the first, and the neural net
produces strange results.
W32.Stuxnet Dossier
Falliere et al [2011] A detailed dossier on the infamous Stuxnet worm -
a worm that used zero-day exploits on Windows machines
propagated via USB to penetrate air-gapped machines in Iran and
purportedly wipe out of 1/5th of their nuclear centrifuges.
The Hangover Report - Unveiling an Indian Cyberattack
Infrastructure
Norman Shark [2013] A detailed, frankly LOL, report, of how a
Norwegian telecom company, Telenor, reported a case of "spear
phishing" emails to the upper management. Further investigation
revealed that the attack came from India, which unsurprisingly
failed to cover its tracks.
The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video

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David, Rubenstein et al [2014] Seemingly straight out of a sci-fi movie,

the guys at MIT CSAIL use high speed (audio-less) video footage
to recover sound from minute vibrations (in things like packets of
chips).
First Person Hyperlapse Videos
Kopf, Cohen et al [2014] First person videos are choppy, boring and
slow. This research converts these first person videos from Go-Pro
cameras to hyperlapse videos - time lapse videos with a smoothly
moving camera - seamlessly.
MOOCs and Open Education
Yuan, Powell [2013] A detailed review of the phenomena of Massive
Open Online Courses (MOOCs), openness of higher education,
and its implications.
What's the Big Idea? Towards a pedagogy of idea power
Papert [2000] An essay about how schools deform ideas to fit the
pedagogical framework. The legendary Papert ponders on the use
of Computer Science as a tool to re-empower ideas that lose their
glory when fitted into the school framework.
Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A
Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook
Backstrom and Kleinberg [2013] Given a set of Facebook users,
Backstrom and Kleinberg use Machine Learning and other methods
to predict your romantic interest accurately up to 79% of the time
for a dataset of 73,000 "neighborhoods" on Facebook.
Kademlia - A p2p Distributed Hash Table
Maymounkov and Mazieres [2002] The introduction to the Kademlia
protocol for Distributed Hash Tables, notably used by BitTorrent for
trackerless torrents.

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My favourite TV serials. Would definitely recommend.

Black Mirror A dystopian science fiction British TV series akin to

The Twilight Zone (1959) and Orwell's novel 1984. None of the
episodes share a plot or cast. It dwells largely on the implications of
very possible consequences of technology in the near future.
Stephen King likes it.
Mr. Robot When looking for a Game of Thrones rebound, Mr. Robot
was the perfect new show. Rated 98% on RottenTomatoes and
featuring hackers, hacktivism and New York City, this show is about
everything I like.
Game of Thrones Based on the book by George RR Martin, Game
of Thrones tells a medieval tale of dragons, empires, war, love and
death. A lot of death.
Breaking Bad Breaking Bad is about a high school Chemistry
teacher that starts making meth to support his family and his cancer
treatment. The character development is heart wrenching.
Entourage Entourage, based on Mark Wahlberg's life, follows an
actor and his crew and celebrates the highs and lows of male
friendship.
Friends This classic is a ten season journey about friendship, love,
hate and comedy.
House of Cards House of Cards is a political drama that follows
Kevin Spacey as the protagonist and shows just how dirty politics
can get.
Sherlock This modern take of the classical detective story features
Benedict Cumberbatch. The three-long-episodes-a-season format
makes for a quick awesome watch.

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Think I'm missing something? Do you have something you think I

should know about? Shoot me an email at
dd367 [at] cornell [dot] edu
or get in touch with me on any other form of social media.
I'd love to see it!

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