Satnam Singh @satnam6502 Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

@Generalworld007

@WoodstockLib

@EscenarioM

@hoh_sk

@ya_dola

@Adeoluseyi01

@nikerzkart

@KennyRuido

@Black_boyXx

@FAWales

@ThaKrazyToonz

@menoboy

@AMulliniks20333

@RadneyVale

@BluegemNetwork

@pantabalak6611

@PAndriopul35567

@JessieP39515316

@pantabalak6611

@al_from_koii

@kimbtin

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@SIRInyene

@layiwasabi

@LaLibertadMedia

@irschtephan

@dioistaken

@dul_turkporno

@bokeplokalmalam

@pantabalak6611

@glamurybella

@AyuNyimas69

@capypig10

@ScoutingLLC

Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

@sabrinaesaquino In IEEE-754 single precision: 0.1 is exp: 123, mantissa bits: 5033165 i.e. 2^-4 * 1.600000023841858 = 0.100000001490116119384765625 0.2 is exp: 124, mantissa bits: 5033165 i.e. 2^-3 * 1.600000023841858 = 0.20000000298023223876953125 Adding these two together: 0.30000000447034836

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

I've completed exactly 55 revolutions around the sun pretty much to the minute. Others might think I'm a loser to be still "just a coder" at 55 but actually I'm proud because it's tough to be an old git in this game and still hack it. I had to take demotions and quit management!

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

I wish we would stop saying that strong mathematics skills are necessary for a computer programming career, and stop requiring high levels of mathematics attainment to study computing at university. It is a false proxy for whether you will be good at programming or not.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

1 year

I once arrived at San Francisco airport with an H1-B that expired while I was out of the country, but the renewal was not going to start for a few days. They started to process me for deportation (I lived in San Jose where I owned a house!!!) and put me in a room for 5 hours that

“paula”

@paularambles

1 year

wtf this is brutal

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Me: "Hello, my name is Satnam Singh and I work at Google Research." Interview candidate: "Yes, I know, I follow you on Twitter." [All pretense at appearing professional immediately evaporates.]

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

11 months

12 years I was on the verge of failing my second attempt at interviewing at Google. I was summoned to the New York office of the potential hiring Director who said "Satnam, your interview feedback is all over the map, we can't make sense of who you are, can you even code?" I

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

My daughter has told me excitedly about a SAT solver she has just written in Python. Parenthood has prepared me for mixed emotions, but this has truly left me conflicted.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

To get promoted build things poorly that are likely to break and then fix them in an emergency and emerge as a hero. To be overlooked and never loved work hard to build reliable systems that you keep running where everybody takes reliability for granted and nobody knows your name

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

I turned 56 today. I’ve been reflecting on what (if anything) I have learned in my life that I can tell you that might be of use or interest to you. I’ll spare you the details of the specifics of my history and background and how I got from a poor rural family in India to

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

5 months

@CFDevelop When I “retire” that’s what I will too. I am not retiring from coding, I’m retiring from process.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Recruiter: We ask you to do three coding interviews. Me: No problem, let me know which engineers from your company you would like me to interview and what programming languages they want to use. Recruiter: <noise a recruiter makes when they SEGV>

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Keeping my work and personal life separate.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Today is my last day of work at @Google .

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Exactly 10 years since my Google interview. Director: We can’t make any sense of your background. Can you code? Me: <Reaches for current CACM on his desk, opens it at my article, points to C++ code> “Well, I wrote that.” Director: <Looks at code, looks at me> “OK, I’ll sort this”

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

My son is learning something called "OOP" at high school which seems to have something to do with rectangles and circles. He instinctively knows not to ask me blasphemous questions about such stuff and instead goes straight to his mum about his inheritance issues.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

Daughter: "Dad, how do I install C for Eclipse?" Me: "We need to talk."

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Someone told me to adopt formal methods but it turned out this is not what they meant.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

1 year

depends on who you get and their reaction to you. The first officer took an instant combative tone with me from the outset, I had no idea why she felt so negatively about me. After seven hours I was home (my luggage had been stolen by then).

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

8 months

Hubris followed by a near death experience, from exactly 11 years ago. Life seemed good at the Google holiday party, but shortly afterwards I would be in Stanford hospital fighting for my life as I suffered a pulmonary embolism (a blood clot in my lungs). The doctor told me

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

7 months

We’ve developed an LLM chat service that runs at breathtaking speed compared to some other LLM chat services you may have used. Please give it a try via . The LLM chat service is built using our special purpose chips (LPUs) for accelerating machine learning

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

Daughter about her seafood dish: “Where is my shell?” Me: “It’s usually in /usr/bin”

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

5 months

I was 45 years old when I realized I "could not code", despite having written over a million of lines of code since I started hacking as a teenager. After a career as a researcher in academia and industry I had just started at Google writing production code for a devops project,

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

1 year

My daughter recently texted to me “Why is my lecturer talking about Tony?” who she knew as our neighbor in Cambridge. Now she realizes he is also a computer scientist. I visited Tony this afternoon and told him about my daughter’s surprise.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

1 year

could get the renewal documentation from my house and bring it to the airport, so I owe a lot to Hamish Fallside who picked up the documents and drove to SFO to meet the immigration officer to hand over the documents. The kind immigration officer did not need to do that. So much

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

Over lunch today I asked the best C programmer I know why he still prefers C (for low level systems code). In a previous thread the notorious gets() was cited as a representative of what is wrong with C, but this person said gets() was informally effectively deprecated long

Embedded Systems

@embedsys

2 years

The best time to learn C was 50 years ago. The second best time is now.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

1 year

Our AirBnB host asked me which vegetables I would like to cook with so she can harvest them from the house garden. They include early potatoes, shallots, garlic, onions, three varieties of kale, large leaf spinach, a sweetheart cabbage and some sugar snap peas. This is going to

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

Gave Over.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

A friend is about to retire as the director of a large software organization and speaks to me about the abrupt nature of being an important person one day to becoming an irrelevant person the next day. I worry about having too much of my identity and self-worth defined by my work

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

1 year

had handcuffs at every seat (secondary immigration processing at SFO airport). It made me realize how fragile my existence was in the USA. The shift of the person processing m deportation ended after a few hours, and the replacement officer was much kinder. He asked if a friend

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

Me: "What course are you enjoying most at [Strathclyde] university?" My daughter: "C programming." Me: <uncharacteristically lost for words>

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

1 year

I was privileged to attend Simon Peyton Jone's Order of the British Empire (OBE) investiture. The medal was presented by HM Lord-Lieutenant Mrs Julie Spence OBE QPM on behalf of The King for his services to computing and his leadership of the UK computing at schools initiative.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

I keep coming across people who think anything that can’t be learned in a one day hackathon to be not worth knowing. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but some very valuable ideas take a bit of time and significant effort to study and understand. Not everything has a shortcut.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

So many outages are caused by bad configuration updates. We invest so much energy into the design and use of “regular” programming languages, yet configuration languishes as a second or third class citizen, scribbled in YAML and JSON with uncertain meaning. We then compose

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

I've just done a lot of interviewing at large and small companies, and I've interviewed many candidates in my career and served on Google's Hiring Committee for software engineers. I thought I would share some advice on coding interviews in case it helps.

Advice for Whiteboard Coding Interviews

Advice for Whiteboard Coding Interviews I’ve recently done a lot of interviewing as a job applicant. Historically I’ve interviewed many candidates myself and I’ve also served on Google’s Hiring...

fpcastle.com

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

I've joined @GroqInc where I will continue to pursue my passion: brining the power of functional programming languages like Haskell to the design of high performance hardware and tools for programming hardware accelerators. Want to join me? ssingh @groq .com

Groq Attracts Industry Best from Fortune 500 Companies and Beyond

/PRNewswire/ -- Groq, a compute accelerator innovator for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), today announced industry leader hires, part...

www.prnewswire.com

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

9 months

I only have three problems with C++ and they are all listed on this slide presented at the #OpenXLA summit.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

My daughter passed the first year of her computing science degree at the University of Strathclyde with distinction, which is far better than my first year at uni. I'm of course a very proud father. Now, if only I could stop her from programming in Java and switch to Haskell...

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

8 months

People mocked me for putting in two dishwashers into our Cambridge UK kitchen, but they did not understand the importance of double buffering and decoupling LOAD operations from UNLOAD operations, a hazard that often occurs during multi-course dinners.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Dinner as a guest at a Cambridge college. Fellow: Which college did you study at? Me: I did not go to Cambridge. Fellow: Ah, you went to the other place. Me: No, I did not go to Oxford. I went to Glasgow. Fellow: <SEGV>

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

An engineer asked me today how I tackle ambiguity in technical problems. The path to the solution can’t be found in one step. Make decisions, almost any decision, to try and refine part or all of the problem. They will not be the right design decision, but get early feedback from

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

TIL there are programs worth writing that are not compilers.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Happy New Year to everyone kind enough to follow me on Twitter.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

I gave advice to five people this week about interviewing with tech companies or leaving academia to join them. A point I repeated about big tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook is that local microclimates vary wildly and are the higher order bits of your day to day

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Daughter took this photograph of me during our afternoon walk yesterday.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

I've just been appointed as a teaching lecturer at UC Santa Cruz for the spring quarter of this year. Students, get ready to learn Verilog hardware design Satnam-style!

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Just to emphasize how disorienting technical coding interviews can be, I once failed MY OWN FAVOURITE INTERVIEW QUESTION that I had asked zillions of Google candidates when it was asked of me elsewhere. I did not even recognize it as the same question until after the interview.🤦

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Good to be back in the office. My desk is just a little bit behind the captial blue 'G'. No masks, no capacity limits, delicious food and snacks. It's great to start feeling normal again.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Me to my 18 year old daughter: "I am looking forward to spending time with you before you head out to university." Daughter: "Dad, you're working at your desk when I wake up, and you're working at your desk long after I get home from work." Me: <re-evaluates life choices>

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

7 years ago I defeated mouth cancer with biopsy/laser treatment but the bugger seems to be back again. Early enough to take care of it I hope. It joins the long line of things that have tried to kill me, including a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lungs), celiac disease

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

First introductory Verilog lecture at UCSC done. I think the students are just stunned into silence/destabilized by an Indian looking bloke speaking with a Scottish accent ranting about Haskell and FPGAs. I am sure the novelty won't last long.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

4 years

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

It's the thin books you need to be afraid of.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

1 year

I was playing with LEGOs with my daughter but then she worked out what I was doing and she was not impressed. An attempt at a (very poor) CMOS NOR-gate. The vertical red lines are polysilicon that provide the A and B inputs to the circuit. When polysilicon crosses n-type

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

21 year wedding anniversary today and 31 years together. At the outset people *literally* bet against us. They are the losers now.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

10 months

Simon Peyton Jones is having immense amounts of fun working on the Verse language with @TimSweeneyEpic , @Augustsson , @fancytypes , @RanjitJhala , Guy Steele and glittering cast of other programming language researchers at Epic Games. As usual, a high energy inspiring talk from

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Congratulations to @simonpj0 who is joining Epic Games to work with @Augustsson on the Verse language for game design and programming the metaverse!

An Epic future for SPJ

As you may know, I am leaving Microsoft Research at the end of November. Time for something new! I am going to start a new role as Engineering Fellow at Epic Games in December. Epic is doing all...

discourse.haskell.org

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

I wish my father was alive to see a brown skinned man become Prime Minister. He (and I) would not have believed this could happen in our lifetimes from the perspective of the UK hostile environment of the 70s and 80s. And there is absolutely no way he would believed such an Asian

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Me: Do you have a wardrobe malfunction? Daughter: <checks straps and things> Me: No, I mean <points to clothes strewn across the floor> Daughter: Oh, this way I can see all my clothes and know exactly where to find what I want. She rejected the O(N) wardrobe for the O(1) floor.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

My daughter graduated from Los Altos High School school today. Needless to say, I'm a very proud father.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

Exactly 11 years ago I quit doing research, leaving my position at Microsoft Research Cambridge to move back to the Bay Area to join Google to work on production devops. I feel humiliated to have failed at research, but I also feel fortunate to have a technical rebirth elsewhere.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

1 year

I taught my son to make my mother's chicken curry last night. He did a great job. It is fantastic to continue family traditions, with twists and turns at each generation. Next: teach him about recursion.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

Simon Peyton Jones is awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by the Queen. I hope he gets a chance to give her a mini-tutorial on Haskell.

Computing at School

@CompAtSch

2 years

Simon Peyton Jones’ work to deliver outstanding computing education is recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours ahead of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations. 👏🎊 Read more: #PlatinumJubilee #Congratulations #OBE

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

4 years

Happens every now and then: Other white American/UK person: You speak very good English. Me: Thank you, and yours is no bad either. Keep practicing.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

5 years

It's happened again.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Happiness awaits. It's been far too long.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Note to self: do not try to have a nuanced discussion on Twitter.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

A Scotsman, an Indian and an American walk into a bar. “The usual, Mr. Singh?”

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

To hell with the haters. Satnam's chicken curry recipe, adapted from how my mum makes chicken curry. She adds the ground spices after she adds the pureed tomatoes. I also add dried fenugreek leaves to add a sweet nutty undertone.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

My son is challenging me about how I could have come top of my class at physics *and* history at my high school. In his world view you can be good at one or the other, but not both. That view is what I think is wrong with the world.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

1 year

Celebrating 23 years of marriage and 33 years together at Spruce, a nice restaurant in San Francisco.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Project tech lead demonstrating how to safely cast in C.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

9 months

I wore a Google t-shirt that an early employee gave me for my second attempt at interviewing at Google in 2011 ("look like the people you want to join"). A Google employee in the New York office elevator looked at the t-shirt and remarked "That shirt is more valuable than I am".

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

6 months

I can hang up my apron now. It does not get any better than this.

Nigella Lawson

@Nigella_Lawson

6 months

@satnam6502 That sounds and looks absolutely gorgeous, Satnam!

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

Facebook/Meta recruiter: Would you like to give up your VP/Fellow position for a temporary 5 month contract? Me: No. @Meta some of your recruiters are a disgrace.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

4 years

I’ve contemplated making an “inverted CV / résumé” listing all the places that rejected me. It would make impressive reading. I’ve also wondered about giving talks about how to fail at industry and academic job interviews. I have many stories...

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

4 years

Used to happen a lot at airport security: TSA: Sir, what is this equipment? Me: #FPGAs ! They're fantastic! They're like the LEGO of hardware! TSA: What do they do? Me: Anything! Mid-flight you can reprogram these circuits in #Haskell to do anything! TSA: Sir, please step this way

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

8 months

It might seem strange to you but I feel in love with a programming language called #Miranda made by David Turner, and it had a profound influence on my life that endures to this day. Miranda seemed like magic to me, I had no mental model for how it worked so elegantly,

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

My mum just served me my favourite meal: maki di roti and saag. With huge a slathering of butter. Wonderful.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

1 year

I am safe from the Bard, for the moment.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

I should tattoo on my forehead: "I know I look Indian, but I'm actually Scottish, and that's the real reason you don't understand what I am saying."

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

Celebrating our wedding anniversary and being together for 32 years at the exquisite Aquavit in New York.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

I once dyed my hair electric blue and then a while later gave a presentation to some very senior people at Microsoft where I worked at the time. My talk was totally dismissed out of hand by Steve Ballmer who did not like my blue hair and would not take me seriously because of it.

Irene Zhang

@schemeprincess

3 years

I’ve literally wanted to dye my hair pink for a decade but fears about being taken seriously as a CS academic kept me from doing it. So, this is my gift to myself for getting 3 papers into SOSP this year. 🤘🏼

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

I've got rid of my pandemic hair. Apple Face ID no longer works for me.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

I've deleted a tweet about a disturbing event I endured last night because it was even more hurtful to see the hundreds of people that did not believe me. Twitter is such a toilet. Thinking of quitting for good. Last time I did that I lost my original handle @satnamsingh

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Let's put to an end the rumours that @avsm and I are the same person. He speaks #OCaml in an Irish accent, I speak #Haskell in a Scottish accent!

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

Senior engineers, don't throw your co-workers under the bus. It's never a good look. Sure, people make mistakes, but almost always mistakes are not due to the sole actions of a single person, but instead the combination of individual actions and decisions and actions of others.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Of course this is the road adjacent to our holiday rental house.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

I have truly arrived home now that I've had my favourite meal maki di roti and saag. The excellent saag was made by my sister and my mum made the maki di roti (cornflour chapati). This version is vegan.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

I am still shaken up and upset by someone at work who insinuated that because they went to Cambridge and I did not they are better than me. Perhaps that is true, but I can't help the snipe getting under my skin.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

9 months

I started brainwashing my daughter with functional programming and liberal politics from an early age (5 days old).

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

I was put in my place at the Glasgow Apple Store. I tried to explain exactly what model of Mac I wanted to buy my daughter for uni. The young staff member ignored me and just made eye contact with Kiran. I was typecast as the doddery old man who knows nothing about computers.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Over a decade ago I worked on the Accelerator project at Microsoft that compiled the same high level (stencil) matrix computation automatically to vector instructions, GPU code or VHDL for FPGAs. People laughed at me when I presented this slide at talks. No one is laughing now.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

Pre-covid look vs. now.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

1 year

Daughter texted me to say that for some strange reason they are discussing in class our neighbour Tony Hoare from when we lived in Cambridge. Dots are being connected.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

3 years

When my daughter just turned eight I took her to our local Cambridge UK two star Michelin restaurant for lunch (Midsummer House). The gentleman that greeted us said "I supposed we can give her fish and chips." I said she'll have the multi-course tasting menu with me. And she did.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

2 years

(stomach cancer etc.), pre-diabetes, sleep apnea and the change of the type of the foldl function in the Haskell prelude. I'm too busy singing to put anybody down, so I plan to defeat this ailment and carry on hacking and drinking and ranting for some time yet.

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

4 years

My daughter just got blocked from her high school class via Zoom because she borrowed my laptop which has the Zoom username "Satan" so the teacher assumed she was a ZoomBomber. This non-attendance slip is going to be awkward to write...

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Satnam Singh

@satnam6502

13 days

After a year of no alcohol (with a few digressions at the end) and losing a ton of weight (some of which I regained after some work trips) I have finally managed to drag myself out of the pre-diabetic range and into the normal A1c range for glucose. It was bloody miserable not

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