Anas Ismail Khan

Sybill Trelawney, the Divination teacher at Hogwarts, was poorly received by her fellow staff, her students and the fans of her universe for reasons that all translate to “She was a fraud. She wasn’t a true seer and therefore not an eligible candidate for the job.” I however have always had a very different opinion about her. I believe that not only was she not a fraud but also a perfect candidate for the job, not to mention the fact that she did actually possess a gift.

We know that she was the great-granddaughter of some celebrated seer named “Cassandra Trelawney” and that Dumbledore went to meet her at the “Hog’s Head” and that no sooner than he met her, he realized that she didn’t possess her great-grandmother’s gift. Then she went into a trance and made the prophecy about Harry defeating The Dark Lord, and Dumbledore decided to hire her because he could tell that she was gonna make more of these prophecies and wanted her to be close to himself when that happened.

Now I want you to think. You are the headmaster of a school, and you want to hire a teacher for a karate class. You have to choose between a guy who is incredibly strong and can pick up and throw around the room just about anyone who picks a quarrel with him regardless of how good their karate is and a guy who spent years learning and mastering the sport and is a great fighter. Who will you choose? True that the first guy has the gift of strength and therefore has a good chance of winning most fights but he may not know anything about the sport, whereas the second guy has nothing except for a thorough knowledge of exactly what you want him to teach to your students. I don’t know about you, but if I was you I would probably hire the second guy, unless of course the first one demonstrated better karate skills than the second one.

Let’s try a different situation. You are the headmaster of Hogwarts and you want to hire a divination teacher. You have to choose between a woman who is well-versed in all the practices and techniques of divination (e.g. reading tea-leaves and making predictions from a pack of cards or dreams) or a centaur who, like all centaurs, was born with inexplicable knowledge of the cosmos and unfathomable divination skills that only require for him to look up at the sky. The woman doesn’t possess any magical powers that allow her to tap into the spirit world but she knows all that is known to man about the art of divination whereas the centaur who doesn’t have any need for those human methods probably doesn’t even know them. In fact, in the potterverse, the centaurs mainly, if not only, use the skies to predict the future and that too with seemingly minimal calculation or effort. It may be safe to assume that they aren’t even aware of the other methods used by humans. So, if it was for me to decide, I’d hire the woman, because she knows her stuff and so should be able to teach it whereas the centaur may not even know shit about the subject and is just naturally gifted at predicting the future by looking at skies.

We saw enough proof in the book of the fact that Sybill actually did know a lot about divination. She was accustomed to using all the techniques that she taught in class, and a whole lot of her predictions came true. She predicted the death of Dumbledore a few hours before it happened, predicted the order of death of certain groups of people. There are better posts about her predictions coming true so I’m not gonna list all of them here. So we know that Sybill certainly did have the knowledge, and that makes her a good candidate for the job. And we are also aware of the fact that she actually did possess a gift. That makes her a perfect candidate for the job.

One thing to note is that she herself was totally unaware of her gift. Clearly she had no control over it but given time and practice, it could be possible for her to get a handle on it. If Dumbledore wasn’t such a jerk, he’d have told her and tried to help her but he chose to not only keep her in the dark but to also make sure that she was one of the least respected members of the staff. Dumbledore and the Teachers routinely spoke ill of her and didn’t shy away from telling their students that she was a fraud and that her predictions weren’t to be taken seriously.

Let’s address the “fraud” question now. She did, at times, make predictions that sound way too ridiculous and didn’t even come true. Why? The answer is very simple. Entertainment. When you have a job like hers and everyone expects you to make cool predictions every once in a while, you have to have a mysterious air around you and you have to make predictions and you have to say stuff to make sure you have the required amount of attention. Come to think of it, she once predicted that Harry will have 12 children. Everyone knows that sounds made up including herself and so the whole point of saying it was to entertain students with some mildly humorous predictions which was a good change from the darker predictions she used to make, two of which she made in her first class and went on to become popular gossip topics.

Sybill Trelawney is underrated an underappreciated and she deserves better than to be called a fraud and better than to be insulted by her staff members.

I’ve been reading books, more than I’ve been reading lately, lately. Very often, I read them onscreen. A while back, I was starting with H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” and the PDF I found had about somewhere slightly above a hundred pages in it and it made me wonder if that was actually the whole book and not a truncated version and so I googled for the last sentence of the book to see if it matched the one in the PDF.

I ended up finding this tumblr blog called “The Final Sentence” that exists solely to serve as an archive of the final sentences of all books. I think it’s pretty cool actually and every once in a while, it makes me feel better about a crappy PDF.

I once wrote an answer on Quora about the improbability of a programming language to completely die out once it has gained popularity. The idea, not so original, was that there are two factors preventing a language from dying:

1. A significant amount of code is written in it and a significant amount of people or _other __code _depend strongly on it. An example is Linux. Now Linux has always been C and always will be. As long as Linux exists, it would be impossible for C to die out.
2. Everyone knows about it. The problem with a programming language being popular enough for it’s existence to be common knowledge is that there will always be people who’ll be fond of it and would want it to never die out. The best example would be Richard Eng, the smalltalk evangelist who has grown more popular than the language itself and likes to call himself Mr. Smalltalk.

This post is about the first reason. C, PHP and JavaScript are three of the most popular and most hated languages that are getting closer and closer to being about as old as time itself. For my own reasons, I both like and dislike the 3 and also rely a lot on them. Let’s assume everyone agrees to killing all 3 of them. Now the problem is that C is:

1. The language Linux is written in.
2. The language most programmers start with. (Often this is because universities prefer to teach it in the earlier semesters.)
3. More or less the only mature language that has the least amount of abstraction that one could ask for except for C++, which is a mess and an offspring of C itself and therefore not worth talking about in this post.

During lunch, I was reflecting on that day when my programming teacher asked me to come forward and teach “bitwise” operations to the whole class, and I remembered how, in my attempt to explain to them the basic difference between a regular “OR” and a bitwise “OR”, I had talked about value comparison being different from a bitwise comparison. Then I began to wonder. A bitwise operation on machine level is fairly simple to understand, but what about value comparison? What is it that happens at machine level when you check if two integer values are equal?

As I began my search for the answer, I pinged Vladislav Zorov, my mentor and friend, and asked him. He said that compilers mostly just subtract the memory addresses of the two objects being compared and returns true if the difference is zero i.e. if they are literally the same object. I couldn’t agree with this so I argued against it. I said that it is possible for two variables to point to identical objects without pointing to the same object and so I set out to prove it.

I wrote a very simple program:

import java.util.Scanner;  
public class HelloWorld {  
  public static void main(String []args){  
    // Created two strings using the same literal and an array with the second index set using that literal.  
    String x = “abcd”;  
    String y = “abcd”;  
    String[] z = {“asafaf”,”abcd”};

    // Printing addresses of all 3.  
    System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(x.hashCode()));  
    System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(y.hashCode()));  
    System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(z[1].hashCode()));

    // Checking to see if the equality symbol works on these  
    if(x == z[1] && x==y && y==z[1])  
      System.out.println(“== works on the 3”);

    // Comparing the 3 using the equals method which will, obviously, work.  
    if(x.equals(z[1]) && x.equals(y) && y.equals(z[1]))  
      System.out.println(“equals method works on the 3”);

    // Creating Scanner object to read from stdin.  
    Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in);

    // Taking two strings as input. Will test with  
    // 1. Two different strings  
    // 2. Identical strings  
    // 3. “abcd” for both  
    String j = input.next();  
    String k = input.next();

    //printing their addresses  
    System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(k.hashCode()));  
    System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(j.hashCode()));

    // Testing both comparisons  
    if(j==k)  
      System.out.println(“== working on input strings”);  
    if(k.equals(j))  
      System.out.println(“equals working on input strings”);

    // Initializing a string identical to x,y,z[1] but with the new keyword  
    String a = new String(“abcd”);  
    // Printing its address  
    System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(a.hashCode()));  
    if(a==x || a==y || a== z[1])  
      System.out.println(“== working with new keyword”);  
    if(a.equals(x))  
      System.out.println(“equals method working with new keyword”);  
  }  
}

If you run it, you’ll see that its output shows that all strings that have the same value point to the same address regardless of how they’re initialized. But the equality symbol only works when two strings have been created with the same literal. The fact that we’ve now proven that identical strings in Java do have the same memory address does perhaps imply that comparison is done simply by comparing addresses but then what about the equality symbol? Well, I’ll update this post when I find out.

The dirty little secret is that most “modern JavaScript development” is nothing to do with actually building websites – it’s building packages that can be used by people who build libraries that can be used by people who build frameworks that people who write tutorials and teach courses can teach.

I’m not sure anyone is actually building anything for actual users to interact with. – David Carson

I just finished reading Franz Kafka’s “Die Verwandlung,” translated into “The Metamorphosis” by Stanley Corngold. Before I even started reading it, I’d told my classmate about how it seemed like a weird one — something I’d deduced from its synopsis — and he’d responded with “Franz Kafka’s works tend to be.”

Now that I’m done with it, I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. For one, it was incredibly short. Like I knew it was a short story but I’d still been expecting it to be longer. Then there comes the fact that (SPOILER ALERT) 

Logic, science, reason, all of it is what? Rules that always hold true for everything that they are defined for. But who really defines them? We do. Who comes up with them? We do. And what are they based on? Observation.

I remember, as a kid, reading an article in my native language, titled “What if there was no Sun?” and it, as you can guess, was full of stupid stuff like “pitch black, ice cold, nobody would survive for any more than … e.t.c.” While I was reading it, I couldn’t help but wonder why a world without our Sun would ever have any life-forms that need the sun to survive? Or why the humans _on such a world would not _be used to not having a sun and thus be optimized for survival in such harsh conditions.

My point? We believe logic is absolute. Maybe it is, but only for our world. We know that if we pull at a free movable object, it would move towards us. But for all we know, there could be a world out there in which doing so would result in that very object moving away from us. That sounds illogical, stupid, and inconceivable but if it happened all the time in our world, it wouldn’t be.

We believe that we can make deductions using reasoning, but how reasonable would that be when that very art of reasoning itself is a set of deductions based on observation. What about observation? Do we even really see our world as it is? We don’t even know if we all see the world the same way. A really narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum is sensed by our eyes and is used by the brain to form an image. This is literally akin to reading a detailed book and imagining the events and the characters. Using this analogy, we can tell that while the image can be extremely detailed, it will still be limited by the amount of information it is based on. Imagine if our ears were so trained that we could, in the absence of light, form images and see using sound. Is _that _inconceivable? But what really is the difference between the ear and the eyes? Both sense and interpret waves with the help of the brain. If we could see the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum, we would have a much smaller list of opaque materials than we currently do.

This does of course suggest that it doesn’t matter if the science and logic we so rely on is limited by our observation as long as it holds true for our observable world, but the idea was the very fact that it would be just limited to our observable world. This is kind of like how we wouldn’t be able to tell if there were any more-than-3-dimensional-beings out there observing us right now because we can’t perceive or observe more than 3 dimensions.

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot 
of substandard programmers use it...

In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and 
portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are 
basically available in C.

In general, I'd say that anybody who designs his kernel modules for C++ is 
either 
 (a) looking for problems
 (b) a C++ bigot that can't see what he is writing is really just C anyway
 (c) was given an assignment in CS class to do so.

Feel free to make up (d).

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I really want to keep this as short as I can and address only the primary issue. For those who don’t know, GoDaddy is one of the most popular domain registrar’s in the market and I started using it a couple of years back as a means for getting rid of my local registrar who had been screwing up routinely in a most inefficient way.

Abstract: Lately, they have not only made a few irrational and immoral decisions, but they also robbed me of a rather large sum of money and then messed up my order completely. In short, I paid thrice for the same order and I didn’t even get what I ordered. Furthermore, somehow the same domain was purchased twice using my account and I have absolutely no idea how it’s even possible.