Bhardwaj Rish

You have a sheet with several numbers written on them. You have to fill in operators to make the left side balance the right side. You can use   any operator, and as many as you'd like. You can use brackets. You cannot write any number on the sheet. So, square root works because there's a symbol for square root. Cube root doesn't because it requires you to write 'three' in the root symbol. Similarly, you can't square a number, because it requires you to write 'two' in the superscript. You also cannot use decimal as it requires you to write '0' in front of the dot. Here's the question -  0 0 0 = 6 1 1 1 = 6 2 2 2 = 6 3 3 3 = 6 4 4 4 = 6 5 5 5 = 6 6 6 6 = 6 7 7 7 = 6 8 8 8 = 6 9 9 9 = 6 I'll give you the answer to the first.  6 + 6 - 6 = 6 Can you solve the rest? -- It took me almost half an hour to complete.

Brief, unstructured, but have always wanted to put this through. Many questions and not  critically thought ideas. The root of most human induced problems is large population. I feel any race/city/organization/institution that limits it size to as much as it can handle will function better than those that grow uncontrollably. Now this sounds obvious, but surely other than the Chinese no one seems to be following this. The obvious issues - Day to day troubles - Road traffic. Queues in supermarkets. Local transport, metro, buses, trains always crowded. Education - Can the government provide education to  everyone ? What is the selection of students? Creates division and hierarchy amongst institutions - not everyone gets to study at a top tier institute. On what basis is an individual considered worthy of a top level education? Employment - Where do you generate so many jobs? Even if you push in more people into each domain, say increase the size of police force as the overall

The more I think about it, the more I feel I've made a big mistake. Or maybe I haven't. Imagine this . You're on an indefinite term in jail. No, jail's too harsh. Let's call this a zoo . You're one of those many human-animals that are captured, and kept in protection in the zoo. You've been captivated for months now, and have hated every minute of the feeling. You're wise, you're strong, but like every other human-animal, you live in this zoo, waiting for the day you'll be free. Every day you dream of what this day would have been like had you been free - from the city you would choose to live in to the people you'd like to do meet and do business with, the food you'd eat and the place you'd like to call home. If only you were free right this very day . Every week or so, the zoo has visitors- people from the industry, factory owners who tour the zoo and observe the animals inside. These visitors spend hours trying to find a right f

A couple of my posts have been about how people are awesome. This post? This is about how I just don't understand a couple of things here and there. No intention to hurt the people involved in the image. Online communities are amazing. Stackoverflow, stackexchange in particular (not mentioning Reddit here). It is quite a feat to have created a tool that has created such a vast community  ( Jeff Atwood  - the creator of SO - read his blog if you haven't, extremely fun to read!) that follow the rules, attempts to fix those that don't abide by them and continues to grow. It's almost like a world of its own - most people are like the average citizen - they answer questions of things they are good at and cause no trouble. A small percent are the troublemakers - illogical people with little sense who post wrong questions/downvote wrongly or are just plain  wrong . There are policemen who make sure rules are enforced - they verify and edit questions, write appropriate comme

Imagine walking down the road on one of your many monotonous days, to find something so spectacular, something so joyful that just being there for 5 minutes makes you feel like every moment of your otherwise common day is now going to be like no other. :D It is not uncommon to see single violinists/trumpet players on the road playing solo music in Europe, but to see a whole orchestra perform, wearing ordinary everyday clothes, with the biggest smiles on their faces, spreading smiles to everyone watching, is simply precious. Beethoven's Ninth symphony. :') There are several people that stand out in the video. The girl on the lamp post at 3:33, it's such an ingrained human reaction to move your hands to the rhythm of the music. The ordinary dressed Choirmaster at 4:06 who is anything but ordinary. The (probably Italian) guy at 4:09. His priceless reaction is what the flashmob plays for. You can see the happiness on his face. :D I really wish to be a part of sev

Warning. If you like puzzles, this w ill take up a lot of your time. I've been (trying to do)/doing algorithmic programming on Hackerrank and other similar websites for the past couple of months. (Practising competitive coding is the only way to get a soft engineer job, apparently.) Some problems are really fun, while others are now standard algorithms that took humanity 10s of years to figure out - you can't expect yourself to come up with solutions to all of them without sitting through the theory. I was trying out 'interview practice questions' on Hackerrank, when I found this. This question is one of a kind, I haven't come across anything like it before, and certain you haven't either. It took me 10 minutes and a slight peek at the discussions tab to convince myself this question is legit. A guy mockingly posted "IMHO, the problem is a hacker challenge - it's not a reasonable "practice interview problem" unless you are interviewing

We all know the latest buzz. The world has been going crazy over Pokemon Go, starting their adventure as a trainer, merging the gap between _real_ life and the virtual world. There are hundreds of blogs about how Go has impacted the world, how it is forcing people out of their homes and to actually explore their city and meet new people, making the world a more social place. (Personally, I still don't believe this. Go reminds me of the people from Wall E . Everyone's under the influence of _The Screen_. But let's leave this for another blog :) ) Go & Open Source Developers This is why people are awesome. In less than a month since Go's release, there are dozens of Github repos creating unofficial APIs and tools to help you locate Pokemon, find the closest poke stops and gyms. My roommate has been going out everyday in hunt for Pokemon since he got hired last week. Last night, while discussing stories of his many adventures and how he met so many people p

It's funny how only once you find a really good song you realize how much you needed it. Before that, you never really knew about it, and life was still fine. But now that you've heard it? - You can't live without it. I was very fortunate to find these songs this summer. Each one has a good memory associated with them, and I'm really glad music of this sort exists. The Strumbellas Spirits - The music video & the live version . I got this song in my head and it won't go! The Strumbellas aren't a very famous band yet - they will be very, very soon though. All of their music is soft and meaningful. Bonus- they have an excellent violinist; that instrument can entirely change the mood of the song :D While listening to the live version of this song, you can genuinely feel the pain in his voice - the second half where the lyrics are - And I don't want a never ending life, I just want to be alive, while I'm here. There must be more to this, a deeper mea

My love for Android is never ending. I've thought of putting a complete halt to all Android development over thrice in the last year*, and haven't been able to so far. One major reason is the sort of things Android allows people to come up with! The endless number of libraries, both for UI, or development. Here's a list of super useful libraries you may not have heard of. Android Annotations I stumbled upon Android Annotations about an hour ago, and I'm hooked. It's an Android library that helps in making code smaller and easier to read. True. Android is based on Java, and we all know how Java, unlike Python likes things big and explicitly written. Annotations are those '@' marks followed by a keyword you see above method or variables in several languages. ButterKnife uses them to inject views instead of writing long lines of the same code. Annotations are also used to mark methods like so - @Override. Android Annotations takes this to a whole new le

Man man man! I've been smiling like a fool staring at my screen the past 4 hours or so. And feel like shouting out loud every time I read more about the work they've done. Firebase. Firebase. Firebase. Firebase. Firebase. Firebase. Firebase. Fireflies in my stomach. This is too good to be true!  One product that does everything . After yesterday's Google I/O keynote, there were a whole lot of notifications to my developer account. A major one was Google backing Firebase, notifying developers to update analytics, cloud messaging, and ads display to Firebase. What's Firebase? A platform to build applications with no server side code, stores everything in JSON. Firebase handles it all for you. Similar to Parse, which declared shutdown early this year ('16), people that used it were literally on the street. Yup. This happened to a whole lot of developers.  Including me. Startups too, including Social Cops . For those who know what (and how awe