hi4hi Matrimony

hi4hi Matrimony  is an android application for matrimony which allows users to talk to each other without sharing their phone numbers. Profile has just one photograph and maximum 256 characters of description, so that users can get started immediately. Application doesn't asks for Real Name or email address or facebook account. We believe that our best bet to privacy is to work with as little information as possible.

The core activity of the application is looking at user profiles and INVITING them. These invites can be ACCEPTED or DECLINED. No calls can be made, unless the other users accepts the invite. If an invite is accepted, two users have a DATE. This is a floating DATE over the phone which can be done anytime both users are available. Each DATE allows users to call each other ONCE. For talking again, users have to INVITE again.

Users can set their status to Busy or Available. Users with Busy status cannot be called. This is useful in case users want to talk only after office hours or say over weekend.

This video does a better job at explaining the concept.

Have a look and give us your feedback.

Download from Google Play

Concept Rounding Off

Number are nice. They round off nicely. But concepts are a different ball game all together. When concepts are rounded off, the results are spread all over the spectrum. The idea is that we understand new things in terms of things we already understand.  So no matter how accurately we define a new thing, the listener is going to do a concept rounding off to the nearest thing they understand. The implication is that being accurate might land you much far off in the listeners mind and being inaccurate  might help you reach close enough to the desired conceptual position. When I say being inaccurate, I mean choosing those concepts to describe your new concepts which are likely to be present in listeners mind and not some ideal abstract picture.

 Marketing people understood this all the time. Big data now universally means a Hardoop Cluster. Cloud is client server, though SaaS also meant the same. SOA, ESB and now finally people understand it as web apis. So Apigee became API Gateway. I had hard time explaining people why we wrote HTTP proxy at Apigee because everyone thought apache acts as a good reverse proxy.  It is even hard to explain that I work on high performance systems but I never do thread pool size tuning. LVS is a proxy but you don't see it opening any ports with netstat. Saving cream, shampoo, handwash and soap are all soaps.
 
I am tempted to call it Uncertainty Principle. The more accurately you describe something, less likely it is to be understood.

Snapshot and History

I was searching for parking in Forum Mall. I found one, but it was hard to park because someone had not parked the car properly in the slot. Almost half of the car was in the slot I was thinking of parking.

The first obvious reaction was WTF, but later it occurred to me that all I was looking at is a snapshot. May be someone else had parked some other car in the wrong slot, leaving no choice for the driver of this car. And now since that other car is gone, it looks like the driver of the current car is at fault. The point is one persons wrong parking could lead to multiple people parking wrong all day long, long after that first person in gone.

Sometimes we look at a snapshot and decide something, but it could be far from truth.  

The idea of justice

This is not about the book. But it may have something from this one.

Newspapers are now filled with lines like "We want justice" or  "Justice delayed is justice denied". Why do we have this apparent lack of justice? One thing that comes to mind is the fact that justice is not what it used to be. The only kind of justice available now for law abiding citizens of the country is what can be called legal justice.

I feel justice is a sort of cultural thing. It is something that is obvious to people at all the times but capturing it in rules and guidelines detaches it from its cultural roots.  The good and the bad part of legal justice is that it is defined and written. Just like all computer systems are hack-able, so is legal justice because it is also a kind of "code". Code that runs on computer has finite set of symbols and it has no ambiguity, and still it is possible to hack it. The code of legal justice has further complications, it is subject to interpretation. In some sense best lawyers are  hackers of legal code. They are highly paid and celebrated, whereas their computer counterparts are looked at in totally different spirit.

I can think of only two ways for legal justice to be effective. One is to have the jury system. If 10-12 random people think something is a crime, it likely is. People are a very good competition to people. They can understand each other, their motives and can evolve with time, unlike rules which can be easily abused. Lots of criminals would have been behind the bars if we have random people deciding their fate and not a set of rules, subject to interpretation of a small set of professionals. People can understand why witness turn hostile or why you don't get evidence. The law that only punishes criminals if there are witnesses and evidence,  is the logical/primary reason for criminals to threaten witnesses and to hide evidence.

The second way could be rules which are defined using languages that computers can understand. The benefit of such an approach is that anyone sitting in their home can input the related facts and see the outcome of the trial. We don't need any trial. Someone can write a crime generator and enumerate all possible crimes and their punishments. Basically instead of getting hacked in the court, which is a super slow process and sensitive because someones life is at stake, if we have a system which can be hacked any time by anyone, we end up with a better system. Call it open source justice if you will.

Justice is either a logical thing encoded in rules or something complex which perhaps only people can understand. In case it is first, it is logical to make it "people free" i.e. define it in a language computers can understand because they are so much better at this. If not, then let people run the show i.e let's have jury to decide stuff not judges. I just don't understand the rationale of the current system which seems to prevent the very thing it is supposed to provide..i.e justice.

By going to streets people might get some justice now, but what these exceptions tell us is that something is fundamentally wrong with the system itself. A short term focus will bring justice but it would be nothing more than revenge. But if we could fix the system itself, it can prevent injustice in the first place. I would prefer a better system than ever watching the replay of this story again.

Sometimes the middle path doesn't leads anywhere, you got to choose.

Cost of Vote

2011-2012 budget for India = Rs 14,90,925 crores
Total number of voters (as per 2009 elections) = 71.4 crores

Per voter this year budget = Rs 20,881
Since we vote every five years, the cost of vote comes out to be around
Rs 1,04,406.

Strangely, poverty line in India is defined at Rs 28 per day, which gives Rs 51,100 as total expenditure for a poor person for five years. If poor people could sell their vote at market price, they would be twice as richer ;)