HS

High quality person. CEO, iviva. Improving workplaces at @iitmadras. Working on interesting problems.

[HS @statictype]

Fravia’s reverse engineering

[Hubert Thieblot @hthieblot]

Anyone who surfed the early web between 1995-2010.

What’s the one website/app you still think about?

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

> Spurs vs. Knicks in the NBA Finals
> A tech infrastructure stock bubble
> An indie horror more popular than Star Wars reboot
> Jony Ive launches consumer hardware in multiple colorways

Welcome back to 1999.

[HS @statictype]

Totally agree. On the other hand you won’t see 23 or 24 sitting out for a key defensive stop at the end of a game.

[Robert Griffin III @RGIII]

Shai Gilgeous Alexander mid-range game is the closest thing we have to Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, but yal not ready for that conversation.

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

Almost 1/3rd of YC founders are of Indian origin now 🤯

[HS @statictype]

Dont agree with everything @balajis says but some good points here

[Balaji @balajis]

My view is: you’re not actually mad at me, but mad at the situation. I grant that it sucks, but I didn’t cause decades of money printing and the pending sovereign debt crisis, and neither did you.

But in short: if the Mayflower was American, and leaving England to build New England was American, then leaving the dysfunctional old world to build the new is the most American thing you can do.

A longer response follows.

(1) DID THE IRISH AMERICANS BETRAY IRELAND?
First, did the Irish Americans betray Ireland by leaving for America? Why weren’t they loyal to Ireland? Why did they "cut and run"? Why didn’t they stay and fight the Irish Potato Famine?

And the Puritans...did they traduce England by not returning and fighting with the Roundheads? Were the Virginians disloyal to the other side, the Cavaliers? How about the German Americans…how come they left Europe after the Revolutions of 1848?

Point: virtually every single US ethnic group, other than the African Americans and Native Americans, “fled” some issue in the old world. War, civil war, communism, fascism, fundamentalism. The whole point of the New World was to leave behind dysfunctional, bankrupt states…often caught in the throes of endless left-vs-right conflicts.

If almost every single American is descended from someone who left a dysfunctional state, how can it be un-American to leave a dysfunctional state? Why could your ancestors leave dysfunction, why are they free men... but others can’t move, and are locked to the land?

(2) LOYAL TO BLUE OR RED AMERICANS?
Second, if someone tries being loyal to “the American people”, does that mean being loyal to the 75 million Kamala voters, the Blue Americans? Because if you’re loyal to them, you are unfortunately no longer loyal to the Red Americans.

And that’s the rub. Just as Democrats use “democracy” to mean rule by Democrats, and are then stunned that ~50% of democratic votes keep going to Republicans, Republicans keep using “American” to mean Red American, and are then always angry that ~50% of US citizens are Blue Americans.

Today, Gallup reports only 36% of Democrats are “proud to be American”. They are, however, proud to be Democrats. They’re also not posting on X, but rather on Bluesky. The digital secession, the spiritual secession of Democrats away from a “United” States of America has already happened. That’s unfortunately what polarization means.

This Blue/Red conflict is exactly the kind of left-right fight that the Puritans and Cavaliers left behind in the 1600s, and the German Americans left in the 1800s. Just like there is no Korea, only North Korea and South Korea, there is unfortunately no America any more, only Blue America and Red America. And just like the Korean situation led to a Korean diaspora, the American situation is causing an American diaspora.

(3) STAY AND FIGHT, BUT WHO OR WHAT?
Then, if someone was to stay and fight, who do you want them to fight? Perhaps you want them to fight other Americans (namely Blue Americans), in the name of being an American. Or you want them "fight" a ~$175T sovereign debt crisis, which is like fighting a volcanoa, as it's just the largest bill ever due in history, and something even Elon couldn’t put a dent in.

TLDR: you can’t “stay and fight” a sovereign debt crisis. It’s not something you can punch in the nose.

(4) SHOULD INDIAN AMERICANS STAY OR GO?
Also, in case you haven't noticed, half of MAGA is yelling that Indian tech guys should leave the country, or never come, as they'll never be true Americans. Now others are suddenly mad that Indian tech guys are taking them up on it, and leaving America. Meanwhile, far leftists have begun just shooting at tech guys.

This is just a schizo and unstable situation.

(5) LOYALTY TO IDEALS WAS LOYALTY TO AMERICA
I am loyal to capitalism, democracy, free speech, free markets, science, math, wherever they are. I am loyal to peace and trade, small-l libertarianism, privacy, nonviolence, and technological innovation.

I am also loyal to a specific enumerated group of people, the many friends, coworkers, collaborators, and customers who I’ve worked with over the years, both US citizens and non-citizens, from the Stanford and Silicon Valley of a few decades ago.

These were essentially the mainstream American ideals for decades. Millions of Americans still support them. Indeed, millions of Americans think that blood-and-soil nationalism of the kind you implicitly propound is un-American!

(6) BLOOD AND SOIL, BUT WHAT BLOOD?
Finally, and now we really get down to brass tacks: what test do you propose to determine whether someone is a true American, aside from their current paperwork? Because unlike (say) the Japanese, there is no genetic test that correlates close-to-perfectly with US passport ownership.

Therefore, any definition of who’s American *has* to be civic nationalism from a purely operational standpoint, defined at the “software” level (in terms of law) rather than the hardware level (in terms of genetics).

Yet if you try to get N different rightists to define the “is_american” function you’ll get N different definitions, with and without different minority groups. One that went viral recently is the “Grade A American = Mayflower” thing, which is sort of like wokeness in reverse, but for MAGA.

And look: loyalty means symmetry. I am loyal to you if you are loyal to me. But the way you're talking about loyalty translates to servitude. I've been polite, and engaged you in good faith, but we are strangers. Yet you are demanding gratitude and even deference (!) from me, implicitly on racial grounds, because "you didn't build that, someone else made that happen". Moreover, you are doing so by invoking "the people" in a right-coded variation of the way the Soviets invoked "the people."

I'm sorry, that doesn't fly.

Why would anyone be loyal to a MAGA faction that arbitrarily designates countless millions to be Grade B, C, and D? You can't just redefine the social contract overnight, unilaterally, with some tweets, into a retconned blood-and-soil America that the WASPs themselves shut down...and then get extremely mad when others don't buy into it.

We're just going have to renegotiate these kinds of relationships from scratch, with new opt-in communities, where everyone is a grade A citizen. If that means rebuilding New America outside America, just as New England was built outside England, so be it. The next Mayflower is boarding.

[HS @statictype]

Maybe the Spurs should try giving the ball to that Wemby guy. He seems pretty good.

[Rasal Jayasinghe @rasaljaya]

Sri Lanka now exports more code than tea. Let that sink in.

For the first time, ICT/BPM exports overtook tea in April 2026 $146M vs $100M.

And the gap is only widening.

Projections for full-year 2026:
IT/BPM: ~$1.78B (+22.6% YoY)
Tea: ~$1.31B (−6.8% YoY)
Projected annual gap: ~$470M

What was once a tea-and-textiles economy is quietly becoming a knowledge economy.

Talent, code, and engineering capability are now out-earning the leaves that defined us for a century.

#SriLanka #DigitalEconomy #LKA #ColomboTech

[Siddhartha Saxena @siddsax]

Anthropic onboarding day: Michael Scott introducing Karpathy like he just signed Wemby in free agency.

[HS @statictype]

@buntyverse 1. If people did what he said that arbitrage would vanish.

2. I dont think Zoho makes money on arbitrage.

[HS @statictype]

This is the second best use of AI I've seen.

[Hater Report @HaterReport]

Leaked footage of the OKC Thunder locker room after their Game 2 win over the Spurs 😭

[HS @statictype]

This is why money losing companies are money losing companies.

[Sanjiva Weerawarana @sanjiva]

Wow LK govt approved $1.8M contract to buy MSFT stuff for Sri Lankan Airlines.

Shouldn’t money losing companies use cheaper stuff?? https://t.co/rRsWvmIArz

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

I went to BJ's Restaurant last night with my kids. The bathroom was disgusting. The front of house was kind but sloppy and slow. The food upset my stomach and I woke up at 4am this morning because of it.

Whoever BJ is, they probably aren't a real person, because everyone acted like nobody's name is on the door. I studied the management history of BJ's.

The original founders left after the seventh location. Then it was sold to their accountants. Then it went public. Then the CEO resigned last year after 19 years and was replaced by an interim board member from Darden Restaurants, who was then replaced by a "Chief Concept Officer" promoted to CEO. The CFO also quit.

Roaches behind the takeout counter in Coral Springs. Rodent droppings and mold in the ice machine in Pembroke Pines. An "F" retention score on Comparably. Glassdoor reviews that say "management turnover is high... that should say quite a bit about the company culture."

Seven layers of management between the person cooking your food and anyone who owns the outcome. General manager reports to area director reports to regional director reports to regional VP reports to SVP of Operations reports to the COO (who started in January) reports to the CEO (who started last year). 218 locations. Founders long gone.

Managers rotate every 18 months. The kitchen is run by compliance checklists, not pride. A dirty bathroom is nobody's personal failure because it's nobody's personal restaurant.

This is the stewardship crisis in America in one building.

In Chinese restaurants, the 老板 (laoban) is there. He tastes the food. He watches the kitchen. His family's reputation is the business. The restaurant is clean not because of health inspectors but because his name is on it.

Haidilao built a $30B hot pot chain with less than 10% employee turnover. Servers can give you free dishes without asking a manager. Why? Because they're treated like stewards, not interchangeable parts.

The West replaced stewardship with professional management. MBAs who optimize spreadsheets for people they've never met. CEOs who've never touched the product they sell. Politicians who sign the bills and spend the people's money but never checked the money built anything that helped the people they claimed to care about.

Founder mode isn't new. It's the oldest idea in Chinese business culture. We just forgot it.

The best founders I fund at YC are natural stewards. They own the outcome. They're in the kitchen tasting the food. They care about the bathroom.

Most of society's problems are a stewardship crisis. Not a lack of resources or technology or intelligence. A lack of people who give a shit because their name is on it.

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

I can’t stop thinking about this post. If you do one thing today, I encourage you to give it a thoughtful, thorough read…

And then commit to never living your life this way. Life has wasted success on the people described in this post.

It really is completely pathetic. They say that comparison is the thief of joy - look no further than this post for validation it is indeed true.

On their deathbed they will realize they have lived their life completely wrong. Don’t let it be you.

[HS @statictype]

So does @AWSSupport really think its acceptable to embargo a production account for multiple days? They have frozen it due to security concerns - a good proactive move - and now are sitting on it for days after everything got audited. Is there anyone who can sort this out?

[HS @statictype]

THIS

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

In Tamil Nadu, the BJP being in power at the centre has been used by essentially all the parties to demonize them. The DMK made "attack Modi" as their only plank. EdappadiDMK (that is the correct name) would have done the same thing if the Congress had switched over to them. In Tamil, we call this பூச்சாண்டி காட்டுதல் - like my grandmother would tell me as a kid "that tree next to the pond has a ghost that will catch you, so don't go near it" to keep me away from swimming in the pond! Modi is their favorite பூச்சாண்டி.

So when someone parrots the line "we want to keep the BJP out of Tamil Nadu", they are saying "we don't want competition for our cozy duopoly", not some deep principle. The BJP has been in alliance in AP and Pondicherry and those states are doing fine, they are making excellent progress. Yet TN is supposedly "different".

The "difference" was the BJP getting into alliance with these same parties (EDMK or DMK) that want to openly or secretly suppress them in TN.

What is the way ahead? Find good youthful passionate leadership that are willing to fight the good fight long term. Focus on building up the party from the grassroots. Ignore all the பூச்சாண்டி business. Do not align with anyone who claims "TN is different". TN is Bharat. We have to fight this subterranean separatism.

Annamalai was making progress but he needed a lot more time. He was creating a genuine political movement, he invited youth to be active in politics and he had massive engagement.

I would have volunteered for this assignment too (I love building up from zero!) but I am neck deep in tech and Bharat needs deep tech. So not in this life time. To be very clear, I will state my political views (my right to free speech) but I will not be in active politics.

I hope all our educated citizens do engage in this political debate and express their opinions, but let us all do it RESPECTFULLY.

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

Let me explain what just happened today because it deserves so much recognition.

GalaxEye is a Bengaluru startup founded in 2021 by IIT Madras engineers. Today they launched Mission Drishti on a SpaceX Falcon 9. It is India's largest privately built satellite at 190 kg. And it carries a technology that no commercial satellite has ever carried before.

Normal satellites take photos of the Earth using optical cameras. Like your phone camera, but from 500 km up. The problem is obvious. Clouds. Night. Fog. Smoke. If any of these are in the way, the photo is useless. India has monsoon cover for 4 months a year. That is 4 months where optical satellites are partially or fully blind over large parts of the country.

The alternative is SAR. Synthetic Aperture Radar. Instead of taking photos with light, it sends radar waves down and reads what bounces back. Radar goes through clouds, through darkness, through smoke. A SAR satellite can image a flooded village at 2 AM during a cyclone when no optical satellite can see anything.

The problem with SAR is that the images look nothing like photos. They look like grainy black-and-white radar maps. A military analyst or a trained geospatial engineer can read them. A farmer, a disaster response team, or a city planner cannot.

Until today, if you wanted both optical and SAR data for the same location, you needed two different satellites, passing over at different times, at different angles. Then someone had to manually align and fuse the two datasets. Expensive, slow, and the data never perfectly matched because the satellites saw the same spot minutes or hours apart.

GalaxEye put both sensors on one satellite. Optical and SAR, fused into what they call OptoSAR. Three times more information than a single sensor. Processed onboard by an NVIDIA AI chip at 1.8 metre resolution.

Now in practice, during the next cyclone hitting Odisha, one satellite pass gives you a clear image of which villages are flooded, which roads are cut, and which buildings are standing. Day or night. Cloud or clear. In near real-time.

For defence, it means you can monitor a border area 24/7 regardless of weather. For agriculture, it means tracking crop health across an entire monsoon season without a single cloud gap. For infrastructure, it means monitoring construction progress on highways and bridges without waiting for a clear day.

GalaxEye tested their SAR tech on ISRO's POEM orbital platform. The satellite was tested at ISRO facilities. IN-SPACe provided regulatory clearance. NSIL, ISRO's commercial arm, will distribute the imagery globally. And it launched on SpaceX because ISRO's PSLV doesn't have the right orbit slot for this mission.

Yes, four IIT Madras graduates built a world-first satellite in 4 years in Bengaluru.

Take a bow!

[HS @statictype]

C’mon. The Suns had the best record in the NBA. The Laker’s best player was Sedale Threatt and they barely made the playoffs with a win the in the last game of the season.
That they could take 2 games on the road against the Suns was a major accomplishment.

[NBA Cobwebs @NBACobwebs]

May 2, 1993: With Phoenix facing elimination (trailing the Lakers 0-2 in a best-of-five series), coach Paul Westphal guarantees the Suns will win the next three games and become the first NBA team to win an opening-round playoff series after losing its first two games at home.

[HS @statictype]

@jarvat @NBACobwebs They were the best team in the NBA and the Lakers barely made the playoffs. Not sure they deserve credit for coming back from 2-0 when its a bit of a shock they even got into a 2-0 hole in the first place

[shetty @thestoicccoder]

claude just killed Haldirams

[HS @statictype]

Until agents are making autonomous buying decisions, humans are involved in making a sale so sales people will be needed. If your product is enterprisey (ie, requires buy-in from multiple groups for it to be useful) then sales people are required. It usually doesn't matter how good it is.