Rishiyur Nikhil

@[email protected]
42 Followers
13 Following
73 Posts
(also @nikhil)
Interests: Digital design, RISC-V hardware system design, Haskell and functional programming, puns, cricket, world events and foibles of human hubris
Rishiyur NikhilJun 12, 2023
Moshe VardiJun 11, 2023
Should Higher Ed be considered a public good? Absolutely, but only if it commits itself to the public good. https://medium.com/@vardi/higher-ed-as-a-public-good-2534759b339c
Higher Ed as a Public Good - Moshe Vardi - Medium

President Biden’s announcement in August 2022 of a plan for student-loan forgiveness has triggered a discussion about viewing Higher Ed as a public good, like clean water or public park. Furthermore…

Medium
Rishiyur NikhilMay 26, 2023
This is some Shubman Gill show! Six in the City! #IPL #ShubmanGill
Rishiyur NikhilJan 29, 2023
If you follow me here ('at Nikhil at mastodon dot online') you may wish to switch to 'at Nikhil at mastodon dot acm dot org', which is where I now spend my Mastodon time. Thanks.
Rishiyur NikhilJan 29, 2023
If you follow me here, you may wish to change it to @nikhil which is where I now spend most of my Mastodon time. Thanks.
Rishiyur NikhilJan 29, 2023
RSNikhilJan 29, 2023
#Cricket ESPN "Worm", #SouthAfrica v. #England, a moment ago 🙂
Rishiyur NikhilJan 12, 2023
Show threadRSNikhilJan 12, 2023
3/2 cf. Dijkstra's Guarded Command Language, Lamport's TLA+, Abrial et. al.'s Event-B, Term Rewriting Systems, Chandy and Misra's UNITY, Bluespec, ... all fundamentally non-deterministic languages.
Rishiyur NikhilJan 12, 2023
Show threadRSNikhilJan 12, 2023
2/2
Once the mathematical equipment needed for the design of nodeterministic mechanisms achieving a purpose has been developed, the nondeterministic machine is no longer frightening. On the contrary! We shall learn to appreciate it, even as a valuable stepping stone in the design of an ultimately fully deterministic mechanism."
Rishiyur NikhilJan 12, 2023
RSNikhilJan 12, 2023

1/2 Another lovely Dijkstra quote (from "A Discipline of Programming", Prentice Hall 1976)

"Eventually I came to regard nondeterminacy as the normal situation, determinacy being reduced to a—not even very interesting—special case.
…

Rishiyur NikhilJan 12, 2023
Dijkstra, on abstraction:
https://twitter.com/commandodev/status/1613476699768758275?s=20&t=yBIVUYXhKVuteSLYJkvRGA
Ben Ford on Twitter

“Dijkstra on abstraction (1972): The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. When did we lose this approach to building things?”

Twitter
Rishiyur NikhilJan 7, 2023
Judd LegumJan 6, 2023

1. Two years ago today, http://popular.info began its reporting on corporate PAC donors to the members of Congress voting to overturn the 2020 election.

Over the course of a few days, hundreds of companies pledged to suspend their giving

What's happened since?

🧵

Popular Information | Judd Legum | Substack

Independent accountability journalism. Click to read Popular Information, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.