All things I loved consuming to reinforce my prior beliefs of the world around.
Proxies and brokers. Don't replace everything at once. Add new code with same old functionality. Replace old code piece by piece like Ship of Theseus. It will have less domino effect of bugs.
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Avoid rewriting a legacy system from scratch, by strangling it
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A journey to searching Have I Been Pwned database in 49μs (C++)
Searching using optimal algorithm and data structure. It's weird how in normal cases we don't even consider worst case scenario and just let the algorithm be. But data structures and search algorithms do matter in performance critical domains.
This makes sense for me at the moment. Having been working as a computer vision engineer
coughs(over-estimation of the post), PDFs are pain in the ass....
The shell can be one of the powerful tools you can use if you are to be comfortable with CLI.
Partly because it's obscured and non-deterministic. "Non-deterministic" in a sense, a simple change can have unforeseen consequences and inherent bugs. Also the goals keep on changing constantly. Problems with scaling, keeping with temporal values and such.
Hacker News Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22523814
This is an interesting issue in open-source. The original creator of Guake was not listed on the later-contributed-by-community continuation of the project.
It also showcases the healthy discussion between the intellectuals.
List of relevant resources for data engineering.
[Almost certainty] If other ML models already solved the problem.
[Very high probability] If a similar problem has already been solved by an ML algorithm, and the differences between that and your problem don’t seem significant.
[High probability] If the inputs & outputs are small enough to be comparable in size to those of other working ML models AND if we know a human can solve the problem with little context besides the inputs and outputs.
[Reasonable probability] If the inputs & outputs are small enough to be comparable in size to those of other working ML models AND we have a high certainty about the deterministic nature of the problem (that is to say, about the inputs being sufficient to infer the outputs).
We seem to cling to patterns we are familiar with. That applies to software development too. Patterns in programming...
I love how Ben interprets the underlying complex phenomena into simple and understandable manner. This specific video demonstrates the pros and cons of building an entire computer on a breadboard. At higher signal frequency, the noises kick in due to more inductance and capacitance on the board which in low frequency signal otherwise might not be observed.
"But, a company can send out its take-home interview question indiscriminately and waste candidates' time. (This is why I walk away from time-consuming take-homes, or take-homes that require an alphabet soup of technologies.)"
"It's much harder to tell when a take-home question is bad. Some candidates might want to impress you and spend an unreasonable time on the question. Other candidates might ghost. (Ghosting means the candidate just stops responding to emails and phone calls.) The feedback loop just isn't there."
"As a candidate, when I get a bad whiteboarding question, it's easy for me to just muddle through it. Depending on circumstances, I'll either decline the job or discuss the odd question with someone else in the process. But, when I get a bad take-home question, I'm stuck between either ghosting, (not responding at all,) or providing feedback. I've done both, and I'm not sure which is a better approach. The one case I gave feedback, the hiring manager got defensive, which confirmed my decision to walk away."
Interesting. Tests have their own set of planes in themselves.
I feel this is a great tool. Generating dependency graph has always been a bummer for me since I don't use any type of IDE.
pydeps generates the graph at module levels. It's kinda good to see it.
History of conflicts of naming "heavenly"(as they say) bodies. It's amazing how same results are obtained independently by independent observers without having any interaction with each other's existence.
It's always fascinating to hear Susskind. Loved listening to this one.
This is the part 1 of the series by WBH.
This video is about the Ozma problem of distinguishing the chirality (ie left-handedness or right-handedness) of matter using weak interaction processes like beta decay (for example in uranium), or neutral kaon/k-meson decay. This is wrapped up in the phenomenon of CP violation, by which charge and parity are both violated by certain weak interaction processes - this enables antimatter to be unambiguously distinguished from matter, and left handed chirality from right handed.
In this particular part, it dives (in a very layman way like WBH does every time) into the genes as a nature's software, and animals as a container/host for those genes.
This makes so much sense once you've read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
I think one should have few questions that keep them up at night.
First, it makes you aware of your own "self" and the universe.
Second, it makes you go to the places that you might not otherwise. A rabbit-hole of information you will get to consume and feel more anxious!
This has been one of the most relaxed and insightful conversations in the series.
I love how penrose is humble, and articulated even at the age of 90 years.
The conversation jumps from philosophy of time, space, conciousness, learning and much.
This is an exciting conversation, partly because Ann and Carl were couples and that their relationship was a cosmic phenomenon.
The anecdotes Ann presented about their life, the power of science, the making of the Cosmos series and such were insightful.
I'd say, this was a great conversation to listen to without much technical details in the process.
This can be seen through Ann's enthusiasm for going into topic much deeper philosophically.
It's always fascinating to read about entropy from another perspective...
"Science today stands at a crossroads: will its progress be driven by human minds or by the machines that we’ve created?"
"Understanding is the means by which we overcome a world of paradox and illusion by opening up the black box of knowledge to modification."
Stephen has come up with his own computational view of universe. However, he is getting backfired.
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"The structure of our social media feeds blinds us to history, as it causes us to live in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption. The structure of the Internet pulls people away from age-old wisdom..."
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"The world always makes sense. But it can be confusing. When it is, your model of the world is wrong. So, things that don’t make sense are a learning opportunity. Big opportunities won’t make sense until it’s too late to profit from them."
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Hormesis: A low dose of something can have the opposite effect of a high dose. A little bit of stress wakes you up, but a lot of stress is bad for you. Lifting weights for 30 minutes per day is good for you, but lifting weights for 6 hours per day will destroy your muscles. Stress yourself, but not too much.
We share our tools and tools shape us.
I could resonate on this particular topic on whole another level.
Heartfelt. Contemplating. Leaning on. We seem to lean on certain things, certain conenctions and attachments..in many ways we can only begin to realize about. Self-reliance is a must I agree. But, one cannot truly live in his/her own solitude, right? There's should be some companionship that creates compassion and emotions that blend into the perceived reality of oneself... Lean on...
It's good that David has influenced so much of people around...not in a "classification" manner like "good" or "bad"...but in a more artistic way that seems to resonate with people that are in depressed state...in a more subtle way that's not nonchalant....
"I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it." - Nelson Mandela
Reading this write-up made so much sense not only on the startup/tech stack but on life itself. Anxieties are "ways" for imaginations, most of which are pretty on the dark side I guess. Fear is a feature of anxiety that kept our ancestors safer, so all of us feel anxious sometimes.
Damn. I truly know this particular feeling. Drinking coffee feels like a hopeless situation of hope and tragedy...
"The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one's voice rises, one's gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing"
"Humility — the acceptance that being human is good enough — is the embrace of ordinariness."
The love his admirers bear this author has a peculiarly intimate and personal character. This is because Wallace gave voice to the inner workings of ordinary human beings in a manner so winning and so truthful and forgiving as to make him seem a friend.
Wallace seemed always to be trying to erase the distance between himself and others in order to understand them better, and trying visibly to make himself understood — always asking questions, demanding to know more details.
This is a short and concise write-up by David. Like he has mentioned in the article:
In my pursuit, I’m guided by the famous words of Bruce Lee: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
For me it's personally relatable since I don't quite have long attention span to focus on one thing for a very long time.
This hits hard and quite close to me. :)
I can't even imagine a person like Fred Rogers. He was a fascinating person I guess. And this article gives a perspective from the writer, a life-long friend of Rogers, who interviewed him and turned into a deeply emotional relationship.
"It's no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature."
"You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into."
"We become what we think about."
Earl Nightingale was an American radio speaker and author, dealing mostly with the subjects of human character development, motivation, and meaningful existence.
Earl Nightingale message is incredible here and we highly recommend listening to it and following some of the awesome traits Earl lays out in detail.
This is an inspiring speech by Nightingale. It's one of the best wisdom that anyone can get.
Truly amazing woman, Lynx!
"It's always a pleasure to get a peek into Murakami's mind. What a mindful converstaion between the two people here... "
This has been in my to-listen list for a long time now since I know (vaguely) who Eirc was. Finally, I listened it with attention to what Eric and Peter Thiel had to contribute. It was like two intellectuals, although separated by personal philosophy and dogma, were in this dance of thought processes that synchronized with each other. Both, having respect for each other, were totally true intellectuals. "Peter and Eric discuss the link between growth and violence and the need to rejoin the quest for a more energizing future for all levels of society."
This had been on my to-read for so many months because I wanted to experience the podcast. Since I've started listening to conversations, I feel I barely know who Joe is. I had assumed him to be someone groking money and popularity. Boy... I was damn wrong. This man is his own Wikipedia... intellectual...a different kind. I'm glad that I've started to listen to his podcast...
Reject teaches us valuable things, about doubts we have and dares us to ask the "why" question.
It was such a good experience reading about Dyson from the people around whom he influenced...
I am not sure if I can genuinely talk about this. I haven't had any chance to get into the mind of Parijat, how she viewed the world, and what even life and love meant to her? Is life even meaningful? I have many questions that often bombard my Mind-Cave.
This is heart-touching. I've no words. I hope someday medical miracle will be seen where cancer is cured.
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Why’s This So Good? David Foster Wallace and the brilliant “Consider the Lobster”
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Cigarette! Exquisite fiend, ephemeral friend, how I miss you
Not to philosophize the habit of smoking, but " Smoking is a pause, a space to breathe.". I wasn't a regular smoker (had started smoking just last year from once a week to few times a week). But I wasn't addicted becaus I could control myself. Plus there was weed.
Inspiring...
This flow of words moved me like [[The School Of Life]] does always. It's like watching a video from an old camcorder; you're just there imagining what it was like through the passage of time with love, sadness, happiness, fear, miseries; how we flowed. A reflection of one's self, of the world within, of the world that surrounds us.
Heart-wrenching
Bill Gates is pretty thoughtful and mindful. He is an intellect who (from my perspective) tries to see things from wider perspective through his knowledge and mental models.
This is one of the "better" talks I have watched and it's so true that the world isn't prepared to pandemics.
We think are ready for any thing. We were ready to buckle up for war between countries, inside a country, separatists propaganda, and so much I can't jolt down here.
But here's the thing, we are never ready for new kind of viruses, a new form of epidemic. Partly because viruses are complex, mutable. And partly because we can't truly quarantine such entities. And because they grow exponentially in some forms. It takes time to reach a stale growth, the upper flat side of a sigmoid curve. It just takes time and we don't have enough mentality to avoid new viruses.
That's why we have never thought of preparing for such outbreak despite being cautioned by researchers time and again of possible outburst. Perhaps, we all are cognitively bias to refer to new type of viruses as simple flus, with relatively small number of deaths initially. But then when it grows and gets out of hand, that's when we realize it has already begun and we haven't still prepared ourselves. That's the truth I guess.
Like his talk from 2015, Bill keeps on emphasizing how we should proceed for testing kits/tool that are cheaper, help private sectors and be more precationary.
What are the world’s biggest and most urgent problems?
The most urgent problems are those where people can have the greatest impact by working on them.
The more neglected and solvable, the further extra effort will go.
I know it will take sometime...
This was a unique read for me. I guess it's more like reading a research paper than an article. I could barely understand the statistics (which I had studied in the B.E days). It's interesting to note that the author didn't find any degradation of cognitive skills due to a lack of "normal" sleep hours. The author used some techniques to measure his cognitive skills, mainly playing a video game, solving SAT problems, and [[Psychomotor Vigilance Task]] (a sustained-attention, reaction-timed task that measures the speed with which subjects respond to a visual stimulus). However, it might be the case that subtle negative effects will accumulate slowly, if not checked, to the point that it may degrade physical health too. The data collection technique by the author needs patience and a lot of self-awareness. That's fascinating equally.
"How would you live if you couldn’t use social media? You’d probably have to develop a whole new set of skills, which could be an amazing personal growth challenge, one you might actually find deeply fulfilling if you tackled it."
I wish I could have same level of perseverance as that of the author. This is truly an inspiring write-up.
I recently discovered this band. I have been listening to some exotic music that reflect native culture through their instruments, vocals and spirit.
"A celebration of the cosmopolitan traditions of both Istanbul and the Sephardic Jewish community and another example of the great music that is coming out of the Eastern Mediterranean right now." - fRoots Magazine
This specific song is hewbrewish. The title translates to On The Way To The Sea. The translation of the song goes something like this:
A pair of busty eyes
A pair of similar eyes
They tell me why they can't
And be happyWaiting life
Life gift
Escape from here for over a year
To another countryOn the way to the sea
I didn't prepare for that
May call me there
In her erotic voiceTalked about the Creator
And I could see
Sometimes it exists
In the neurotic world
I think it's beautiful and should be felt to (not just listened).
When it comes to hearing music, a network of nerves in the auditory cortex called the corticofugal network helps catalog the different patterns of music.
When we hear something that hasn’t already been mapped onto the brain, the corticofugal network goes a bit haywire, and our brain releases too much dopamine as a response. When there is no anchor or no pattern on which to map, music registers as unpleasant. “If the dopamine neurons can’t correlate their firing with outside events, the brain is unable to make cogent associations.” The way the corticofugal system learns new patterns limits our experiences by making everything we already know far more pleasurable than everything we don’t.
It’s that our brains actually fight against the unfamiliarity of life. We are built to abhor the uncertainty of newness. The choice to listen to new music prioritizes, if for one listen only, the artist over you.
Philip Kennicott is the chief Art and Architecture Critic of The Washington Post. Philip reflects some of his early experiences with an introduction to music and how his teachers have influenced his perspective on music.
Places tolerate us. For natives and local residence, same places mean different values. For outside observers, it's a matter of great "research" topic about culture and evolution of the place. For writer, it's more affine towards emotional aspect -- more articulated feelings.
The modes of transportation have shaped how cities grew and thus how culture, economy, civilization evolved...
I've been watching documentaries about Kubrick... It's fascinating to see how he approached storytelling...
This gave me goosebumps.
"This poem was written by the great poet and philosopher Rabbi Solomon Ibn Gabirol during the 11th century. The Piyut opens with a statement of time - the dawn. This leads into a description of the light as a differentiator, creating and renewing things, giving them their form and volume. At this hour, daybreak, the poet chooses to request an audience with his God, between the uncertainty of the night and the fullness of the dawn. The poet is searching for the light that will clarify, explain, and differentiate the things as God did during the creation of the world."
Build stuff. Don’t just study stuff, build stuff!
Few things I have been experimenting (using) on:
(a) pocket: My go-to platform for saving articles to be read later.
(b) evernote: I mostly dump my broken thoughts here.
(c) zotero: Currenly experimenting on this. Seems promising.
(d) Meta: bits-and-paradoxes: Compiling some contents I have liked here.
(e) Notion: People say it's very good. I haven't got my hands dirty with this.
(f) Memex: I had been using this on-off. But I ditched it since it was having a toll on the CPU in my firefox browser.
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How do you remember all of your tags? How do you make sure each note is tagged properly?
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How to Stick With Good Habits Even When Your Willpower is Gone
"Your habits change depending on the room you are in and the cues in front of you."
"Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language."
Everyday, I am improving my usage on roam...and it's getting more and more like "organized chaos". I guess that's okay. :)
"Literacy develops through practice—through labor that compels the development of revised brain functions. The more you read, the more your brain adapts. It is a “plastic” organ"
try to focus on long-term skills (engine)
never hesitate to go for short-term ones whenever an opportunity arrives
I'm never going to see "dictionary" with same perspective again...
"There's an amazing thing that happens when you start using the right dictionary"
This is good. I might look back at this time and again.
"How much of what you read today will you still care about a year from now?"
Beautiful. :)