Journal entries year 2018

2018-01-31

This is a very good book - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

2018-02-08

Debian ranked #1 in the Linux Journal poll for best Linux distribution.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/best-linux-distribution-2018

2018-02-11

Scientists discovered that this marble crayfish is cloning itself. Their population is increasing very rapidly. It arrived in Madagascar around 2007 and is now estimated to be in millions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/science/mutant-crayfish-clones-europe.html

2018-02-19

The next time a politician who won't support stricter gun laws asks for a campaign donation - just send them 'thoughts and prayers'. #KidsLivesMatter

2018-02-20

I wish there is an automated way to get a "TL;DR" version of a webpage. Almost all news articles on bloomberg, wsj, nytimes are lengthly with very little useful information.

2018-03-02

This is impressive at so many levels. India's unique wound dressing that stops bleeding in minutes gets FDA nod!

https://www.thebetterindia.com/132937/indias-unique-wound-dressing-axiostat-gets-fda-nod/

2018-03-10

Speechless! What do we do with him? Hats off man!

BCCI accepts Dravid's request to halve his Under-19 World Cup reward

http://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id/22595551/bcci-accepts-dravid-request-halve-19-world-cup-reward

2018-03-20

Standoff at Panera Bread near Princeton University ends after gunman fatally shot by police

https://nj.gov/oag/newsreleases18/pr20180320e.html

2018-03-23

Walmart launches small army of autonomous scanning robots - http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/20/walmart-launches-autonomous-scanning-robots/

2018-03-28

The new finance.google.com website is horrible. It looks like Google also disabled the api to download historical data. URLs such as https://finance.google.com/finance/historical?q=WMT&enddate=2017-11-15&startdate=2017-11-14&output=csv are no longer working.

2018-03-31

"Mommy, I don't want to go school today"
"Why?"

Everybody is hugging me when I enter classroom.
Eliyana is scratching me.
I want to be with you, mommy.
I am grumpy today.
I am getting tired in the evening and then I cannot watch rhymes because I feel sleepy.

My daughter has been trying many different things through out this week. I wonder what she will do next week.

2018-05-12

According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH4bi60alZU , GMOs are not bad. In fact they are necessary for human survival in the long run.

2018-05-13

Chess Grandmasters live longer than the general population. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0196938 . Their survival rate is comparable to Olympic medallists.

2018-05-30

/* Conversation between my daughter and her mother */

"హంసీ, ఇంక దేవుడికి దండంపెట్టుకుని పడుకో"

"దేవుడా, I am not sleepy. You also do not sleep, ok? Mommy is sleepy. Don't copy mommy. Copy me."

#ఇదండీవరస

2018-06-27

Robot cooking matar paneer. Very impressive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBB0ZaN1paE

2018-07-26

Created http://prasanthicreations.xyz/mehndi.html to advertise my wife, Prasanthi's mehndi services.

2018-07-31

Teenager Finds Classical Alternative to Quantum Recommendation Algorithm - https://www.quantamagazine.org/teenager-finds-classical-alternative-to-quantum-recommendation-algorithm-20180731/

Blog post from Scott Aaronson - https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3880

2018-08-06

Killing the senescent cells using a drug that is a combination of quercetin and dasatinib delayed the aging mechanism in mouse. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/drugs-that-kill-off-old-cells-may-limit-a-bodys-aging/

2018-08-11

This is very nice - The wisdom and/or madness of crowds

2018-08-19

Potato paradox - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox

2018-08-26

"Never provide poor solutions to poor people. " Very inspiring and touching talk!

https://www.ted.com/talks/chetna_gala_sinha_how_women_in_rural_india_turned_courage_into_capital

2018-09-02

Very well explained - Bobby Fischer's 21-move brilliancy

2018-09-13

https://snarky.ca/setting-expectations-for-open-source-participation/ - Setting expectations for open source participation

It is a bit long but well worth reading.

2018-09-14

The Most Notorious Towing Company in Chicago Gets the Boot - http://members.boardhost.com/onedeuce/thread/1536957135.html

The article talks about Lincoln Towing Service, locally known as the Lincoln Park Pirates, has hauled away cars for no reason, overcharged motorists to get them back and taunted owners who complained. This happened for more than half a century.

2018-09-24

This is a great place to start if you are dealing with a sequence of numbers and wondering if there is an underlying pattern - https://oeis.org/

2018-10-13

Me is only sitting as me in you ... ROTFLMAO!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OmPEmhdPp8

2018-10-15

“Crypto is the Mother of All Scams and (Now Busted) Bubbles While Blockchain Is The Most Over-Hyped Technology Ever, No Better than a Spreadsheet/Database.”

That’s the title of Nouriel Roubini’s testimony to Congress about crypto today.

2018-10-24

Apps Installed On Millions Of Android Phones Tracked User Behavior To Execute A Multimillion-Dollar Ad Fraud Scheme - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/how-a-massive-ad-fraud-scheme-exploited-android-phones-to . Well researched article. Authored by Craid Silverman. Google's response to the fraud scheme - https://security.googleblog.com/2018/10/google-tackles-new-ad-fraud-scheme.html

2018-11-06

Note to self: stop checking Facebook a week before every election so I do not have to be tortured with all these "go vote" messages.

2018-11-14

https://about.gitlab.com/2018/11/14/how-we-spent-two-weeks-hunting-an-nfs-bug/ - It is a nice write up on how the Gitlab team discovered an NFS bug in the Linux kernel and helped fixing it upstream. This is what I love about open source. It lets you debug the entire stack. Kudos to the gitlab company for providing resources in the effort to fix something upstream.

2018-12-01

Linus Torvalds interview at TED 2016 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8NPllzkFhE

2018-12-22

Can anyone refer me to https://superhuman.com/ ?

2018-12-08

Huawei CFO (who is also the daughter of the comapny's CEO) arrested in Vancouver, faces extradition to the US - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canada-has-arrested-huaweis-global-chief-financial-officer-in

2018-12-24

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge - A great article on Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat

2018-12-27

https://kite.com/blog/python/functional-programming - A well written article on functional programming capabilities in Python. Even though the article is titled "Best Practices for Using Functional Programming in Python" it does not give much advice on that. Never the less, I found it informative, well written. Learned a thing or two.

Summary:

Use pure functions, avoid mutability, limit use of classes, strive for idempotency, use lambdas for one line functions, use higher order functions sparingly, use generators where applicable