https://aiexperiments.withgoogle.com/autodraw - I really liked this experiment. You can doodle something and it will pick your doodle and give you a proper picture. For e.g. below I drew a flower and than could get a neat version.

If you are web-developer, no more struggling with creation for favicons. :) outsource it to AI.

My drawing:

Computer Output:

This is a short documentary on Steve Jobs, trying to start again with the NeXT computers. It captures him as a individual working with his team, using his experience, build and sell a computer for education market.

Given the team he had, the approach he took, it seems that the result was a successful one.

BYTE in 1989 listed the NeXT Computer as among the "Excellence" winners of the BYTE Awards, stating that
it "shows what can be done when a personal computer is designed as a system, and not a collection of
hardware elements". Citing as "truly innovative" the optical drive, DSP, and object-oriented programming
environment, the magazine concluded that "the NeXT Computer is worth every penny of its $6500 market price".

• NeXT_Computer

Listened to this guest lecture by Mark Zuckerberg in 2005. He was not world famous then yet, so the audience size is small and they ask pointed questions about facebook. This was supposed to be a computer science class, and Mark chides multiple times at the crowd that they are not asking CS questions yet.

Mark Zuckerberg's personality comes out well in this lecture. The interesting things that a computer science engineer can pick up is, Mark suggests, knowing "C" you could jump to "PHP". The idea about scalable architecture, performance optimization early in the game etc.

His thoughts on running a business in a competitive environment were interesting too.

This is a short non-technical book consisting of compiled speeches of Richard Feynman. It does not into physics, but covers a lot of topics like religion, politics, society, ethical questions in science, atom bombs and scientist motivations. Richard feynman has lot of context to explore all these areas. Plus, his communication style is very pleasant.

I usually avoid reading general books like this. But I happen to pick this up, and on a day, when I was about to give some leeway into an astrology (it's not a science) shared by my close ones, having just reading a topic in this book gave me excellent points to bring my thinking back into track. Contrary to my assumption when starting to read this book, I found it extremely useful!

Received this motivational quote from Khan Academy today.

Recent research shows that students learn more when they are taught that intelligence is malleable and can be grown through hard work. Students do worse if they believe that intelligence is fixed, and so are afraid to make mistakes or ask questions because they will look like they aren't smart. Let your students know that they're getting smarter every minute they spend practicing and tackling tough problems!

I added these git clean short-cut aliases to my config.

[alias]
   cls = clean -x -n -e *.iml -e .idea
   cl = clean -x -f -e *.iml -e .idea

Often, I would mistakenly delete my IntelliJ idea files and I will loose the various customizations I had done. This setup will prevent the mishap from happening again.

The original post is here.

I might have stumbled upon this via hackernews and this topic is of perennial interest to me. The general advice given were helpful. I liked the specific, measurable suggestions too. These were:

• Learn C - I know C. I have written C. I will need to get back to writing in C.

• Write a compiler - Not yet.

• Learn macros - Not yet.

• SICP - Not yet.

• Understand continuations - Not yet.

• If anything, just try a new language - I try this every now and then. The emphasis on his post were learning functional languages which, I think, I will be starting this year.

I earned a Benjamin Franklin badge.

That was very motivating.

I listened to "Introduction to Siddhartha Gautama Buddha and Buddhism" at Khan Academy. It was consistent with what I had known about "Siddhartha". This 9 minute lesson dwells into core-idea and philosophy shared by Siddhartha pretty quickly and explains it succinctly.

We know of the Andrew Carnegie as the famous philanthropist who donated huge portions of his wealth for setting up public libraries across united states. What I was not aware was, he as an immigrant and a child laborer who got benefited from his reading, when one of his boss opened up his library on Saturdays for his workers.

Got to know this from a very tangential post titled Keep the Internet Open

From Alan Kay:

Yes -- in fact, the original notion about all this was to be in the same spirit as the 1936 Electrical and Telephone Federal Act which was specifically aimed at rural areas that the utilities didn't want to spend money to reach, so the fed mandated "power and phone" as a kind of universal right. This has also been a theme of the EFF. The basic impulse was also one of the drivers behind Carnegie's huge support of the free library system in the US (the whole story there is interesting, including some of the high minded stipulations in the Carnegie bequests, which I've on occasion tried to get the Internet communities to buy off on).

Every Carnegie library had to have two special rooms -- one just for children, and the other where people could be taught to read. Part of the Carnegie money for the libraries supported the reading teachers and sessions. Carnegie was an immigrant and child laborer who could read a little. One of his earliest bosses would open his home library to his workers on Saturdays. Carnegie used this to raise himself up, and never forgot how it happened. (He was also one of the few truly rich people ever who said he was going to give it all away to benefit the civilization around him, and actually did it.)