Robin Marantz Henig: Monk in the Garden: Life of Gregor Mendel
An amazing biography. The perseverance and meticulousness with Mendel performed the experiments is very inspiring. He was not the typical gifted/talented student either. He would face many difficulties at school as well as while trying to be a priest.
If I were to just pick one favorite, it is not even a contest. Heck, challenge me to pick one favorite in a decade, it would still be this. Charlie Munger!
Charlie Munger: Poor Charlie’s Almanack
I even wrote about this: https://krishna2.com/munger
Just like countless others, I too grew up bewildered by Jackie Chan's movies and his stunts. And I liked his autobiography.
Jackie Chan: Never Grow Up
I read "The Poppy War" - even though I liked it, I didn't want to go down a full-fledged series. I read "Yellowface" and loved it so much. I have "Babel" on my shelf - but (irrationally) I am not reading it thinking that it would be over if I read it.
R. F. Kuang: Yellowface
I can't wait for what R.F. Kuang's going to come up with next.
This is an old classic -- my son recommended this to me. I enjoyed it.
Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther
What an amazing biography. Very very inspiring.
Robin Marantz Henig: Monk in the Garden: Life of Gregor Mendel
I had gotten her "Ember in the Ashes" in 2016 or so but never got to it - but this story snipper caught my attention. What a lovely book. It is set in a Motel in a Sierra Nevada town in California. Loved the book. Promptly went back to read "Ember in the ashes". This book (all my rage) won the National Book Award for Young Readers.
Sabhaa Tahir: All my Rage
Everyone's bound to get on this train sooner or later (I think this is being made into a movie) -- 440,000+ reviews on amazon. I got curious and got this book. Liked it.
Freida McFadden: The Housemaid
I am keeping the recommendations to a general audience and hence skipping my Vedanta books (which I thoroughly relish/read and read again many times). Oh, there are a bunch of business books too, a bunch more fiction this year (than my usual ratio) including a few LitRPG and of course, some running related. As always, you can see the full list here:
Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charlie Munger is one of my favorites. It keeps on giving. Amazed that Munger had access to all this wisdom 40 or 50 or even more years ago.
Likewise![1] I apply it to all aspects of life and also whatever book[2] I read, I end up seeing something from the Gita in there. (or a movie or song).
Bhagavad Gita : Various translations and commentaries by many authors. Fascinating to see a fairly small text (roughly 700 verses @ ~1400 lines) that lends itself to so many interpretations and thoughts.
In every reading, there is always something new that I learn, a new perspective and new lessons that I can apply to daily life.
Very interestingly this is the first scale for anyone learning Carnatic Music (classical Indian music predominantly popular and taught in South India).
Such an inspiring post. Awesome to hear your story. Did you do it part time or full time? And yes, a +1 to the comment and to the idea that you should write a blog post. Thanks!
I liked the way Ray Bradbury writes about this in Fahrenheit 451. When you read books, you have time to think about it, re-read it and question it. Whereas while watching video, things move so fast that the decision is made up for you.
There is also this book : The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy Reprint Edition, Kindle Edition
by Charles R. Morris
Congrats on the launch. Have you considered doing this for Kindle Singles?
There are certain topics that I am interested in but the time I want to invest is between NewYorker articles (15-20 pages) and a full-fledged market-dynamics dictated 250-450 page book. And Kindle Singles (and such sized books) fill that niche nicely. And needless to add here, am a huge audible / audio fan - so would love to see the two get merged.
Great that you already have those datasets. Yes, putting it on a small public server where people can search and evaluate would be good. Honestly the "speed" part cannot be truly verified if it is on a standard public server but at least the other aspects of it can be. As I see it, you are up against primarily Elasticsearch and Postgres's search engines. [To put out a full index could be costly so you could always try a small subset but still a good enough chunk, say a million docs or so].
Another thing to keep in mind is how easy it is to install and be pluggable. I know you have designed it as a library but I think a small wrapper around it with its own http server so anyone using it can start it as a service and use http to access via JSON would be useful too. [At least everyone these days seem to do everything in containers]. And also to add, Elasticsearch sets a good bar for how easy it is spin up a search engine and get started. Again, not sure how far you must be going to make ResinDB as easy to install, to use and document and all that.
One way to get adoption is to approach a few open-source projects and non-profit orgs (or profit orgs but you might've to start out for free) and see if you can convince them to use your search engine. Once you have a couple or more, it helps in two ways. First, you can get good feedback on what are the steps that someone besides you need to do to get it in production and updates and maintenance and second, you can use them as reference customers.
Feel free to contact me via email [same as hn id but with the popular email service from another search engine out there! :)].
That's a big claim and kudos if you really pulled it off. There is also the aspect of relevancy in addition to speed.
I think the best way you can showcase is to build a few sample proof-of-concept search engines. For e.g., How about a search engine for Wikipedia? Project Gutenberg? StackOverflow? All these datasets are freely available. You can set up a search engine for this and easily let anyone be able to verify your search engine's speed and relevancy.
Lastly, in addition to both speed and relevance is how easy it is to install, customize and extend.
Why can't one of those big cloud/disk providers (Dropbox or Amazon or Microsoft or Google or Apple) come up with such a Password Manager? In fact, they can integrate it really well too.
@sama : Great write up. Regarding the admission process you had mentioned on Dalton Caldwell that he took "a process that used to be stressful and deeply imperfect and improved it by a huge amount."
"Hamilton" by Lin Manuel Miranda. This is the story of how the play came to be after his first white house performance.
Here is a short post I wrote a few days back:
Hamilton is an absolutely fantastic musical. An amazing history : probably the most interesting story of a founding-father. It has got everything : rags-to-riches, heroism, fighting, betrayal, sex scandal, .. you name it. The musical is based off of Ron Chernow's door-stop sized biography. Lin Manuel Miranda adapted it to a Broadway play. And if you are like most, you will end up becoming a huge fan of Miranda. The musical won a Pulitzer as well as a lot of Tony's including the best musical. What a beautiful way to tell the story of a founding father with Rap, Hip-Hop, R&B and a bunch of other genres. Mind blown!
If you can get a ticket to the musical, consider yourself lucky and go watch it. I haven't. So ended up doing all the other reading / listening before the musical finale. :)
I got so interested in this that I have now listened to the musical (many times), read all the coverage of it in NY Times (published as a book) and also the book that Miranda himself wrote about the genesis of the show and watched a dozen videos of Lin on youtube.
An amazing biography. The perseverance and meticulousness with Mendel performed the experiments is very inspiring. He was not the typical gifted/talented student either. He would face many difficulties at school as well as while trying to be a priest.