Kirubakaran Athmanathan
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Aug 2018

Aug 23, 2018

Photos

Working on the beach
Working on the beach

Breakfast by the lake
Backpacking Breakfast

Backpacking Gang
Gang

Too bad Alan couldn't make it this time. We'll have to do another backpacking trip with all six of us to make it the official "Annual Hacker House Hike".

Strawberry Station is a cool store otw to Tahoe, to pick up things for hiking, camping, or snowboarding, if I forget something. 45min east of Placerville; 30min west of South Lake Tahoe; on Highway 50. 8a-7p daily. google maps

Hog Wild has really good food near Placerville. 11a-8p; Closed: Mon & Tue. google maps

Writing

I'm thinking about setting something up that would essentially let me quickly publish small updates, similar to tweets. This is so that the website can be a better information management system for myself, by reducing the publishing barrier / threshold.

I use Hugo to publish this website. I'll either set up a Hugo plugin or think of some "quick update" workflow that works with my current setup without any tooling changes.

I don't want to actually tweet using Twitter, because I like to own my content. I don't mind using it to get traffic though.

Speaking of tweets, I now have a Mastodon account. I still think that it makes sense to keep all my content on my website, at least until I run my own Mastodon server. I don't know if that's worth it right now.

I'm not happy with the org file renderer of Hugo. It doesn't seem to follow the specs. For example, if the list item starts with a link, it doesn't get rendered as a link. I have too much work to fix this though, so I'm working around the shortcomings with hacks. I'm prefixing the links with ‌ Nested lists don't work, so I'm putting in raw html instead of org lists. This sucks, but setting aside my already insane time commitments to work on this is not really an option right now. Oh well.

Reading

  1. ‌Prisoners' Dilemma

    2. I'm half way through it. Very interesting read. It has a brief biography of John von Neumann, lot of fun anecdotes around the Manhattan Project, etc.

  2. ‌A Place Called Freedom

    3. I've enjoyed Ken Follet a lot in the past, but I'm finding this book to be not that exciting. Maybe this is not his best work, or maybe my tastes have changed? I'm probably going to abandon this book.

    I'm excited about exploring these books soon:
  1. ‌The Origins of Order
  2. ‌Coding the Matrix

Bookmarks

  1. ‌Predicting Google Closures
  2. ‌Connections between Physics and Deep Learning
  3. ‌Open Worm : Building a virtual organism

    4. They're trying to build a comprehensive computational model of a microscopic worm. It has just a thousand cells, it solves feeding, mate-finding and predator avoidance. I found it via this interesting comment on Hacker News, which is about another super interesting project: Simulating snails. Here are the dev updates

  4. ‌Mistakes You Should Never Make

    5. Highlights:
    • make a budget for your company, get a bookkeeper
    • be explicit with cofounders
    • invite an outside director to sit on your board when you raise money
    • build a support network