krishna2

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.

Here are a few of my favorite reads from 2024.

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:

https://krishna2.com/books

Here's to a happy prosperous fulfilling 2025!

Happy reading!

This post is available at: https://krishna2.com/2024 Post on Jan 1, 2024 (2023 reading): https://krishna2.com/2023 Post on Jan 1, 2023 (2022 reading): https://krishna2.com/2022

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.

Even wrote a review in case: https://krishna2.com/munger

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).

[1] https://krishna2.com/bg [2] https://krishna2.com/books

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.

(My books/reading list: https://krishna2.com/books)

https://krishna2.com - my personal site with some essays but mostly I keep it to publish my reading list: https://krishna2.com/books

Happy to answer any questions. I am the first author of the WIT dataset / paper and the above blog post.

A twitter thread: https://twitter.com/krishna2/status/1440423443804024839 and a linkedin post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/krishna2_announcing-wit-a-wik...

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.

A lot of action nowadays happen on Mobile. How would this help with that?

You could color the 1s and 0s - so the image is more obvious and enhanced.

For Rockefeller, there is Ron Chernow's.

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

Links: https://www.amazon.com/Titan-Life-John-Rockefeller-Sr-ebook/...

https://www.amazon.com/Andrew-Carnegie-David-Nasaw-ebook/dp/...

https://www.amazon.com/Tycoons-Carnegie-Rockefeller-Invented...

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.

Thanks & Good luck!

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.

Hope that helps!

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.

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@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."

Can you please elaborate on that?

"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.

Here's Lin's first presentation of this idea in a poetry recital at the White House: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNFf7nMIGnE

The entire musical is available on many streaming services and on youtube too.

The book by Lin Manuel Miranda : Hamilton : https://www.amazon.com/Hamilton-Revolution-Lin-Manuel-Mirand...

This is the book that covers all articles on NY Times: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01FWP73AM/

A few cool Lin videos:

SNL Monologue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsupmN90wBk

Freestyle rapping in the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w31jboLYcH4

Freestyle with Ellen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqhKeIr6Zbc&t=201s

Ron Chernow's book: https://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Hamilton-Ron-Chernow-ebook/...

[yet to read this massive tome -> saving it up as the finale].

Super interesting. Thanks for all the curation and relevant set of links that you are promptly posting/replying. StackOverflow data is available for free too - that would be one awesome dataset to let folks get their hands on. Any plans for that?

"In an NVMe-based solid state drive, XPoint chips can deliver more than 95,000 I/O operations per second at a 9 microsecond latency, compared to 13,400 IOPs and 73 ms latency for flash."

and

"A version of XPoint in DIMMs will enable up to 6 TBytes main memory in a two-socket Xeon server at about half the cost of DRAM".

Happy my list will cons new lists. :)

PoSe is by far the magnum opus. PaKa was written first and SiSa was written a dozen or so years later but historically SiSa happens about a decade or two before PaKa. PaKa is short (one-fifth the size of the other two). I liked the story of PaKa a lot. [although the movie version was totally butchered]. And just like how PoSe (which happens about 300 years after PaKa/SiSa) is all about Chozhas, the other two are about Pallavas. Very fascinating reads - will totally recommend it.

If you like Science and Music (in this case, western classical music), and biographies/history related to the science/music characters, then you will like my list a lot. Please feel free to get in touch offline - can share more details. [I have the same id as the hn id in google/gmail as well].

PS: the goodreads link you posted takes me to my year_in_books page - can you please share your public url? Would love to see your reading list. thanks.

Here is my list from 2015:

1. Mark Derby: England my England

2. Bill Messenger: Elements of Jazz [great courses]

3. David Mamet: GlenGary Glen Ross

4. Neil deGrasse Tyson: The Pluto Files

5. Elizabeth Vandiver: The Illiad by Homer [great courses]

6. Elizabeth Vandiver: The Odyssey by Homer [great courses]

7. Elizabeth Vandiver: The Aeneid by Virgil [great courses]

8. Robert Greenberg: Great Masters: Liszt - His Life and Music [great courses]

9. David Christian: Big History [great courses]

10. Robert Greenberg: Great Masters: Robert and Clara Schumann - Their Lives and Music [great courses]

11. Steven Novella: Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills [great courses]

12. Ramesh Menon (Veda Vyasa): Mahabharatha

13. Mark W. Muesse: Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation [great courses]

14. J.K. Rowling: Book 1: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

15. J.K. Rowling: Book 2: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

16. Steven Pressfield: The War of Art

17. Barnaby Conrad, Monte Schulz: Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life

18. J.K. Rowling: Book 3: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

19. Ramesh Menon (Veda Vyasa): Siva Puranam

20. Professor Allen C. Guelzo, Professor Gary W. Gallagher, Professor Patrick N. Allitt: The History of the United States, 2nd Edition [great courses]

21. Robert Greenberg: Great Masters: Brahms - His Life and Music [great courses]

22. Robert Greenberg: Great Masters: Tchaikovsky - His Life and Music [great courses]

23. Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni: The Palace of Illusions

24. J.K. Rowling: Book 4: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

25. Austin Kleon: Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

26. Stephen King: On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft

27. David McCullough: 1776

28. Prof. Roy Benaroch: Medical School for Everyone [great courses]

29. J.K. Rowling: Book 5: Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix

30. Siddartha Mukherjee: The Emperor Of All Maladies

31. J.K. Rowling: Book 6: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

32. Robert Greenberg: Great Masters: Shostakovich - His Life and Music [great courses]

33. J.K. Rowling: Book 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

34. Neil deGrasse Tyson: The Inexplicable Universe: Unsolved Mysteries [great courses]

35. Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli: Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

36. Shurnyu Suzuki: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

37. William Shirer: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

38. Jhumpa Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies

39. Stephen Greenblatt: The Swerve: How the world became modern

40. Professor Andrew R. Wilson: The Art of War [great courses]

41. Prof. Jennifer Paxton: 1066: The Year That Changed Everything [great courses]

42. Prof. Sherwin B. Nuland: Doctors: The History of Scientific Medicine Revealed Through Biography [great courses]

43. Sun Tzu: The Art of War

44. Prof. Robert Greenberg: Great Masters: Mahler - His Life and Music [great courses]

45. Prof. Seth Lerer: The Life and Writings of John Milton [great courses]

46. Prof. Robert Greenberg: Great Masters: Stravinsky - His Life and Music [great courses]

47. Stephen Guise: Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results

48. J.R.R. Tokien: Hobbit

49. George Orwell: Animal Farm

50. Prof. Seth Freeman: The Art of Negotiating the Best Deal [great courses]

51. Ram Dass: Be Here Now

52. Prof. Gregory S. Aldrete: The Decisive Battles of World History [great courses]

53. Conn Iggulden: Conqueror Series Book 1: Genghis: Birth of an Empire

54. Conn Iggulden: Conqueror Series Book 2: Genghis: Lords of the Bow

55. Prof. Frederick Gregory: History of Science 1700-1900 [great courses]

56. Prof. Indre Viskontas: 12 Essential Scientific Concepts [great courses]

57. Conn Iggulden: Conqueror Series Book 3: Genghis: Bones of the Hill

58. Conn Iggulden: Conqueror Series Book 4: Khan: Empire of Silver

59. Conn Iggulden: Conqueror Series Book 5: Conqueror

60. Prof. Robert Hazen: Origin and Evolution of Earth [great courses]

61. Mark Forsyth: Elements of Eloquence

62. Prof. Patrick Allitt: Industrial Revolution [great courses]

63. Ramesh Menon (Valmiki): Ramayana

64. Prof. John McWhorter: Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths of Language Usage [great courses]

65. Dava Sobel: Longtitude

66. Prof. Robert Hazen: Origins of Life [great courses]

67. Prof. Daniel Robinson: The Great Ideas of Psychology [great courses]

68. Tracy Kidder: The Soul of a New Machine

69. Prof. Garrett Fagan: History of Ancient Rome [great courses]

70. Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five

71. Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita

72. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

73. Kalki: Ponniyin Selvan: Book 1: Pudhu Vellam [apple music]

74. Upton Sinclair : The Jungle

75. John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath

76. Kalki: Ponniyin Selvan: Book 2: Suzhar Kaatru [apple music]

77. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engles: Manifesto of the Communist Party

78. Kalki: Ponniyin Selvan: Book 3: KoduVaal [apple music]

79. Kalki: Ponniyin Selvan: Book 4: Mani Magudam [apple music]

80. Kalki: Ponniyin Selvan: Book 5: Thiyaga Sigaram [apple music]

81. Kalki: Parthiban Kanavu [apple music]

82. Hugh Howey: Wool [Silo Series : Book 1 of 3]

83. Kalki: Sivagamiyin Sabatham: Book 1: Boogambam [apple music]

84. Kalki: Sivagamiyin Sabatham: Book 2: Kanchi Mutrugai [apple music]

85. Kalki: Sivagamiyin Sabatham: Book 3: Bhikshuvin Kadhal [apple music]

86. Kalki: Sivagamiyin Sabatham: Book 4: Sidhaindha Kanavu [apple music]

87. Thomas Sterner: The Practising Mind

88. don Miguel Ruiz: The Fifth Agreement

89. Prof. Jonah Berger: How Ideas Spread [great courses]

90. Prof. Robert Sapolsky: Being Human [great courses]

91. Michio Kaku: Einstein's Cosmos

92. Guy Kawasaki: Art of the Start 2.0

93. Edward Dolnick: Clockwork Universe

94. Prof. John Medina: Your Best Brain [great courses]

95. Sherman Alexie: Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

96. Prof. Thad Polk: Addictive Brain [great courses]

97. Jeff Kinney: Diary of a Wimpy Kid

98. Prof. Scott Huettel: Behavioral Economics [great courses]

99. Rob Walling: Start Small, Stay Small

100. Ernest Hemmingway: Old Man and the Sea

101. Prof. Robert Greenberg: Brief History of Holiday Music [great courses]

Good idea to have a 'leader' (ala Vim style) and then have the intuitive shortcuts follow. Example 'zll' instead of 'll'. ll is almost always 'ls -l'.

There is a Bill Gates quote (I read it on the "Becoming Steve Jobs" biography that was recently published) : "Lots of people want to be like Steve. They have got the asshole part down pat. All they are missing is the genius part.".

I got in to CMU for my Masters. Mustered up the guts to quit my job and do it full time. Because I wasn't a citizen (or PR) back then, I didn't get any aid and had no savings at all. I got myself five credit cards and paid my fees with that and then managed to do balance transfers between them and maintained a low interest rate (< 4%) and paid it all within 3 years.

I mentioned this as my "hack" in one of my YC applications and the few who reviewed my app (prior to formal application) all said, "oh this is a known trick. it has been used before". Anyways, I am still happy and proud that took the plunge, did my masters and I am better for it.

Currently reading "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich".

Would appreciate more suggestions for World War 1, World War 2 histories, especially Russian History books.

Already on my reading list (a few related to the above):

- Gulag

- Guns of August

- Churchill

A few days of coding could save you a few hours of designing. :)

This should be possible with a Kindle. The basic Kindle costs $50 or so. And it is a fork of Android. And has a month of battery life. There are some Kindle-roots [Search "root a kindle"]. Would something like this work for you? The keyboard will still be the kindle-keyboard.

The other option is a cheap ipad with a bluetooth keyboard. If you turn off all the unnecessary apps and notifications and put it on airplane mode - it should last a couple of weeks. You turn it on only when you need it. You will still need to get an ssh app [many available].