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nishnik

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Twitter: twitter.com/nishantiam

www.nishnik.me

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Five years back, YouTube didn't have the feature to queue your videos on the fly. You could have created a playlist, but then it is the same sequence of songs every time. So I hacked a chrome extension to add/remove songs to a dynamic queue saved on your LocalStorage[1]. Later, YouTube added the queue feature. Sometimes I go on long hikes and think that it wasn't merely a coincidence. :)

[1] https://github.com/nishnik/Play_Next

You can live in almost any city in India for less than 1k USD per month. In Bangalore (Tier-1 City), rent for a 1-bed-hall-kitchen apartment will be around 200 USD. Add 10 USD per month for high speed internet. Another 100 USD per month for a dedicated maid and cook. Add 200 USD for all kind of grocery. That will be around 500 USD per month of living expenses.

You can live in Varkala/Goa (if you love beaches) and Dharmshala/Shimla (if you love mountains) for even less.

Related article on Amazon trying its hand on creating games. https://qz.com/1999032/why-amazon-keeps-failing-at-video-gam...

I think Netflix has a better chance in winning on this. Games, like movies, have a skewness in their distribution-of-popularity. Some movies get too much popular, more than 1000x of an average movie. Similar distribution holds for games.

Netflix is excellent at spotting popular movies early-on (Compare Netflix with other streaming content creators). So I hope they can use the same way of making decisions in spotting and building good games.

And then: What do you care about what other people think?

In the first chapter he goes on to tell about beauty/taste[1]. One of his friends told him that you scientist won't be able to appreciate art as much as us artists. Then Feynman explains how he can imagine the cellular level function, why is the flower colorful, and how it interprets to insects having some sense of colour for why should beauty only be on centimeter level?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Do_You_Care_What_Other_...

The book : Oxygen advantage[1] makes similar points. It points out to the research of why swimmers have higher life expectancy than the average athelete, why almost all of us are hyperventilating. Then he outlines simple exercises to improve your breathing habit.

Few points: 1. Always breathe through your nose. Even when you are jogging/cycling heavily. 2. Try to hold your breathe for elongate period of time. 3. Try doing 2 while walking/running/cycling. 4. Swim! 5. Pushing the breathe out and then holding is better than taking the breathe in and holding.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26533127-the-oxygen-adva...

Firefox running add-ons on Android made me switch to it on the mobile phone. It makes the mobile experience way better than Chrome and Brave.

Yes Thiel writes how sales is important.

He gives out a mental model to think how much sales is important for your company, and how much you should invest in it. On a scale from tiktok (viral) to Palantir, you have to increase your sales spendings.

He talks how advertising was important for PayPal (by giving some money(sales spending) for referring).

And he talks why small/medium sized businesses don't use softwares for day-to-day tasks. Because they lie (in his words) a dead zone of sales, the 1000$ per product.

New MacBook Air 6 years ago

I wonder how it compares to the MacBook Pro, 13" - weight wise and performance wise?

Think of it as a game of monopoly. Microsoft got lucky and bought the pink and the orange street, got hotels over it. It was enjoying a good revenue. But then few people(the open source community - chiefly Linus) bought the brown street and the blue street, which aren't much costly. But it affected the monopoly of Microsoft. So, Microsoft is breaking the hotels now. But still has a lot of houses on its land. For Microsoft to loosen up, either we need some big projects coming up(a substitute for Microsoft) - consider this the green and the dark blue street. These projects, as their street names suggest, need to be heavily ambitious. Or we need a bad phase for Microsoft. What I want to say is, Microsoft won't be making Windows open source until it has Monopoly.

They deliberately made the 'close' button fainter. Oh we are going to have an article on "History of 'bold' close buttons".

I appreciate this for the article points out an alarming issue. But there has been slight mis-representation. It slightly portrays that Indian engineering education landscape starts and ends in IITs only. No, there are the NITs, BITSes, IIITs, IISc and others which have equal facilities as IITs and are even doing better than some IITs.