kilotau.com on kilotau.com - reading, thinking, and learning

I had an amazing opportunity to attend a book signing for 10,000 Memories in Berkeley along with my wife. 10,000 Memories is a non-profit, volunteering and crowdsourcing project that has collected 10k witness accounts about the Partition across South Asia.

Reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, I got curious about Chapter 8’s numbers, which essentially break down some of the main driving forces of the climate crisis better than most other things I’ve come across.

Last week, I visited a couple of my professors from Northwestern to chat and help out with an interesting engineering “bootcamp” class they are teaching.

;; This is a playful introduction to Racket, using the in-built app ;; Dr.

Our goal felt hidden, out of reach.

You open up your email, swipe through some work messages, and notice a classic email about a bug.

I made a new gem based on some exploration I did, but to tell the story, let’s talk about a possible use case.

Sometimes, you have a problem.

This is based on a talk I gave at the Open Source Open Mic meetup, around Sep 2015.

I decided to write a short story about a ridiculous premise to get myself to just sit down and finish a story.

updating based on feedback is trickier than you think Psychologist Bertram Forer once asked some students to fill out a personality test and then gave them a personalized profile based on the results.

thoughts about how I’m picking what to learn right now Originally published on Medium.

As an engineer working in an education startup, learning is a familiar topic for me.

I was talking to a friend during dinner and the conversation drifted over to what I’m guessing is a very busy intersection: how an exact explanation seems to subtract from the beauty of a thing.

At the eSpark Hackathon last weekend, I had a great time making interesting new things with my work friends.

Why the tired gesture?

You probably have some ssh key files (~/.ssh/id_rsa{.pub,} or similar) kicking around if you’ve ever needed to use a service that uses public key cryptography, like Github or Heroku.

Hardware: a living, conscious, human brain capable of reading English and with a high school level of education in mathematics, science, and history, and that is greater than the 70th percentile in terms of interest in computer science and general current…

I’ve decided to experiment with a weekly blog post that consolidates my reading, programming, and general learning.

TL;DR: here’s the demo!

Terminals are crucial to mastering computers and are super fun to play with.

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

For those not yet familiar with the awesomeness of Strangeloop, it is a yearly conference about “emerging languages, concurrent and distributed systems, new database technologies, front-end web, and security."

Have you ever wanted git branches to display all branches sorted by the last commit date?

I love the versatility of emacs, even without any additional packages.

I just finished reading Worm, a smartly written and relentlessly intense web serial by Wildbow.

originally published in North by Northwestern Whether you want to build a game, a website, a mobile application, or simply want to explore creative concepts, programming is an indispensable skill.

Do you read more about politics or economics?

What I mean by a “neural prosthetic” is a supplemental tool that aids your brain.

I’ve made some headway into my reading list over the past few weeks.

I recently found a (somewhat old) but great repository.

Today, I cleaned up an earlier project I’d left hanging around called Colby.

The problem: find the largest prime factor of 600851475143.

Github link: RepoMap There are hundreds of git repositories stored at various folder depths all over my computer.

…and it was really quite simple to do!

Marcel Flores, Maciej Swiech and I have been working hard on our machine learning project, in which we are asking whether we can detect twitter spammer upon account creation, before they’ve made a single spammy tweet.

It’s been a busy few days at Hack Northwestern!

I had an idea to try and bring a tiny bit of Clojure’s ideas of hash-maps to Ruby’s hashes.

Over the past day or so, I’ve been playing around with small bits of Ruby after spending most of the summer in Clojure-land.

After asking #ruby what the equivalent of Clojure’s -> macro could look like, I compiled the collective solution into a gist.

Ever since Posterous was acquired by Twitter, I’d been meaning to ditch the service for something better.

TL;DR https://github.com/gnarmis/sentimental Sentiment analysis is the hot thing to do these days.

Having found an awesome little wrapper for Snowball (which allows for stemming of words, like “going” -> “go”), I decided that it was the perfect opportunity to try creating my very own “Clojar” and deploying it.

Noir is an excellent, Sinatra-like framework in Clojure, and Korma is a great companion.

(defn Y [r] ((fn [f] (f f)) (fn [f] (r (fn [x] ((f f) x)))))) There’s few things as iconic as the Y-Combinator in functional programming.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

I’m really digging this wonderful little language called Clojure.

Introducing What’s Here?

http://getsoundboard.com Me and Jon are finally at the stage where we can start showing off our idea called SoundBoard, which was conceived and well received at a hackathon last weekend.

Last weekend, me and Jonathan Chan spent a straight thirty hours working on SoundBoard, a crowd-driven music player, and had a blast!