Philadelphia is a historic city on the east coast of the United States. It was the capital of the U.S. before Washington D.C. I spent two and a half days in and around Philadephia in January 2016. Day 1 I started the day with Indepence Hall National Historic Site. Liberty Bell Center gives a good overview of this historic American cultural icon. From there, I continued onto the tour of Independence Hall. Only a guided tour is permitted inside and it is perfect. ...
Standards exist so that products from different vendors can interoperate with each other, for example, sending email from Gmail to Yahoo! mail, and use common interfaces, for example, sockets for electrical appliances. The standardization does not always have to come from imposed standards; sometimes, it comes from the user expectations. For example, the interface of a Calander/Scheduling application is pretty standardized. There is little scope to differentiate a new Calendar application from the existing products like Outlook Calendar, Google Calendar, and iCal while just implementing the standard is still pretty hard. ...
Among all islands in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico (“Rich Port”) is among the few to have historical and geographical places of interest, alongside the beaches. It is a U.S. territory. Flights from the mainland United States are treated as domestic flights. It has tropical weather, so, a visit in the latter part of the year is recommended. Public transport is poor outside of the main city of San Juan, so, if you want to explore the island, a rental car is highly recommended. Here is a recommended four-day itinerary. ...
Alaska is vast, in a 4-day trip, one can either do the northern Arctic part or the southern part. We did the latter. Here is the itinerary we followed. Day 0 - Land in Anchorage, and drive four hours to Denali national park. Day 1 - Take the Kantishna bus tour of Denali national park. Driving inside the park is not allowed. ...
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham is considered the bible of investing.
Thanks to Uber’s meteoric rise in valuation, several startups are trying to mimic the idea of building marketplaces with instant gratification. So much so, that there is an aptly titled poem, " Uber for X", devoted to this. Though the jury is still out on Uber or Airbnb, some others like Exec and Homejoy have already failed to be sustainable businesses. Here are a few thoughts on the characteristics of marketplaces, including so-called sharing economy startups, which decides their eventual fate. ...
An economic activity has one more of the following impacts Wealth creation - for example, processes like extraction of oil, capturing solar energy and even repairing a broken device. Wealth transfer - for example, processes like selling a good, taxes and bribery/theft, though the last one is usually illegal. Wealth destruction - for example, processes like hurricanes, wars and riots. Most developing/underdeveloped countries usually lack sufficient wealth creation, but it does not stop there. They suffer a lot from man-made wealth destruction as well. Sometimes, they are obvious, as in the case of wars and riots. Sometimes, they are more subtle. For example, India loses 24% of electricity to transmission and distribution, as oppose to 6% in the USA. Or, for example, 30% of fruits and vegetable harvest is lost in India due to lack of proper storage. Tax, in principle, is a transfer of money to the government. Even if the government uses money inefficiently, it is still being used. While in the case of wealth destruction, the resources are simply lost leaving an overall poorer society. ...
An interactive map of where all one can easily travel an Indian passport. I have added separate layers for those of you who have a Schengen, a UK, or a USA visa. Short link: bitly.com/visa-indians Data Sources: Wikipedia Another sheet Travel freedom via residencies
Default window management scheme in Mac OS X is not well-polished. For example, till Mac OS 14.6, there is no way to make an application occupy left half of the screen or to make an application always stay on top. To improve on that, my personal setup includes following applications. Better Touch Tool - At the most basic level, it provides “Window snapping” feature, drag the window to top-left and it expands to full screen. It allows full control of gestures and keyboard shortcuts. My personal setup includes “cmd + option + Tab” to switch between active windows of the same application. It is available via homebrew cask. ...
Day 1 Great leaders are great because they handle challenges and setbacks well - John Chambers, CEO, Cisco Real education is like building a house - you set a good foundation first and then you build the house, floor by floor. Traditional education forces everyone to move at the same uniform speed and does not do justice to learning - Sal Khan, Khan Academy It is important to have a growth mindset (anything can be learned) as opposed to a fixed mindset (eg. I am good at X and Y but not A and B) - Sal Khan, Khan Academy Choice of narrative always triumphs over the choice of selection in the long run - Amit Agrawal, Head, Amazon India Hard things like entrepreneurship should not be tried half-heartedly since anything less than a full-fledged effort is going to go nowhere - entrepreneurship panel Keeping emotional highs and lows in check is critical to success - entrepreneurship panel Good mentorship is valuable, relationships are more important than results and an idea without data backing it up is not worth talking about- Patrick Gelsinger, CEO, VMWare Both Andy Grove and Larry Ellison are amazing but ruthless people to work with - my observation based on talks (and in-person conversations) of (with) a few people who worked with them. Day 2 You start a company not to compete with others but for a mission to make the world better - Elizabeth Holmes, CEO, Theranos. Don’t just think about what you are doing, also, consciously think about what you won’t be doing, there is always an opportunity cost of doing something. Most people don’t like risk, therefore, most won’t do anything interesting. Tech is my religion. Normal jobs will be gone in 50 years. Experience is another word for bias, systems with too much of experience are frozen, therefore, innovation happens at the edges. Have an internal compass, spend time following it, not reacting to what’s expected out of you. Steam engine challenged humans in muscle power, machine learning will challenge them in mind power. In face of driverless cars, rigid public transport like railroads is a bad idea. Spend more time doing things which can not only make a difference but makes you happy as well. - Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures Lessons in Product Development from Deep Nishar, MD, SoftBank Know thy user User’s use LinkedIn on iPad differently (more at night) compared to LinkedIn (on the desktop), therefore, the iPad app is designed differently than desktop (focuses more on leisure content). Focus on simplicity An average human cannot hold more than 7 things in their head at a time. 80% of request for new features which Microsoft gets are already in one of the 35 toolbars but users cannot find them. Embrace constraints How nutella was invented Data is your guide but don’t fall off the cliff while following it Innovation is not instant Multiple lead bullets lead to one silver bullet. There were productive phones, beautiful phones, easy-to-use phones before the iPhone, except iPhone combined everything into one. Adapt to changes Or someone else will win in changing environments. Expect success Believe that you will succeed and engineer systems accordingly. Work and entrepreneurship are a means to an end goal of having a more satisfied life and not end in themselves - Mallika Sarabhai