Bui Ha's Notes

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/11/vaclav-smil-wired/ I really fell in love with this man. His some-how provocative argument is really thoughtful. Through his short interviews, I also draw several lessons for myself. I will put his books in my reading list!

People are prone to be let down by displeased ending than the whole happy experience. Every time an unhappy event happens at the end of a cheerful experience, every good memory of the whole experience you've achieved get ruined in everything. Despite the whole vivid, beautiful memory you experienced, you forever stuck in your bad memory. You frequently encounter disordered, or depressed feeling. And something is memorable not just because it's been good, sometimes it's been very bad.

The strength of an community (organization) depends on its member. If its member shares a similar vision and contributes his time building the community, that community becomes remarkable strong. However, if its members participate in the community without any contribution, the community is fragile.

I observe that each man has his individual view about the world that is different from other men's viewpoint. In other word, each man has his own concerns. The point here is we can't change people. I have heard somewhere that we can't change people or influence them and I have believed those claims. But not now. We don't even change his own concerns. For example, if all a man cares about is money, you can't direct his thought to other issues. Therefore I come to a conclusion that if I want to influence or persuade someone, I shouldn't just use my words because people won't believe in your words. Talk is cheap. Instead, I need to show him the side of the problem that I perceive.

Just listening to interviews of very high-profile managers and business men/women in my home country, I noticed their uses of language is not always good, sometimes it's hard to follow and rather ambiguous. The main characteristics of those people's speaking are: The idea is vague covered ambiguous words. Listener sometime must deduce what is being spoke. Redundant words are omnipresent.  The sentence tends to be long.  The overall information is low. Sometime it's waste of time to listening to interviews/speakings without much information. I realize that to reduce my wasteful time spent on speaking non-sense things in your future, I should take time to study carefully my mother tongue.

Just want to write down something to capture my confusing thoughts.

Paul Graham just posted another post stressing the importance of verbal skill.  http://paulgraham.com/accents.html In his post, he wrote about the correlation between the founder's accent and the low success ratio of startups. He found that the stronger the founder's accent is, the harder other people will understand what he tries to say and therefore his startup will be more difficult to succeed.  The founder is always selling to customers, partners, investors and even his employees. The founder's work is to encounter as many people as possible and persuade them to buy his products or ideas. When people meet him the first time, they just think him as normal person they meet everyday. They aren't going to understand him, unless he uses an understandable English. Therefore the founder must be the person who can communicate well in English.

I never thought I could act this way And I've got to say that I just don't get it I don't know where we went wrong But the feelings gone And I just can't get it back..

My company organized a "hackathon" for engineers. We had 5 hours to build a nontrivial web application. People, who didn't have any ideas of what to build, were given a topic, and the topic of this hackathon was "Build a web-based RSS reader to replace Google reader". After 5 straight hours of coding, there were 8 people ready to present about their products. Minh's weird PyRSSReader was the most completed, production-ready RSS reader. Though the result still didn't present yet, I thought he would finished in the first place. To me, what did I build? At first, I thought that a RSS reader was fine but sounded uncool, and due to my temptation to solve a "real-world" problem, I gave up the RSS reader and followed my own idea. I tried to build a web-based log-grepping tool. The web frontend was built in Flask framework. The api backend was built based on a half-baked select server. The system ran smoothly and I thought of presenting my result to

Continue a wave of news since PRISM was exposed to the public, today several big news agency brought up public reaction of liberty groups, high-profile individuals and public opinions about PRISM. As the previous posts, I collected all news about PRISM here for later references. 1.  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/86-civil-liberties-groups-and-internet-companies-demand-end-nsa-spying The demand denounces the spying program as illegal and immoral, and seriously infringes the core value of freedom and privacy of America. Civil liberty groups also call for a number of legal reforms, including reform to controversial section 215 of the US Patriot Act. Notices: 4chan is also in the list! 2.  http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/06/11/in-nsa-leak-case-a-whistle-blower-or-a-criminal/before-prosecuting-snowden-investigate-the-government As usual, a very concise and thoughtful writing by Schneider. He got the right point when saying that we should investigate whether the class

Another sleepless night. It made me really really tired. My girlfriend came at the midnight just to see me but I nearly couldn't talk to her. My brain got burned and it was hot. Just wanted to say sorry to her. I don't know why I've suffered from insomnia. My mind got tired but the thread of thought didn't want to shutdown. Perhaps, if this condition continues, I must come to see a doctor.

It's rare to see such a high-voted list of articles with numerous comments on HN. Nearly every link talks about the newly exposed surveillance program - called PRISM - made by NSA to every US citizens. The whole news media has been consistent to a single point: the surveillance is outrageous and immoral. I just organize all electronic news about this scariest event. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/06/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-nsa-scandal/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/what-we-dont-know-about-spying-on-citizens-scarier-than-what-we-know/276607/ A new computer facility is being built in Utah to store the surveillance information collected from telecom companies. http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html 9 leading companies are listed to participate in the surveillance progr

Every story about mysterious North Korea is very compelling. Nearly every essays I've read depicts a vivid picture about the oppositions of luxurious indulgences of the "honor commander" and impoverished life of people. Last time was a story about a man who escaped from communal labor camps after contemplating his family got killed http://www.northkoreanrefugees.com/2007-09-atbirth.htm This time was about a Kill Jong Il's favorite Japanese sushi chef. http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201306/kim-jong-il-sushi-chef-kenji-fujimoto-adam-johnson-2013?printable=true Two stories are very interesting and deserves your night reading!

Until recently, I've realized that I have depression, or at least I'm now able to call out its name: depression. Well, I don't discover its name by myself but from the comics I bumped into on the internet.  http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.jp/2013/05/depression-part-two.html And I realized that there are many people who have a same mental state as me. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22782913 Though I still don't know how to do to escape from this feeling but I think being able to recognize the enemy or call out its name is huge progress in fighting it.

Cả tuần tự nhắc nhở bản thân nhớ đi nạp thẻ điện thoại để gọi điện về hỏi thăm ông bà mà toàn quên. Hôm nay nhớ đủng đỉnh đi nạp thể, về đến nhà chưa kịp gọi điện đã thấy papa gọi điện sang báo ông nằm viện. Giật mình.. Gọi điện về hỏi thăm ông, thấy câu đầu tiên ông nói: "Ông khoẻ rồi. Con ở bên đấy cứ yên tâm công tác đi nhé". 3 tháng trước khi bà nội mất, ngày bà ra viện bà cũng nói thế với mình... Hệ phế quản không ổn định là ông khó thở. Mỗi câu nói ông dường như phải dùng hết hơi thở hiện tại mới phát ra được. Muốn nói chuyện hỏi thăm ông nhiều hơn mà thấy ông nói khó khăn quá. Tự nhiên thấy cuộc đời sau ngắn ngủi và nhiều sự bấp bênh quá. Tự nhiên muốn về. Mau khoẻ ông nhé, ông nội ơi.

 Đêm hôm qua thay đổi thời tiết là mình nằm mãi không ngủ được, cứ trằn trọc thao thức hoài. Nằm lăn lóc được một lúc thì tự nhiên thấy mình đang ở hàng sách Maruzen. Tất nhiên là mình đang ở trong một giấc mơ. Tuy vậy thực tế là hồi chiều mình cũng có dạo qua hàng sách này, thế nên mọi thứ xuất hiện rất sinh động, có màu sắc âm thanh. Mình dạo bước qua từng chiếc tủ sách cao chất đầy các thể loại sách: từ văn học cổ điển cho đến hiện đại, tài chính kinh tế cho đến cuộc sống thường thức. Mình nhìn thấy mình ghé vào từng khu, cầm từng quyển sách lên lật lật từng trang. Mình sẽ mua quyển này; mình nhất định sẽ đọc quyển kia. Rồi mình lễnh thễnh tìm đến khu sách IT. Đúng lúc này, mình thấy có bạn trẻ đang hỏi người bán sách vị trí của tủ sách IT và người bán sách chỉ đến cuối dãy. Mình đến cuối dãy và thấy tủ sách IT thật, đúng chỗ mình đang tìm đây mà. Mình nhấc quyển sách gần tay nhất lên, lật lật một hai trang. Thế rồi trong đầu mình bắt đầu suy nghĩ: rõ ràng lần gần đây nhất mình đ