Stuff 💡

Useful Links

For startups 🐣

Y Combinator Startup School is a free 8-week online course on how/why/when to start a Startup
Paul Graham’s essays on startups and founders are absolute gems - be sure to check the ones on how to get startup ideas and the 18 mistakes that kill startups
Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is a must read - you may not agree with everything he writes (I don’t), but you won’t stay indifferent
Startup Stash has a sizeable collection of tools for startups and entrepreneurs
Perhaps not surprisingly, most AWS-flavored delectables for startups can be found in AWS Startups

For people in a hurry 🏃 💨

Learn X in Y minutes offers a quick tour of (almost) every programming language
Feeling too lazy to implement a classic algorithm? Check out The Algorithms, GitHub’s largest open-source algorithm library
Fastest way to use ML models? Try out Hugging Face 🤗 Models online for free
Need an API for a project? This list of publicly available APIs may come in handy
Having a hard time debugging your code? Consider buying a rubber duck (of the bathtub persuasion)

Nand2Tetris teaches how to build a modern computer from first principles - it has spawned all kinds of insane projects including a 16-bit ALU implementation in Minecraft ⛏🧱
The new edition of Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold is an absolute treasure - it covers everything from playing with flashlights 🔦 with your best friend to the “worldwide hum of the internet” 🌐
Erik Demaine’s lectures on data structures, algorithms and programming are mind-blowing - be sure to watch the lectures on models of computation and document distance (I guarantee you’ll never look at your Python scripts the same way again) and temporal data structures (expect time travel analogies 🕓🚀 and movie references)
Kevin Zurawel’s Game Development in 8bits or… stupid NES tricks is a lesson on creative limitation
Terry Tao’s attempts to formalize a paper on a conjecture by Katalin Marton in Lean4
MinutePhysics uses whiteboard animation to explain all kinds of physics-related topics - the video on boat wakes is a personal favourite
Anything by 3Blue1Brow… here’s how he does the animations using Manim
If brown paper math derivations tickle your fancy, check out Numberphile

xkcd - a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language
smbc - a webcomic that covers science, research, superheroes, religion, romance, dating, parenting and the meaning of life (uff!)
IP over Avian Carriers - an IETF RFC for… well, the name says it all 🐦; contains memorable sentences like “because IP only guarantees best effort delivery, loss of a carrier can be tolerated”

If you get off on things like _='_=%r;print(_%%_)';print(_%_), then you’ll absolutely love Quine Relay
- It’s also the nerdiest way to get ChatGPT into an infinite loop ♾️💥

There’s a GitHub repo with an awesome list of awesome lists - smells like Russell’s paradox to me!
Few things are as meta as Douglas Hofstadter’s GEB, an exploration of self-reference and recursivity featuring a wide ensemble of Carrollian-like characters
A recent (meta-)piece for The Atlantic on why meta doesn’t mean what you thing it does
An implementation of PartyRock by Matt Wood (VP @ AWS) in PartyRock, an Amazon Bedrock playground
Finally, here’s a warning sign warning you about warning signs - consider yourself warned! 🚨