├── 2016-august.md
├── 2016-books.md
├── 2016-conferences.md
├── 2016-december.md
├── 2016-november.md
├── 2016-october.md
├── 2016-september.md
├── 2017-august.md
├── 2017-books.md
├── 2017-december.md
├── 2017-february.md
├── 2017-january.md
├── 2017-july.md
├── 2017-june.md
├── 2017-may.md
├── 2017-november.md
├── 2017-october.md
├── 2017-quotes.md
├── 2017-september.md
├── 2018-april.md
├── 2018-august.md
├── 2018-books.md
├── 2018-december.md
├── 2018-february.md
├── 2018-january.md
├── 2018-july.md
├── 2018-june.md
├── 2018-march.md
├── 2018-november.md
├── 2018-october.md
├── 2018-quotes.md
├── 2018-september.md
├── 2019-books.md
├── 2019-december.md
├── 2019-january.md
├── 2019-june.md
├── 2019-may.md
├── 2019-november.md
├── 2019-october.md
├── 2019-september.md
├── 2020-april.md
├── 2020-august.md
├── 2020-books.md
├── 2020-february.md
├── 2020-january.md
├── 2020-july.md
├── 2020-june.md
├── 2020-march.md
├── 2021-january.md
└── README.md


/2016-august.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | August 2016
  2 | ===========
  3 | 
  4 | Tech
  5 | ----
  6 | 
  7 | ### A Guide to Python's Magic Methods
  8 | 
  9 | [Article](http://www.rafekettler.com/magicmethods.html)
 10 | 
 11 | - `__init__` defines the initialization behaviour of an object, **but** it is not the first thing called (that's `__new__`)
 12 | - `__new__` is the class constructor, passing the new class to `__init__` for initialization; mostly useful if subclassing immutable type
 13 | - `__del__` is the class destructor, when the object is garbage collected (for objects that require extra cleanup after deletion); **not** reliable if the interpreter exits so good cleanup practices are still required
 14 | - `__cmp__` is the basic c comparison (negative result means it's less, etc; only in Python2)
 15 | - `__eq__`, `__ne__`, `__lt__`, `__gt__`, `__le__`, `__ge__` define behaviour for their operators
 16 | - `functool`'s `@total_ordering` automates defining comparison methods
 17 | - Unary operators: `__pos__`, `__neg__`, `__abs__`, `__invert__`, `__round__`, `__floor__`, `__ceil__`, `__trunc__`
 18 | - Arithmetic operators: `__add__`, `__sub__`, `__mul__`, `__floordiv__` (`//`), `__div__` (`/`; only in Python2), `__truediv__`, `__mod__`, `__divmod__`, `__pow__` (`**`), `__lshift__`, `__rshift__`, `__and__`, `__or__`, `__xor__`
 19 | - Reflective arithmetic operators (object as second argument to operator): just append `r` to the arithmetic operators; usually can just call their normal operator
 20 | - Augmented assignment (operator + assignment operation): just append `i` tot he arithmetic operators
 21 | - Type conversion: `__int__`, `__long__`, `__float__`, `__complex__`, `__oct__`, `__hex__`, `__index__` (when object is used in a slice operation), `__trunc__`, `__coerce__` (only in Python2)
 22 | - Class representations:
 23 |     - `__str__` (for humans, defaults to `__repr__`)
 24 |     - `__repr__` (for use in code and interpreters
 25 |     - `__unicode__` (doesn't work when `str()` is used on class; only in Python2)
 26 |     - `__format__` (for use in `str.format()`)
 27 |     - `__hash__` (for use with `hash()`; usually for dicts along with `__eq__`)
 28 |     - `__nonzero__` (for `bool()`; renamed to `__bool__` in Python3)
 29 |     - `__dir__` (should return list of attributes for the user; usually unnecessary)
 30 |     - `__sizeof__`
 31 | - Controlling attribute access
 32 |     - Encapsulation in Python comes through "magic", rather than explicit modifiers
 33 |     - `__getattr__` is called when a nonexistsent attribute is accessed; can be used for misspellings, deprecated attributes, or raising `AttributeError`s
 34 |     - `__setattr__` allows you to define custom rules for any changes in the values of attributes
 35 |     - `__delattr__` is similar to `__setattr__` but for deleting attributes
 36 |     - `__getattribute__` is similar to `__setattr__` but for getting attributes. Only works with new style classes, but can be tricky to implement
 37 |     - Implementing these can be tricky and can easily lead to infinite recursion
 38 | - Custom sequences
 39 |     - Immutable containers only need `__len__` and `__getitem__` defined
 40 |     - Mutable containers require `__setitem__` and `__delitem__` as well
 41 |     - Iterable containers require `__iter__`
 42 |     - Others: `__reversed__`, `__contains__`, `__missing__` (only for subclasses of dict)
 43 | - Reflection: `__instancecheck__`, `__subclasscheck__`
 44 | - Callable objects: `__call__` allows classes to be callable (as if they were functions!)
 45 | - Context managers: `__enter__`, `__exit__`
 46 | - Descriptors: `__get__`, `__set__`, `__delete__`
 47 | - Copying: `__copy__`, `__deepcopy__`
 48 | - Pickling: `__getinitargs__` (only for old style classes in Python2), `__getnewargs__`, `__setstate__`, `__reduce__`
 49 | 
 50 | ### Dirty Tricks From the Dark Corners of Front-End
 51 | 
 52 | [Presentation](https://speakerdeck.com/smashingmag/dirty-tricks-from-the-dark-corners-of-front-end)
 53 | 
 54 | - Nesting anchors can require `<object>` tags around the nested anchor (browser short circuits on nested anchors)
 55 | - Can use `<object type="image/svg+xml" data="image.svg">` for SVGs
 56 | - `:before` and `:after` works (sometimes) with `<img>` elements
 57 | - CSS `calc()` is amazing
 58 |     - Calculate font-sizes with vw and vh to create fluid font-sizes based on viewport size
 59 |         - Also for line heights
 60 |     - Calculate column widths and then apply `min-width` or `max-width`
 61 |     - Calculate the necessary overflow padding from a container (e.g. if you want a child element to be full width when nested in a container with margin)
 62 | - Make sure your emails are bulletproof (test with images turned off!)
 63 | - Use progressive scans of images
 64 | - Use `table-layout:fixed` to fix the layout of the table based on the first row
 65 | - Transitions don't work on `min-height`
 66 | - Can override platform-specific emoji designs by using your own fonts that override the Unicode code points
 67 | - With HTTP2, multi-stage CSS loading removes the need for critical CSS
 68 | - `<img>` tags can use a `object-fit` CSS property to be similar to `background-size: contain` and etc
 69 | - CSS `currentColor` represents the calculated value of the element's `color` property
 70 | - CSS `contain` allows you to define priorities for loading and painting CSS
 71 | 
 72 | ### Writing Idiomatic Python 3
 73 | 
 74 | [Book](https://jeffknupp.com/writing-idiomatic-python-ebook/)
 75 | 
 76 | - When checking `if` on a variable multiple times, use an iterable: `if x in (1, 2, 3):`
 77 | - Dict comprehensions also exist
 78 | - So do set comprehensions
 79 | - Sets have overloaded operators: `A | B` == union; `A & B` == intersect; `A - B` == difference; `A ^ B`: symmetric difference
 80 | - For longer lists, use a generator expression instead of a list comprehension to save memory
 81 | - Use `sys.exit()` in CLI scripts to return error codes; 0 means everything went well
 82 |     - The code after your `if __name__ == '__main__':` should only ever be `sys.exit(main())`
 83 | - Don't use relative imports
 84 | - Use the `os.path` module for file system paths
 85 | 
 86 | ### Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
 87 | 
 88 | [Book](http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/)
 89 | 
 90 | - Use decorators
 91 | - Use context managers
 92 | - Most basic types (and tuples) are immutable; this includes strings
 93 | - To concat a number of strings, list comprehension into array and then `"".join(list)`
 94 | - Pythonic style:
 95 |     - Use keyword arguments generously to aid meaning
 96 |     - Don't change how core Python works unless you absolutely need to (e.g. object creation, imports, etc)
 97 |     - Put error checking returns at the top
 98 |     - Preferable to keep a single exit point
 99 |     - Use variable unpacking
100 |     - Use `__` as an ignored variable when unpacking (to avoid clashes with `_`)
101 |     - Length-N list of the same thing: `val = [None] * 5`
102 |     - Length-N list of lists: `val = [[] for __ in range(4)]` (`xrange was renamed to `range` in Python 3)
103 |     - Python's `set`s (and `dict`s) are hashtables; lookup using `in` is much more efficient than in a `list`
104 |     - Use `in` or a default argument to `dict.get()` instead of `dict.has_key()`
105 |     - Use `enumerate` to get the list index while using `for in`
106 |     - Use parenthesed around multi-line statements to let the interpreter join the lines until the parentheses are closed
107 | - Numeric zeroes, empty sequences, empty dicts, and objects whose defined `__bool__()` or `__len__()` methods return falsey values
108 | - Use `not` instead of `!` to revert logic
109 | - Documentation
110 |     - Use docstrings
111 |     - Do not use trip-quote strings for block-level comments
112 | - Logging
113 |     - The user should dictate what happens when a logging event occurs, not the library
114 |     - Instatiate loggers in a library by only using the `__name__` variable; this ensures no name collisions
115 | - Gotchas
116 |     - Default arguments are created once during function definition, **AND CAN BE MUTATED**
117 |         - Use a default argument to signal that no argument was provided to create a new object instead
118 |         - Can be useful as a way to define static variables (i.e. to cache state between calls)
119 |     - Closures are late binding; they only look up enclosed variables when the closure is actually invoked
120 |         - Mostly felt when looping to create unique functions
121 |         - Instead, bind a local variable or default parameter to the indended enclosed variable
122 |     - `.pyc` files are automatically generated and should be ignored from version control
123 |         - Use `PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE=1` to disable this behaviour
124 |     - Not supplying a license: "In the US, if no license is specified, users have no legal right to download, modify, or distribute."
125 | - Web scraping
126 |     - Use `lxml` to parse XML and HTML
127 | - Performance
128 |     - CPython is slow
129 |     - The GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) prevents multi-threaded Python; necessary as CPython's memory management is not thread-safe
130 |         - Maximizing performance requires a strong understanding of the GIL
131 |         - Running another Python instance in another process does not run into this limitation (see `ThreadPoolExecutor` and `ProcessPoolExecutor`
132 | 
133 | ### Intro to cron
134 | 
135 | [Article](http://www.unixgeeks.org/security/newbie/unix/cron-1.html)
136 | 
137 | - Format: `min hr dom month dow cmd`
138 | - `crontab -e` loads your crontab file in your `$EDITOR`
139 | 
140 | ### Asynchronous Tasks With Django and Celery
141 | 
142 | [Article](https://realpython.com/blog/python/asynchronous-tasks-with-django-and-celery/)
143 | 
144 | - `pip freeze > requirements.txt` is pretty rad
145 | 
146 | ### The Most Diabolical Python Antipattern
147 | 
148 | [Article](https://realpython.com/blog/python/the-most-diabolical-python-antipattern/)
149 | 
150 | - Never `except Exception` and pass, as it hides all errors
151 | - At the least, log the exception and its stack trace
152 | - Only silently pass specific exception classes that you know about in advance
153 | 
154 | ### Beyond PEP 8 -- Best practices for beautiful intelligible code
155 | 
156 | [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M)
157 | 
158 | - **Make sure your code isn't beautiful but bad!**
159 | - **Don't let PEP8 / etc cloud your vision (look for Pythonic vs Non-Pythonic instead); pay attention to things that really matter!**
160 | - **Use adapter patterns to wrap bad packages with good interfaces!**
161 | - Prefer Python's context managers for setup / cleanup code (e.g. `__enter__`, `__exit__`)
162 | - Use Python's property descriptors rather than getters / setters
163 | - Use iterables when you have iterables
164 | - Avoid unnecessary packaging
165 | - Use magic methods (e.g. `__len__`, `__getitem__`)
166 | - Use `__repr__`
167 | - Wrap bad exceptions with good ones
168 | 
169 | ### Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python
170 | 
171 | [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSGv2VnC0go)
172 | 
173 | - Stop thinking in indicies
174 | - Use `enumerate` to get foreach indicies
175 | - Use `izip` to loop over multiple collections (iterator'd `zip`) and dict creation out of two lists
176 | - Better performance: make sure your code is running in L1 cache!
177 | - Use `key` functions to sort, instead of comparision functions
178 | - `iter`'s second parameter is a sentinel value
179 | - `for-else` exists
180 | - Use `dict.keys()` to iterate over a dict if you'll be mutating it
181 | - Use `dict.iterItems()` for an iterable over the dict
182 | - Use `defaultdict` for dictionaries with defaults (needs to be converted back to a dict sometimes)
183 | - Use `namedtuple`s!
184 | - "Don't break atoms of thought into subatomic particles"
185 | 
186 | ### Stop Writing Classes
187 | 
188 | [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0)
189 | 
190 | - Prefer easy things over complicated things
191 | - "I hate code and I want as little of it as possible in our product"
192 | - Ship **features** not code
193 | - If you think you need it later, **do it later**
194 | - Namespaces are not for creating taxonomies; use them to prevent name collisions
195 | 
196 | ### Credentials: A Retrospective of Mild Successes and Dramatic Failures
197 | 
198 | [Article](http://manu.sporny.org/2015/credentials-retrospective/)
199 | 
200 | - Interesting retrospective on current and past identity schemes
201 | - Sets out a number of criteria to judge strength identity schemes
202 | 
203 | ### The case for setImmediate()
204 | 
205 | [Article](https://www.nczonline.net/blog/2013/07/09/the-case-for-setimmediate/)
206 | 
207 | - Modern `setImmediate()`s have a 4ms timer; using 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 mean the same thing
208 | - `requestAnimationFrame()` is more useful for animations; it requests a new UI update after the current one
209 | - `setImmediate()` inserts the task after the last paint event in the current event loop
210 | - Node has `process.nextTick()` as a similar API
211 | - Polyfills needed for use
212 | 
213 | ### Telehash
214 | 
215 | [Website](http://telehash.org/)
216 | 
217 | - Secure (full end-to-end encryption), mesh networking protocol
218 | - Mesh: encrypted sessions (links) between any two endpoints
219 | 
220 | ### Pure UI
221 | 
222 | [Article](http://rauchg.com/2015/pure-ui/)
223 | 
224 | - **UI as a pure function of application state**
225 | - "When the magnitude of the undertaking is not clear for the developer or designer, let alone for the people removed from the creation process, it’s simply impossible to make any accurate predictions."
226 | - Break designs into their smallest possible variations and implement against those
227 | - **"A distinction of two very distinct (yet frequently interleaved) phases of the creation process: design and discovery"**
228 | - Design, discover all possible variations, design, rediscover, etc.
229 | - **"Applications must handle different states that are difficult to replicate under normal testing conditions."**
230 | 
231 | ### Always on top in MacOS Yosemite
232 | 
233 | [Article](http://www.perfectlyrandom.org/2015/01/31/always-on-top-in-macos-yosemite/)
234 | 
235 | - Keeping random GUI windows afloat (i.e. always on top) on OSX is possible
236 | 
237 | ### Hall of api shame: boolean trap
238 | 
239 | [Article](https://ariya.io/2011/08/hall-of-api-shame-boolean-trap)
240 | 
241 | - Don't add boolean parameters
242 | - Prefer obvious, keyword, or human-readable arguments instead
243 | 
244 | ### Fuzz testing
245 | 
246 | [Article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing)
247 | 
248 | - Chaos testing
249 | - Most common for file formats, network protocols
250 | - Most useful when testing input that crosses a trust protocol (i.e. user-generated content)
251 | 
252 | ### Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
253 | 
254 | [Article](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/)
255 | 
256 | - Long list of wrong myths about people and their names
257 | 
258 | 
259 | Life
260 | ----
261 | 
262 | ### Warren Buffett’s “2 List” Strategy: How to Maximize Your Focus and Master Your Priorities
263 | 
264 | [Article](http://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus)
265 | 
266 | 1. Write down your top 25 career goals
267 | 1. Circle the top 5 goals
268 | 1. Eliminate the rest. **"Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top 5.”**
269 | 
270 | ### How to be More Productive and Eliminate Time Wasting Activities by Using the “Eisenhower Box”
271 | 
272 | [Article](http://jamesclear.com/eisenhower-box)
273 | 
274 | - **Immediately do** urgent and important tasks
275 | - **Schedule for later** important but not urgent tasks
276 | - **Delegate** urgent but not important tasks
277 | - **Eliminate** neither urgent nor important tasks
278 | 
279 | ### How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the “2-Minute Rule”
280 | 
281 | [Article](http://jamesclear.com/how-to-stop-procrastinating)
282 | 
283 | - Do anything that only takes two minutes **immediately**
284 | - Any new habit should be started within two minutes, let **momentum** carry you to do it further
285 | 
286 | ### How to Solve Difficult Problems by Using the Inversion Technique
287 | 
288 | [Article](http://jamesclear.com/inversion)
289 | 
290 | - Look at a problem and think about the exactly opposite of what you want to achieve
291 | - E.g. Instead of how to be a better manager, ask what would a terrible manager do?
292 | - **"It is far easier to avoid stupidity than it is to create genius."**
293 | 
294 | ### Mental Models: How Intelligent People Solve Unsolvable Problems
295 | 
296 | [Article](http://jamesclear.com/feynman-mental-models)
297 | 
298 | - **"Point of View is worth 80 IQ points"**
299 | - Develop multiple perspectives to look at a problem, and select the best for the problem at hand
300 | - Developing perspectives:
301 |     - Read and do things outside of the norm
302 |     - Link separate, seemingly disparate ideas with others
303 | 
304 | ### First Principles: Elon Musk and Bill Thurston on the Power of Thinking for Yourself
305 | 
306 | [Article](http://jamesclear.com/first-principles)
307 | 
308 | - Think from first principles, not analogies
309 | - Build up from fundamental, hard facts to solve problems
310 | 
311 | ### Be Coachable
312 | 
313 | [Article](http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/08/21/be-coachable/)
314 | 
315 | - **“If you don’t fall, you’re not trying hard enough.”**
316 | 
317 | ### The Science of Speaking is the Art of Being Heard
318 | 
319 | [Article](http://firstround.com/review/the-science-of-speaking-is-the-art-of-being-heard/)
320 | 
321 | - Amygdala rewiring === rewiring fight, flight, or freeze instinct
322 | - Goal is to remove differences as much as possible to make the listener feel comfortable to be engaged
323 | - **Goal of management is a high performing team, focused on outputs, which can only be coordinated by communication**
324 | - **Meta models for effective communication**
325 |     - *Toward vs. Away*: Optimist vs pessimest
326 |         - Toward: motivated to attain goals, **use words like "gain", "obtain", "achieve", ...**
327 |         - Away: motivated to solve problems, **use words like "avoid", "exclude", ...**
328 |         - **Frame actions as either moving away from something or towards another**
329 |     - *Internal-referencing vs External-referencing*: Internal vs external motivators
330 |         - Internal: decisions are based on their own self, **use language like "you decide", "what do you think"**
331 |         - External: seek external information and feedback from others, **use language like "feedback", "approval", "others..."**
332 |         - **How do you know you've done a good job at x**
333 |     - *Specific vs General*: Details vs overview
334 |         - Specific: operate with details, **use words like "exactly", "precisely"**
335 |         - General: focus on overview, **use language like "essentially", "generally"**
336 |     - *See, Heard, Read, Do*: Vector of convincing and persuasion
337 |         - See: influenced by what they perceive **(55%)**
338 |         - Hear: influenced by what they hear **(30%)**
339 |         - Do: influenced by past and current action **(12%)**
340 |         - Read: influenced by what they read **(3%)**
341 |         - **How do you know that someone else is good at their job?**
342 | 
343 | ### Interviewing to Hire Trailblazers, Nonconformists and Originals
344 | 
345 | [Article](http://firstround.com/review/adam-grant-on-interviewing-to-hire-trailblazers-nonconformists-and-originals/)
346 | 
347 | - "You want people who choose to follow because they genuinely believe in ideas, not because they’re afraid to be punished if they don’t."
348 | - Seeds a resilient culture
349 | - Hire as many originals as possible
350 | - Look for:
351 |     - Unsung heroes
352 |     - Insubordinates
353 |     - Inward-facing innovators
354 | - Interviewing:
355 |     - Do they default to challenging? Can they challenge the quo?
356 |     - **"Why shouldn't I hire you?"**
357 | - **“Originals are constructive contrarians. They're not just pointing out that the emperor has no clothes; they're also tailors.”**
358 | - Look for diversity, curiosity
359 | - Find out what they've tried but given up; "their roads not taken"
360 | - Force references to be candid: make them choose between two seemingly undesirable choices
361 | 
362 | ### The ‘Adaptable Leader’ is the New Holy Grail — Become One, Hire One
363 | 
364 | [Article](http://firstround.com/review/the-adaptable-leader-is-the-new-holy-grail-become-one-hire-one/)
365 | 
366 | - Constant learners can adjust to any new environment or role quickly
367 | - **"When you boil it down, learning is about changing your mind"**
368 | - **Gamer**: Take risks, be optimistic, keep trying
369 |     - Clarity of objectives empowers individuals to be resourceful
370 |     - **"How would we approach this if it were a game?"**
371 |     - "The gameful leader expects adversity, but remains excited about solving the puzzle."
372 | - **Beginner**: Be childlike and curious
373 |     - Ask "why not" and "what if"
374 |     - Reason from first principles
375 |     - Take "yourself out of autopilot to shift into awe, curiosity, and wonder"
376 |     - **"What would I think about this if I had no biases, or if I had never seen a situation like this before?"**
377 |     - “What do I believe that the rest of the world doesn’t?”
378 |     - "Create an inner alarm to sound the moment you have the thought: ‘Of course, this the way to do it!’ Silence it by stepping back and reassessing the situation."
379 |     - "The only way to avoid bias and to stay open to the possibilities of learning, is vigilance."
380 |     - **"Value asking questions and people who ask questions"**
381 |     - "What have you learned in this conversation?"
382 | - **Growth**: Your performance is always a reflection of your current self, which will grow in the future
383 |     - Relish in taking on challenges
384 |     - Possess a self-motivated passion for learning; always be in self-improvement and self-actualization mode
385 |     - "Doing the right thing is more important than doing things right."
386 |     - **Premature perfectionism is the root of all evil. Get the feedback you need immediately.**
387 | - Be around constant learners, always look to hire constant learners
388 | - References: ‘Please call me back if this is an outstanding candidate for a job that requires learning.’
389 | - **"Hire people for the way they approach problems."**
390 | - Make it clear to new team members you believe they'll make a difference and will get to grow a lot
391 | - Help new team members set goals so they can experience wins early on and constantly
392 | - **"We’re not knowledge workers. We’re learning workers."**
393 | 
394 | ### This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineers into Remarkable Managers
395 | 
396 | [Article](http://firstround.com/review/this-90-day-plan-turns-engineers-into-remarkable-managers/)
397 | 
398 | - Put away the pencil to write code
399 | - 0-30: Educate
400 | - 31-60: Find rhythm and style
401 | - 61-90: Assess this is a good fit for you
402 | - Management is in all three directions: above, beside, and below
403 | - **"You no longer ride on the rollercoaster. But you operate it."**
404 | - Manage only if that's what you want, if you can channel empathy, and if you can give trust
405 | - Figure out which are the important meetings, and cancel others
406 | - Build an event loop / pipeline for the current day, week, month, quarter
407 | - If this isn't for you, it's OK to step down after trying it!
408 | 
409 | ### Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice
410 | 
411 | [Article](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/)
412 | 
413 | - **"Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things"**
414 | - **"Nobody ever outsources Profit Centers"**
415 | - **Describe your accomplishments by increasing revenues or decreasing costs**
416 | - **Strive to help people**
417 | - **Most important professional skill is communication**
418 | - **"Modesty is not a career-enhancing character trait"**
419 | 
420 | ### Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued
421 | 
422 | [Article](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/)
423 | 
424 | - **Salary negotiations are important**
425 | - **"Rich, successful people negotiate**
426 | - Start salary negotiations after all interviews and a fit looks possible
427 | - **Never give up your number first**; use any number of excuses
428 | - Repeat other people's words back to them for convincing; take notes!
429 | - Stress "we" or "you" benefits
430 | - Use things other than the salary to negotiate
431 | - Use some new information to convince others you're valuable
432 | 
433 | ### The Hiring Post
434 | 
435 | [Article](http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/)
436 | 
437 | - Interviewing is a terrible medium for hiring
438 | - Interviews are hostile environments for candidates
439 | - Interviews are biased twoards candidates who are good at interviews
440 | - Ideas:
441 |     1. Warm up candidates. Welcome them with an initial call. Send them material to review.
442 |     1. Build a standardized interviewing format for every interviewer to follow. **Interviewers should hate it!** Use a script.
443 |     1. Make sure the standardized format generates data, and is testable.
444 |         - Strip existing systems and let the candidate build part of it back up
445 |         - Collect objective facts for causation metrics (when looking back)
446 |         - Score candiates using the same rubric
447 |         - Remove tests that don't predict well
448 |         - Avoid pressured situations
449 |     1. Checklist:
450 |         - Is it consistent? Does every candidate get the same interview?
451 |         - Does it correct for hostility and pressure? Does it factor in “confidence” and “passion”? If so, are you sure you want to do that?
452 |         - Does it generate data beyond hire/no-hire? How are you collecting and comparing it? Are you learning both from your successes and failures?
453 |         - Does it make candidates demonstrate the work you do? Imagine your candidate is a “natural” who has never done the work, but has a preternatural aptitude for it. Could you hire that person, or would you miss them because they have the wrong kind of Github profile?
454 |         - Are candidates prepped fully? Does the onus for showing the candidate in their best light fall on you, or the candidate?
455 | 
456 | Random
457 | ------
458 | 
459 | ### The Raspberry Pi Has Revolutionized Emulation
460 | 
461 | [Article](https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-raspberry-pi-has-revolutionized-emulation/)
462 | 
463 | - RP3 has wifi!!!
464 | - Cool available starter packs
465 | 
466 | ### WELCOME TO AIRSPACE
467 | 
468 | [Article](http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification)
469 | 
470 | - Design is becoming homogenized across the world, **digital globalization (of taste)** is somewhat of an apt description (or at least, a cause)
471 | - Tasteful, but generic and empty; made to make changing places as frictionless as possible
472 | - An anchoring to a recognizable home in an unfamiliar environment
473 | - **Placelessness** and **digital nomads** are starting to become themes
474 | - **The gentrification of taste**; **depersonalization** and the loss of identity
475 | - **"AESTHETIC HOMOGENEITY IS A PRODUCT THAT USERS ARE COMING TO DEMAND"**
476 | - **URBAN AREAS AROUND THE WORLD MIGHT INCREASINGLY RESEMBLE EACH OTHER AND BECOME INTERCHANGEABLE**
477 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2016-conferences.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | Conferences
 2 | ===========
 3 | 
 4 | ### Web Summit
 5 | 
 6 | *Collection of random thoughts from talks / conversations*
 7 | 
 8 | - Fintech: Focus on the full stack
 9 |     -  There was a lot of prior focus on the frontend, but the backend is also ripe for innovation (e.g. clearing, etc) and an integrated solution is key
10 | - Joseph Gordon Levitt: **Creators first**, fair commission and attribution
11 | - Union Square Ventures (on blockchains):
12 |     - Innovations usually start out as a worse version of something we can relate to, e.g. blockchains are like a crappy database right now
13 |     - Have to find the marginal uses for new technology to see their futures
14 |     - Try to supplement current infrastructure before disrupting it (e.g. Ripple as an information layer over traditional financial infrastructure)
15 |     - Key question: how to incentivize providers of infrastructure? Especially in decentralized settings?
16 |     - Focus on protocols, e.g. protocol for moving money around
17 | - UX as an opiate: Everyone and everything competes for attention
18 |     - We should define good rules of engagement for attention-sucking experiences
19 |     - It's a race to the bottom for attention; we need to redefine our values and goals to make sure that attention is spent usefully
20 |     - Ad based models create unbounded hunger for attention
21 |     - **Make the right choices easy because that's what people will reach for**
22 | - Perl (Larry Wall): **Focus on the community, and get the culture right**
23 | - Start up advice:
24 |     - Talk to, and get advice from, those who have just gone through the same thing (things change fast, and you want recent opinions!)
25 |     - Keep investors updated: even if they didn't invest the first time, they might the next time.
26 |     - Ask other founders and CEOs to talk about their interactions with their investors so you know who you might be stuck in bed with
27 |     - Get warm introductions from **good** founders (they really matter!)
28 | - Empathy in an organization: **Make sure someone is fighting for it**
29 |     - E.g. making everyone come out of an interview feel positive
30 | - Daniel Pink: **Drive. Motivation from destination.**
31 |     - Don't forget where you're going, and why you're going there.
32 |     - Establish feedback loops and measure to make sure you're getting closer
33 |     - Only you can make sure you're taking care of yourself
34 | - APIs and Stack Overflow (Jon Skeet): **Trust the other side's intentions, and help them!**
35 |     - Don't criticize symptoms from the other side; they're your fault!
36 |     - Dig into the root goal of someone and try to understand them
37 |     - Help your users if they screw up, and learn from how they screwed up!
38 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2016-december.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | December 2016
  2 | =============
  3 | 
  4 | Tech
  5 | ----
  6 | 
  7 | ### "Scale" FUD and Style Components
  8 | 
  9 | [Article](https://medium.learnreact.com/scale-fud-and-style-components-c0ce87ec9772#.m4n8uphxb)
 10 | 
 11 | - Might be useful to hide and abstract CSS implementation details by encapsulating them within a component
 12 | 
 13 | ### Let Postgres Do The Work
 14 | 
 15 | [Article](http://sorentwo.com/2013/12/30/let-postgres-do-the-work.html)
 16 | 
 17 | - Ordered primary keys (increasing over time) can be a good substitute for time itself in calculations (as an optimization)
 18 | 
 19 | ### Code Review Done Right
 20 | 
 21 | [Article](https://jezenthomas.com/code-review-done-right/)
 22 | 
 23 | - Code reviews should be about sharing your approach to a problem and to ignite a discussion
 24 | - Should involve both sharing and learning, on the committer and reviewer
 25 | - "If the one thing standing between a commit and a production deploy is human discipline, you have broken software"
 26 | - "When giving criticism, nothing is the committer’s fault. If there is a problem in a commit, it’s everyone’s problem in our codebase, and it’s everyone’s responsibility to rectify."
 27 | - "When giving encouragement, it is the committer who receives direct praise. If you rose above and beyond the call, then you deserve the kudos."
 28 | 
 29 | ### How Google Cloud Platform is Challenging AWS
 30 | 
 31 | [Article](https://stratechery.com/2016/how-google-cloud-platform-is-challenging-aws/)
 32 | 
 33 | - "[Amazon] shouldn’t try to guess what kind of services they might want; such guesses would be based on patterns of the past. Instead, it should be creating primitives — the building blocks of computing — and then getting out of the way."
 34 | - Companies tend to ship their org chart (e.g. AWS is a bunch of primitives, the iPhone is a unitary design)
 35 | - "The ideal product... achieves simplicit and a great user experience through tremendous effort in design and engineering that, ideally, is never seen by the end user"
 36 | - "Aggregation Theory: as distribution (or switching) costs decrease, the importance of the user experience increases"
 37 | - By open sourcing its machine learning tools, Google believes its machine learning infrastructure is a sustainable source of competitive advantage
 38 | 
 39 | ### This AI Boom Will Also Bust
 40 | 
 41 | [Article](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/12/this-ai-boom-will-also-bust.html)
 42 | 
 43 | - Most ML/AI techniques being used right now are better suited for large scale problems, but there's not many of these large scale problems that can benefit
 44 | - If the hype was real, we would be seeing much larger displacement from ML/AI now
 45 | 
 46 | ### not(AdviceForHackers)
 47 | 
 48 | [Article](http://edw519.posthaven.com/not-adviceforhackers)
 49 | 
 50 | - Emphasize the future, not the past; you can't change the past
 51 | - You can't read other's minds
 52 | - There are only consequences; in life we have known input but an unknown process (so no predictable results)
 53 |     - "It's about adjusting the controls to maximize the possibility of desirable consequences."
 54 | - Don't expect others to do something you want them to do if they don't want to do it
 55 | - Don't be bothered by other's expectations
 56 |     - "Being different isn't the problem. Forgetting that we are is."
 57 | - Nobody is always right; don't be foolish and don't always believe people
 58 | - Don't blame external factors, and don't give up
 59 | 
 60 | ### How my High School Job Prepared me for Building Software
 61 | 
 62 | [Article](http://edw519.posthaven.com/how-my-high-school-job-prepared-me-for-building-software)
 63 | 
 64 | - Working at McDonalds in a fast-paced demand environment is like scaling
 65 | - In order to be able to scale (and write lots of software), you have to be set up to do so: tools, people, processes, etc.
 66 | - If you're not ready to serve by the time a customer comes, you're probably too late
 67 |     - Have to react quickly to deliver; nobody has the patience for you
 68 | - Crunch time can come anytime (for software businesses), it's important to be set up to handle it
 69 | - One person: one set of burgers in 5 min. Two people: 3 sets of burgers in 5 min. Thre people: 6 sets.
 70 |     - **2x people = 3x productivity, 3x people = 6x productivity**
 71 |     - Anything more, might get too crowded
 72 | - Managers should be able to do, and doers should be able to manager
 73 | - **The difference between mediocre and good is small. The difference between good and great is large.**
 74 | - Get good working habits; you'll keep them and benefit from them!
 75 |     - "Good workers refused to work in dirty work areas. They refused to release deficient product. They refused to put off what could be done later because they knew it would grow to twice as much work later and screw everything else up in the interim. And most of all, they hated working with those who didn't have the same good habits."
 76 | 
 77 | ### Hitting the High Notes
 78 | 
 79 | [Article](https://web.archive.org/web/20130601125631/http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html)
 80 | 
 81 | - **The real goal for software companies should be converting capital into software that works** (not a better mousetrap)
 82 | - Low cost software doesn't make sense, because duplicating software is free; the cost of programmers spreads out over all the copies of software sold
 83 |     - **Design adds value faster than it adds cost**
 84 | - You can't substitute more people for a productive person
 85 |     - Brook's Law: "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later"; communication overhead has costs
 86 |     - Average producers will never produce the best
 87 | 
 88 | 
 89 | Life
 90 | ----
 91 | 
 92 | ### Before You Grow
 93 | 
 94 | [Article](https://blog.ycombinator.com/before-you-grow/)
 95 | 
 96 | - "If you focus on trying to grow before you make a product people love, you are unlikely to succeed."
 97 | - Retaining users is the hard part, aim for organic growth
 98 | 
 99 | ### Why VCs sometimes push compnaies to burn too fast
100 | 
101 | [Article](https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-vcs-sometimes-push-companies-to-burn-too-fast/)
102 | 
103 | - "It may not be surprising, then, that the more money a founder has in the bank, the stronger their position when fundraising. In fact, we’ve seen a few YC companies raise financing rounds without having spent any of the money from a prior round."
104 | 
105 | ### The perils of mixing open source and money
106 | 
107 | [Article](http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2013/the-perils-of-mixing-open-source-and-money.html)
108 | 
109 | - Natural boundary of constraints (of OSS) with time and cost means you're probably not going to embellish it
110 | - "Work will expand to fill the amount raised" ;)
111 | - Motivations change if there are external, expected rewards (usually less intrinsic (good) motivation)
112 | 
113 | ### The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community
114 | 
115 | [Article](https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community)
116 | 
117 | Random
118 | ------
119 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2016-september.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | September 2016
  2 | ==============
  3 | 
  4 | Tech
  5 | ----
  6 | 
  7 | ### Asynchronous Object Initialization
  8 | 
  9 | [Article](http://as.ynchrono.us/2014/12/asynchronous-object-initialization.html)
 10 | 
 11 | - Avoid creating half-instantiated objects (e.g. part of it is still initializing asynchronously)
 12 | - Objects should primarily be about representing state; `__init__` should primarily be about accepting that state and turning it into a complete, internally consistent state
 13 | - Use an asychronous factory instead
 14 | 
 15 | ### Node with Docker - continuous integration and delivery
 16 | 
 17 | [Article](http://mherman.org/blog/2015/03/06/node-with-docker-continuous-integration-and-delivery/#.VnmxVpMrLOQ)
 18 | 
 19 | - Some docker set up, CI tests, and deployment automation
 20 | 
 21 | ### License from who
 22 | 
 23 | [Article](https://writing.kemitchell.com/2016/05/13/License-from-Who.html)
 24 | 
 25 | - Provenance: answers "Who owns this IP"?
 26 | - Only owners can license others to copy, change, share, and sublicense
 27 | - The "author" of software may not own the IP; e.g. if he was working for someone else
 28 |     - Author can't license without owner's permission
 29 | 
 30 | ### How to get a job in deep learning
 31 | 
 32 | [Article](http://blog.deepgram.com/how-to-get-a-job-in-deep-learning/)
 33 | 
 34 | - Building and training a large neural network with transformations between the input and output
 35 | - **See** for links to other material
 36 | 
 37 | ### Pylons Unit Testing Guidelines
 38 | 
 39 | [Article](http://docs.pylonsproject.org/en/latest/community/testing.html)
 40 | 
 41 | - Don't be too clever in your tests! It hides the intent and makes subsequent failure harder to figure out
 42 | - Don't try to replace documentation with "doctests"
 43 | - Ask:
 44 |     - Is the intent of the test clearly explained by the name?
 45 |     - Does it follow the canonical form of a test: set up preconditions, call the unit at test once, make assertions about the return, and **DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE**?
 46 | - Tests should be as simple as possible, run as quickly as possible, and decoupled from others
 47 | - Import the module-under-test in each individual test case; import failures then only cause the individual test cases to fail rather than the test cases to not run
 48 | - Use helper functions instead of attributes on ``self``
 49 | 
 50 | ### API Design for Library Authors
 51 | 
 52 | [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tedt47e9qsQ)
 53 | 
 54 | - Global state (e.g. module state in Python) is precious
 55 |     - AVOID MUTATING OR DEPENDING ON IT!
 56 |     - If it's convenient, give the user an escape hatch to not use the convenient API if they don't
 57 |       want side effects to happen
 58 |     - Depend on global state only if it's inherent to the OS / system (e.g. Windows vs Linux)
 59 |     - Don't bootstrap your application before `__name__ == '__main__'` is true
 60 | - "Push statefulness to a higher level and let the caller worry about it"
 61 |     - If you keep doing this, you'll end up with mostly functional code
 62 | - You can always add convenience to a library, but you can't take it away
 63 |     - Focus on the inconvenient version first
 64 | - Don't expose things that are not logically global as imports
 65 |     - Design API so that functions receive instances of these objects
 66 | - **Convenience != Cleanliness**
 67 |     - Clean means maximally convenient and understandable in unexpected cases
 68 |     - Design with fewer limiting assumptions!
 69 | - Composition should usually be favoured over inheritance
 70 |     - Good choice when the problem and interface is well-defined and understood (should **always** be true when writing a library)
 71 | 
 72 | 
 73 | ### Using Trust in Open Networks
 74 | 
 75 | [Article](https://ssbc.github.io/docs/articles/using-trust-in-open-networks.html)
 76 | 
 77 | - "Trust-ranking is a key feature of open networks with shared data-structures"
 78 | - [Two primary means of managing trust:](http://www.inf.ufsc.br/~gauthier/EGC6006/material/Aula%206/A%20survey%20of%20trust%20in%20computer%20science%20and%20the%20Semantic%20Web.pdf)
 79 |     - Policy based: managing and exchanging credentials, access policies
 80 |     - Reputation based: past interactions and performance determines future trust
 81 | - Policy-based schemes scale poorly, since you have to make a decision on every other agent
 82 | - Reputation allows trust decisions to be automated
 83 | 
 84 | ### Virtualenv Lives
 85 | 
 86 | [Article](https://hynek.me/articles/virtualenv-lives/)
 87 | 
 88 | - Use virtualenv along with Docker / VMs; Docker / VMs don't replace virtualenv since system-wide
 89 |   packages are still installed
 90 | 
 91 | ### Why Everyone Should Use Attrs
 92 | 
 93 | [Article](https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2016/08/attrs.html)
 94 | 
 95 | - [`attrs`](https://attrs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) is the Python of the future
 96 | 
 97 | ### Better Python Object Serialization
 98 | 
 99 | [Article](https://hynek.me/articles/serialization/)
100 | 
101 | - [PEP 443](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0443/) and `functools.singledispatch` are cool!
102 |     - Allows you to register custom function handlers based on the type of the arguments
103 | 
104 | ### Python Development Anti-Patterns
105 | 
106 | [Article](https://hynek.me/articles/python-deployment-anti-patterns/)
107 | 
108 | - "Key infrastructure must not be dictated by third parties."
109 | - Pinpoint your release dependencies with `pip freeze`
110 | - "You have the responsibility to monitor them [security updates] yourself anyway"
111 | - Use [`supervisord`](http://supervisord.org/) to run remote daemons
112 | - Separate app configuration from the actual app (use something like ansible, chef, salt, etc)
113 | 
114 | ### Advancing in the Bash Shell
115 | 
116 | [Article](http://samrowe.com/wordpress/advancing-in-the-bash-shell/)
117 | 
118 | - `!!` runs last command
119 | - `!xyz` runs last command matching `xyz`
120 | - `!<N>` runs last command with number `<N>`
121 | - `!<...>:p` prints what would be executed, and adds it to history so you can do `!!` to run it
122 | - `!$` expands to the last argument ("word") of the previous command, `!*` expands to all arguments
123 | - `^<pattern>^<sub>` runs last command with `<pattern>` replaced with `<sub>`
124 | - Some other word modifiers:
125 |     - `:h` (keep dir)
126 |     - `:t` (keep file)
127 |     - `:r` (keep file name)
128 |     - `:e` (keep file extension)
129 |     - `:s` (substitute text)
130 |     - `:g` (global, usually used with others, like `:s`)
131 | 
132 | ### Immutability, MVCC, and Garbage Collection
133 | 
134 | [Article](http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2013/12/28/immutability-mvcc-and-garbage-collection/)
135 | 
136 | - "Immutability results in a lot of nice, elegant properties"
137 | - Immutability is costly:
138 |     - Infinitely increasing space
139 |     - Fragmentation (of data), current state of data may be spread out
140 |     - Lots of people may fall into an "tiny worst-case scenario" that's not handled well by desiging for immutability
141 | - Opinion: ACID + MVCC solve some of the immutability issues
142 |     - Use "short-term immutability" along with optimizations for space and IO
143 | 
144 | ### Accountants Don't Use Erasers
145 | 
146 | [Article](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/pathelland/2007/06/14/accountants-dont-use-erasers/)
147 | 
148 | - "The database is a cache of a subset of the log"
149 | 
150 | ### A Guide to 256 Colors
151 | 
152 | [Article](http://lucentbeing.com/writing/archives/a-guide-to-256-color-codes/)
153 | 
154 | - Terminals are built *serially*; they only have one pass to display text
155 | - Delimiters for terminals are escape characters
156 | 
157 | ### The Power of B-trees
158 | 
159 | [Article](http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/btree.html)
160 | 
161 | - "If you weren’t looking closely, CouchDB would appear to be a B-tree manager with an HTTP interface."
162 | - Data is only kept at the leaf nodes, and the height is small enough that the OS can cache the higher level nodes
163 | - Using `_rev`, MVCC, and keeping around old versions of documents, readers could be reading multiple versions of a document at once (based on when they started reading)
164 | - The database file only grows at the end (an append-only B-tree)
165 | 
166 | ### Golang is Trash
167 | 
168 | [Article](http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/golang-is-trash/)
169 | 
170 | ### Smart Contracts Make Slow Blockchains
171 | 
172 | [Article](http://www.multichain.com/blog/2015/11/smart-contracts-slow-blockchains/)
173 | 
174 | - May not make sense to introduce currency to private blockchains, limiting `gas` implementations and instead just enforcing a hard computational limit
175 | - Smart contracts require global locks, hindering concurrency, as they may change any other contract's state
176 | - Transactions cannot be processed until their order in the blockchain is confirmed
177 | - Thought: possibly use the public blockchain to store code, and then execute it yourself
178 | 
179 | ### Four Genuine Blockchain Use Cases
180 | 
181 | [Article](http://www.multichain.com/blog/2016/05/four-genuine-blockchain-use-cases/)
182 | 
183 | - Confidentiality of shared ledgers is a big problem in finance
184 | - "Blockchains represent a trade-off in which disintermediation is gained at the cost of confidentiality."
185 | - Use cases:
186 |     - Lightweight financial systems
187 |         - Remove the centralized control and concerns involved (e.g. security)
188 |         - E.g. crowdfunding, gift cards, etc.
189 |     - Provenance tracking
190 |         - Remove centralized trust
191 |         - Certificate of authenticities
192 |     - Interorganizational record keeping
193 |         - Jointly manage data, without involving intermediaries
194 |         - Audit trails of data, e.g. communication
195 |     - Multiparty aggregation
196 |         - Avoid combining multiple systems of stored data together, or giving it to an intermediary
197 | 
198 | Life
199 | ----
200 | 
201 | ### What's the Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology
202 | 
203 | [Article](https://techcrunch.com/2011/03/31/what%E2%80%99s-the-most-difficult-ceo-skill-managing-your-own-psychology/)
204 | 
205 | - "If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100. This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging for a straight A student."
206 | - It's **impossible** to not make mistakes managing a large number of people; don't take it personally and too harshly
207 | - Be rational; separate out the importance of issues from your emotions
208 | - "Tip to aspiring entrepreneurs: if you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CE"
209 | - Techniques to help:
210 |     - Make friends who have gone through or are going through the same
211 |     - Get things on paper, and for second opinions
212 |     - Focus on where you are going rather than what can go bad
213 |     - Don't quit!
214 | 
215 | ### A philosopher’s 350-year-old trick to get people to change their minds is now backed up by psychologists
216 | 
217 | [Article](http://qz.com/778767/to-tell-someone-theyre-wrong-first-tell-them-how-theyre-right/)
218 | 
219 | - Tell people how they're right to reframe their mind to what they've missed
220 | 
221 | ### Investing For Geeks
222 | 
223 | [Article](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/investing-for-geeks?__s=esaiz3kazigwidftsigk)
224 | 
225 | - Buy ETFs. The end.
226 | 
227 | ### Age of Em
228 | 
229 | [Article](http://geoff.greer.fm/2016/07/23/age-of-em/)
230 | 
231 | - Economic growth bottlenecked by people with long learning curves and diminishing returns
232 | - Brain emulations may be a precursor to AI
233 | 
234 | ### The money in open-source software
235 | 
236 | [Article](https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/09/the-money-in-open-source-software/)
237 | 
238 | - Think about a business model from day one
239 |     - Sell enterprise versions, Saas
240 | - Picking a licensing model aligned with monetization stategy
241 |     - Open-source software is always owned by someone
242 | - Don't depend on consulting, but it might be necessary at the start
243 | - Customer satisfaction is more important than sales; ultimately, happy people buy more
244 | 
245 | ### The next big thing will start out looking like a toy
246 | 
247 | [Article](http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy/)
248 | 
249 | - Technology tends to get better at a faster rate than users' needs increase
250 | - Technology adoption is usually non-linear
251 | - Look at external forces to see how a product could be ramped up the utility curve, **not** the designer's feature set
252 | 
253 | ### Come for the tool, stay for the network
254 | 
255 | [Article](http://cdixon.org/2015/01/31/come-for-the-tool-stay-for-the-network/)
256 | 
257 | - Build a useful single-player tool, but then get people to stay and create a network by adding a social part
258 | 
259 | ### Machine learning is really good at partially solving just about any problem
260 | 
261 | [Article](http://cdixon.org/2009/08/20/machine-learning-is-really-good-at-partially-solving-just-about-any-problem/)
262 | 
263 | - Machine learning can get you 80% of the way to a solution within reasonable amounts of time
264 | - Getting the last 10% to 20% can be very difficult
265 | - Easier to apply machine learning to contexts that are fault tolerant and can have fault tolerant UXs built around them (e.g. human corrections)
266 | - Companies rarely maintain competitive advantage because of their machine learning algorithms; the magic is in the data and how they get it
267 |     - ML algorithms are mostly publically available research done by academics
268 | 
269 | ### The idea maze for AI startups
270 | 
271 | [Article](http://cdixon.org/2015/02/01/the-ai-startup-idea-maze/)
272 | 
273 | - Either create fault tolerant UXs on top of the 80% solutions, or find ways to obtain a large amount of data and have that be your advantage
274 | - Public data sets suck
275 | - Narrow your problem set until it's as small as possible while still usable
276 | - Look towards creatively crowdsourcing your data (less capital requirements)
277 | 
278 | ### The computing deployment phase
279 | 
280 | [Article](http://cdixon.org/2013/02/10/the-computing-deployment-phase/)
281 | 
282 | - Two phases of technological revolutions: the installation phase, and the deployment phase
283 | - Financial bubbles propel the initial rapid installation (potentially irrational)
284 | - Crash happens, and then recovery phase
285 | - Finally, long period of productive growth as the technology is matured and deployed
286 | - Entrepreneurial activity moves "up the stack" between the two phases; the initial part is focused on building the technology, the second part is on its applications
287 | - Deployment doesn't just mean creating an app; it's a refactoring of an industry into its "optimal structure"
288 | - Entrepreneurs will increasingly have mutli-disciplinary expertise
289 | 
290 | Random
291 | ------
292 | 
293 | ### Zero Knowledge Proofs: An illustrated primer
294 | 
295 | [Article](https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/11/27/zero-knowledge-proofs-illustrated-primer/)
296 | 
297 | - Information leakage: what if you don't trust the other party you're giving information to?
298 | - Prove statements without revealing any information aside from the truth of a statement
299 | - Raise your confidence to the point where the other party can only be lying with a negligible probability
300 | - Use constructs that both hides a digital value, but also binds the maker to it, and then test these constructs to the point of neglibible probabilitY
301 |     - Digital commitment schemes
302 | - Can be used for any NP-C problem
303 | 
304 | ### Surviving a Bad RNG
305 | 
306 | [Article](https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/03/09/surviving-bad-rng/)
307 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2017-december.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | December 2017
  2 | =============
  3 | 
  4 | Tech
  5 | ----
  6 | 
  7 | ### The dawn of trustworthy computing
  8 | 
  9 | [Article](http://unenumerated.blogspot.ca/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustworthy-computing.html)
 10 | 
 11 | - Fiduciary code: the most important and mission-critical parts of a problem that run on a blockchain
 12 |     - Use fiduciary code where the costs of human ("wet") problems due to unreliable or unsecure computers is higher than the hardware costs for running blockchain code
 13 | 
 14 | ### Money, blockchains, and social scalability
 15 | 
 16 | [Article](http://unenumerated.blogspot.ca/2017/02/money-blockchains-and-social-scalability.html)
 17 | 
 18 | - Social scalability: ability to overcome shortcomings in human minds to allow for participation between participants
 19 |     - How does technology constrain or motivation participation?
 20 |     - How many people can beneficially participant in the institution?
 21 | - In the past: Dunbar number (~150 max participants)
 22 | - **Improving social scalability: institutional or technological improvements that move function from mind to paper or mind to machine**
 23 |     - "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." -- Alfred North Whitehead
 24 |     - Money increased the opportunities for exchanging a variety of goods, by providing a widely acceptable and reusable form of wealth storage and transfer
 25 |     - Internet has predominantly helped via efficient matchmaking
 26 |     - Blockchains will provide **trust minimization**
 27 | 
 28 | ### Hick's Law: Making the choice easier for users
 29 | 
 30 | [Article](https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/hick-s-law-making-the-choice-easier-for-users)
 31 | 
 32 | - Hick's law: RT = a + b * log2(n)
 33 |     - RT = reaction time
 34 |     - n = number of stimulants
 35 |     - a, b = constants
 36 |     - **The more choices you present, the longer it will take for them to make a decision**
 37 |     - **Simplify the decision making process, not eliminate it altogether**
 38 | - Designing good UX:
 39 |     1. Find out the functionalities that answer users' needs
 40 |     1. Guide users to the functions that they need most
 41 | - Recognize there is sometimes no avoiding complexity, e.g. a fighter jet cockpit
 42 | - Using Hick's Law:
 43 |     - Categorizing choice: do a [card sort](https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/card-sorting)
 44 |     - Obscuring complexity: only present specific parts on a screen at a time
 45 | 
 46 | Life
 47 | ----
 48 | 
 49 | ### The 4 Stages of 0->1 Products
 50 | 
 51 | [Article](https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/the-4-stages-of-0-1-products-cdb8236dbf66?ref=hackingui)
 52 | 
 53 | 1. Define your People Outcomes
 54 |     - A point of view on what should be different about the target's behaviour, understanding, or sentiment
 55 |     - Identify the People Problem you're trying to solve: what is currently broken or unsatisfying?
 56 |         - Is it a surface problem, or is it the root problem (I'd like to use my phone to order food vs. I need to eat here and now)?
 57 |     - Define initial target audience
 58 |     - What will people do differently if your product is wildly successful
 59 | 2. Product-Market Fit
 60 |     - Keys: define good hypotheses and get conclusive results
 61 |     - Define bold success metrics (avoid those based on volume), and especially use retention; successes are big step-function changes
 62 |     - Focus on learning, not shipping!
 63 | 3. Reconciliation
 64 |     - Optimize trade-offs in the broader ecosystem: external contraints are put in
 65 |     - Make sure your product increases the overall pie (for the company, etc), not just your slice
 66 | 4. Growth
 67 |     - How do you expand into new segments? Consider trade-offs and the value you provide (and how you could make it more valuable)
 68 |     - How do you increase value for current segments?
 69 | 
 70 | ### The Blockchain Man
 71 | 
 72 | [Article](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/10/10/the-blockchain-man/#more-6111)
 73 | 
 74 | - The Organizational Man's Social Ethic:
 75 |     1. The group is the source of creativity
 76 |     1. "Belongingness" is the ultimate need of the individual
 77 |     1. Applications of science allow us to achieve belongingness
 78 | - Becoming an Organizational Man had enormous economic benefits for individuals in the 20th century
 79 | - "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." -- McLuhan
 80 | - How do we create **Sovereign Individuals**?
 81 |     - A new form of money, that allows us to reset the odds of those not forced into centralization?
 82 | - As transaction costs are again lowered an order of magnitude, corporations will start to converge to a single person
 83 | - **"The Organization gave man access to the benefits of globalization but required conformity. Blockchains give the same access but do not insist on the same conformity."**
 84 | - Organizations and centralized authorities are often opaque: they want to look deterministic on the outside, but really, they offer hidden gambles
 85 | - Blockchains will be transparent, enabling users to see what aspects of their life is actually *probabilistic*
 86 | - "Protocolism is the new nationalism"
 87 |     - A desire for belonging, and perhaps, one for simplicity
 88 |     - Protocol Ethic (the new Social Ethic)
 89 |         1. The individual is the source of creativity
 90 |         1. Serving the needs of the protocol is the ultimate purpose of the individual
 91 |         1. Applications of blockchains allow us to achieve our highest potential
 92 | - The Organization served as a shield from markets, but the blockchain will impose it
 93 | 
 94 | 
 95 | ### Ten work skills for the postnormal era
 96 | 
 97 | [Article](https://workfutures.io/10-work-skills-for-the-postnormal-era-2c07a1009a25)
 98 | 
 99 | 1. Boundless Curiosity: The most creative people are insatiably curious. They want to know what works and why.
100 | 1. Freestyling: We have to learn to dance with the robots, not to run away. However, we still need to make sure that AI is limited enough that it will still be dance-withable, and not not-runnable-away-from.
101 | 1. Emergent Leadership: Emergent leadership: the ability to steer things in the right direction without the authority to do so, through social competence.
102 | 1. Constructive Uncertainty: The idea of constructive uncertainty is not predicated on eliminating our biases: they are as built into our minds as deeply as language and lust.
103 | 1. Complex Ethics: All thinking touches on our sense of morality and justice. Knowledge is justified belief, so our perspective of the world and our place in it is rooted in our ethical system, whether examined or not.
104 | 1. Deep Generalists: Deep generalists can ferret out the connections that build the complexity into complex systems, and grasp their interplay.
105 | 1. Design Logic: It’s not only about imagining things we desire, but also undesirable things — cautionary tales that highlight what might happen if we carelessly introduce new technologies into society.
106 | 1. Postnormal Creativity: In postnormal times creativity may paradoxically become normal: an everyone, everyday, everywhere, process.
107 | 1. Posterity, not History, nor the Future: While we need to learn from history, we must not be constrained by it, especially in a time where much of what is going on is unprecedented.
108 | 1. Sense-Making: Skills that help us create unique insights critical to decision making.
109 | 
110 | ### How Facebook's VP of Product Finds Focus and Creates Conditions for Intentional Work
111 | 
112 | [Article](http://firstround.com/review/how-facebooks-vp-of-product-finds-focus-and-creates-conditions-for-intentional-work/)
113 | 
114 | - Focus: doing things with a clear intention and making sure that all your decisions match your intention
115 |     - "Focus is really about aligning with your purpose – whether it be your purpose on a specific project or your higher purpose in life. When actions reflect intentions, you’re in alignment with your personal mission. Only then can you truly shine."
116 |     - Consider focus to the a force you extert, rather than a quality
117 | - Questions to ask:
118 |     - What is the main problem I'm solving?
119 |     - Who are the people we're solving this problem for?
120 |     - What emotion/feeling do we want to create or evoke?
121 |     - Is this implementation aligned with the problem we're solving?
122 |     - Is this product the must likely to successfully solve the problem?
123 | - Challenging intentions:
124 |     - Are these intentions still the correct ones?
125 |     - Are my recent decisions in line with these intentions?
126 | - Being intentional: stating your values and intentions clearly, to you and your team, and then putting your money where your mouth is
127 |     - Staffing is one of the greatest ways to express your intentions:
128 |         - Do I have enough people on this project?
129 |         - Do I have the right people on this project?
130 |         - What trade-offs do I need to make to get to a "yes" to the above?
131 | - On building a culture that makes change expected and accepted: put people in charge of a problem, not a product
132 | - Delegating to keep focus: direct questions, issues, and opportunities with forward momentum to people who is or can be focused on addressing them at that time
133 |     - Understand the priorities of yourself, team leads, and other colleagues!
134 |         - Remove distracting obstacles to allow for focus
135 | 
136 | Random
137 | ------
138 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2017-february.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | February 2017
  2 | =============
  3 | 
  4 | Tech
  5 | ----
  6 | 
  7 | ### RethinkDB: Why We Failed
  8 | 
  9 | [Article](http://www.defstartup.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html)
 10 | 
 11 | - **Picked a terrible market and optimized the product for the wrong metrics of goodness**
 12 | - "You're in the market *your users* think you're in," and that frames what they think of you (and who you really are)
 13 | - Understand how microeconomics works in your market (e.g. developer tools: lots of free competitors; difficult to get anyone to pay for your product)
 14 | - "Early distribution challenges almost always doom you to eventual death"; getting a feedback loop for traction from the start is important!
 15 | - "It turns out that correctness, simplicity [...], and consistency **are the wrong metrics of goodness** for most users"
 16 |     - Most users want things fast, usable by them, and solving a specific problem (that they have)
 17 | - "MongoDB turned regular developers into heroes *when people needed it*"
 18 | - You have all the time in the world to fix your problems, one by one, once you're established
 19 | - **Don't be three years behind your competitors!** Pivot your way into something you can control.
 20 | - Avoid optimism bias; you are (likely) **NOT** to be different from other people who fall into the same trap
 21 | - Advice:
 22 |     - Pick a large market but build for specific users
 23 |     - Learn to recognize the talents you're missing, then work like hell to get them on your team
 24 |     - Read The Economist religiously. It will make you better faster.
 25 | 
 26 | ### The Rise of Worse is Better
 27 | 
 28 | [Article](http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html)
 29 | 
 30 | - Worse-is-better
 31 |     - Favour simplicity; try to maximize correctness, consistency, and completeness, but favour them in that order (rather than trying to sacrifice some attributes to maximize the latter attributes)
 32 | - Implementation simplicity is more important than interface simplicity
 33 |     - Simple means it's easier to port, change, and modify
 34 |     - Sacrifice safety, convenience, hassle, and magic (to the user) to keep performance good on worse machines
 35 | - Favour things that will make distribution easier in the long run (e.g. simplicity!)
 36 |     - But make sure the simple thing is **good**
 37 | - Worse-is-better: gain acceptance, condition users to expect less, and then improve to a point that it's close to the right thing
 38 | - **"Often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus."**
 39 |     - Note that half of the right thing is still basically right!
 40 | 
 41 | ### Measure Anything, Measure Everything
 42 | 
 43 | [Article](https://codeascraft.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/)
 44 | 
 45 | - Track everything: network, machine, and application
 46 | - Application is the hardest, yet most important
 47 | - StatsD uses UDP because it's fire-and-forget
 48 | - Sampling can be important for very frequent events (sample: only fire an event once in a while) to not overload monitoring
 49 | - "As long as a given solution has next to no management overhead, and is trivially easy for engineers to use, you’ve got something useful."
 50 | 
 51 | ### HyperLogLog
 52 | 
 53 | [Article](http://antirez.com/news/75)
 54 | 
 55 | - HyperLogLog approximates the unique size of a set using very little memory (hashes subsets of data, and uses the hash -- a binary value -- to determine how likely the result was; note that in binary, each next result in a row is 50% likely)
 56 | 
 57 | ### Respect My Authority - Hijacking Broken Nameservers to Compromise Your Target
 58 | 
 59 | [Article](https://thehackerblog.com/respect-my-authority-hijacking-broken-nameservers-to-compromise-your-target/)
 60 | 
 61 | - Wow DNS caching can be a *b3h*.
 62 | 
 63 | ### Are we overcomplicating everything?
 64 | 
 65 | [Thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13426896)
 66 | 
 67 | - Always ask yourself if the problem is actually complex or if you're just making it complex (for various reasons, e.g. ego, trying to make work interesting, etc)
 68 |     - **Avoid Complexity-for-the-sake-of-complexity**
 69 | - Ask the question "when is practice X useful?" instead of "is practice X a good idea?"
 70 | - "Microservices probably reduces the asymptotic cost of scaling but add a huge constant factor."
 71 | - "Statefulness is inherently complex"
 72 | - There is no silver bullet (a single design will not work best everywhere)
 73 | - Favour disposable code over reusable code (YAGNI; don't generalize prematurely)
 74 | - "Code means communication"
 75 | - "The smartest people in the room are the ones who can speak about complex topics in a simple way"
 76 | - Understand when a best practice is best; it may not always apply
 77 | - "I think this is down to the sad truth that most developer roles offer very little challenge outside of learning a new stack"
 78 | - "Comparative analyses to make objective recommendations between different solution alternatives [including architectures and tools]" should be in interviews
 79 | - Think about goals rather than specific solutions first: **your solution should be the best fit for the problem at hand**
 80 | - Hand *repeatable* and *repeatable* tasks to computers (and feel free to make those more complicated)
 81 | - "You can know what features are in a release or when the release will ship, but not both" -- Rob Gingell
 82 | 
 83 | ### Logs Are Streams, Not Files
 84 | 
 85 | [Article](https://adam.herokuapp.com/past/2011/4/1/logs_are_streams_not_files/)
 86 | 
 87 | - Logs are time-ordered streams
 88 | - Streams are more powerful than files; if you want to, you can redirect a stream into a file but you can also redirect to multiple locations or programs
 89 | - Use the syslog protocol (`logger`) for logging distributed systems
 90 | 
 91 | 
 92 | Life
 93 | ----
 94 | 
 95 | ### Why time management is ruining our lives
 96 | 
 97 | [Article](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/why-time-management-is-ruining-our-lives)
 98 | 
 99 | - "The pressure of trying to complete an ever-increasing number of tasks, in a finite quantity of time, was becoming impossible to bear"
100 | - Lots of things are happening today because of our "quest for increased personal productivity" (products, rhetoric, etc)
101 | - Being more efficient / productive at something doesn't always bring benefits (e.g. hyper productive on email == more email, whereas neglected email means people stop caring)
102 | - Don't live under the illusion that everything, eventually, will come under control. This is impossible in modern life.
103 | - **"The average lifespan consists of only about 4,000 weeks"**
104 | - There's a momentum towards more work; it often feels impossible to cut down on it
105 | - Current gig-economy dynamics enforce this behaviour; the only person who suffers if you get lazy is you
106 | - Maybe "getting things done" is the wrong focus; what do those things amount to?
107 | - If everything is centered around efficiency (or economic gain), then other activities are judged by their usefulness towards productive activities (e.g. sleeping for work)
108 | - Awareness of limited time degrades performance; stress gets in the way
109 | - The more productive and efficient you are, the less adaptable you will be to new or unexpected events (e.g. unexpected patients)
110 | - "Personal productivity presents itself as an antidote to busyness when it might better be understood as yet another form of busyness"
111 | 
112 | ### When You Are Depressed, Make Something
113 | 
114 | [Article](https://byrslf.co/when-you-are-depressed-make-something-49467edd1933#.81ttzaq8m)
115 | 
116 | - "Sadness is when you feel down because things aren’t going your way. Depression is when you feel down even when all is going well."
117 | - Depression masks itself as circumstantial sadness --> reinforced feedback loop of negativity
118 | - **"No one judges you more than the way you judge yourself"**
119 |     - Don't be afraid, you're already your worst critic
120 | - Creativity and making something allow you to focus on the present and enjoy it
121 | - "The ability to create and share is a vessel for your spirit. It is a gift that has been passed down through millennia. Use it when you need it most."
122 | - "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." -- Picasso
123 | 
124 | ### The Real Reason Your City Has No Money
125 | 
126 | [Article](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money)
127 | 
128 | - "Humans are predisposed to highly value pleasure today and to deeply discount future pain, especially the more distant it is.”
129 | 
130 | ### Poor Neighbourhoods Make the Best Investment
131 | 
132 | [Article](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborhoods-make-the-best-investment)
133 | 
134 | - "Poor neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of the American development pattern."
135 | - Poorer areas have less infrastructure to manage (and may be denser)
136 | 
137 | ### The Risk of Discovery
138 | 
139 | [Article](http://www.paulgraham.com/disc.html)
140 | 
141 | - We often discard failures and embelish successes once we know the results. But until then, everything has a chance and is risky.
142 | 
143 | ### The Reality of Developer Burnout
144 | 
145 | [Article](https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/the-reality-of-developer-burnout)
146 | 
147 | - "Burnout is sneaky. It doesn’t usually announce itself. It slowly grinds at you until these feelings become the new normal, and at that point it’s not easy to dig yourself out of the hole." -- Zach Holman
148 | - Publish-only: stop paying attention to all outside events and noise
149 | - Have other hobbies than writing code
150 | 
151 | ### If Your Boss Could Do Your Job, You're More Likely to Be Happy at Work
152 | 
153 | [Article](https://hbr.org/2016/12/if-your-boss-could-do-your-job-youre-more-likely-to-be-happy-at-work)
154 | 
155 | - “People don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad bosses”
156 | - "Bosses matter far more for employee job satisfaction than any other factor we measured"
157 | - "Employees are far happier when they are led by people with deep expertise in the core activity of the business"
158 | 
159 | ### How Much Does Employee Turnover Really Cost
160 | 
161 | [Article](https://medium.com/latticehq/how-much-does-employee-turnover-really-cost)
162 | 
163 | - Most understand turnover is costly, but don't have a way of quantifying it
164 | - People optimize what they can measure (quantitively!)
165 | - Understanding something quantitively is often a first step towards a solution
166 | - Formula: cost = # of regrettable departues x average cost of departures
167 |     - # of departues = # of employees x annual turnover percentage
168 |     - Average cost includes:
169 |         - Cost of hiring
170 |         - Cost of onboarding and training
171 |         - Cost of learning and development
172 |         - Cost of time with unfilled role
173 | - Addressing churn: low pay can contribute, but high pay doesn't make up for bad workplaces
174 |     - Focus on (long-term) growth, impact, and care (making them feel valued; surround your company with people who want something for **others**)
175 | 
176 | ### The Best Way to Find More Time to Read
177 | 
178 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2013/09/finding-time-to-read/)
179 | 
180 | - Reading: "Mastering the best that other people have already figured out"
181 | - "Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides.” -- Seneca
182 | - “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero.” -- Charlie Munger
183 | 
184 | ### The Meaning of Low Interest Rates
185 | 
186 | [Article](https://keepingstock.net/the-meaning-of-low-interest-rates-5409de0173e8#.2k77yprhu)
187 | 
188 | - "What does it mean to our culture that interest rates are so low, even negative, in many places?"
189 | - "For interest rates to be so low effectively means that there are not a lot of good ideas about how to make life better in the future."
190 | - Cash is sitting idle (albeit safely) because there's nothing obvious left to explore (that will create returns)
191 | - "Europe and Japan keep rates at rock bottom, and indeed negative in places, to placate otherwise-tottering balance sheets of zombie enterprises."
192 | - "The inability to honestly face failure has led to its subsidization."
193 | 
194 | ### The Psycohology of Human Misjudgement
195 | 
196 | [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=36&v=pqzcCfUglws)
197 | 
198 | - Economics is **always** behavioural
199 | - Economics <==> Psychology
200 | - Don't do sloppy accounting (when it's bad for business, the accounting should show that)!
201 | - Your advisors have **a lot** of bias!
202 |     - Either apply some slack to their advice, or
203 |     - Learn some of the trade and ask them to explain their advice (and why they're right)
204 | - "I don't think vengence is much good"
205 | - When you want to persuade someone, you **really** should tell them why (and maybe add in one of the below)
206 | - Recognize:
207 |     - Power of incentives (i.e. reinforcement)
208 |     - Psychology of denial
209 |     - Incentivized bias (i.e. agency costs)
210 |     - Bias from consistency and commitments to conclusions
211 |         - Don't chain your brain by declarations and commitments
212 |         - What you do will change what you think
213 |         - Medical training: watch one, do one, train one
214 |     - Bias from past correlation and association
215 |     - Information inefficencies
216 |     - Reciprocation tendency
217 |         - Ask for a lot, then back off a bit
218 |     - Bias from conclusions of others
219 |         - Don't cargo cult
220 |     - Contrast bias
221 |         - If it comes to you in small pieces, you might miss it
222 |     - Influence from authority
223 |     - Bias from present or threatened scarcity
224 |         - Minor depreciations or appreciations
225 |     - Envy and jealousy
226 |         - "It's not greed that runs the world, it's envy" -- Warren Buffet
227 |     - Misgambling compulsion
228 |     - Liking distortion (e.g. one's own self, ideas, etc)
229 |     - Disliking distortion (e.g. somone disliked)
230 |     - "Man with the hammer" syndrome (don't force every problem into the same box)
231 |     - Your brain is not (!) mathematical; it is heuristical!
232 |         - Don't overweigh the information you have at hand
233 |         - Don't jump on available information
234 |     - Overinfluence by extra vivid information
235 |     - Not properly explaining "why" -- don't kid yourself when you don't do a good job
236 |     - Stress-induced mental changes
237 |     - "Say something" syndrome
238 |         - People might not know how to express something, but just want to say something
239 | - **Combining multiple of the above produces an exponential result**
240 | - Do something painful and then something rewarding to treat yourself
241 | - Revisit your choices, and understand why something did (or did not) work out
242 | 
243 | ### How to Read a Book
244 | 
245 | [Article](http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/06/17/how-to-read-a-book/)
246 | 
247 | - Stages of reading:
248 |     1. Elementary
249 |     1. Inspectional
250 |     1. Analytical
251 |     1. Syntopical (synthesis of different opinions into another work)
252 | - What does the book tell us about the "six great ideas" (Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Justice, Liberty, and Equality)
253 | - Inspectional reading
254 |     - Read title and front and back (what do they try to convey?)
255 |     - Pay attention to the first few pages
256 |     - (Non-fiction) Read headings and conclusion
257 |     - Read reviews
258 | - Analytical reading
259 |     - Research the author a bit
260 |     - Do a bit of inspectional reading
261 |     - Do a first superficial run through first
262 |         - Ask questions, highlight important parts (but leave those for later)
263 |     - Read it again, more slowly, some time after
264 |     - Try to figure things out first on your own (like unknown words), but use aids if necessary
265 |     - **Answer:**
266 |         - What is the book about? **Write a few sentences yourself to summarize!**
267 |         - What is being said in detail? **Write a few sentences about the overall structure and what happens where (e.g. per chapter)**
268 |         - Is the book true (in whole or part)? What do you believe is true?
269 |         - What's the significance? What's the takeaway? **How does it make you think differently about the world?**
270 |     - Critique and share your thoughts with others
271 | 
272 | ### How to Mark a Book
273 | 
274 | [Article](http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~pinsky/mark_a_book.htm)
275 | 
276 | - To get the most out of anything, "read between the lines"
277 | - "Full ownership comes only when you have made it a part of yourself"
278 | - Marking up a book keeps you awake (more than just consciously) ;)
279 | - **Active reading is thinking**
280 | - Preserve your reactions and sharpen your questions
281 | - **Reading a book should be "a conversation between you and the author"**
282 | - Understanding is a two-way operation
283 | - Marking:
284 |     - Underlining: major points, important statements
285 |     - Vertical lines at margin: emphasize underlined statement
286 |     - Asterisk at margin: most important statements in the book
287 |     - Numbers at margin: sequence of points made for developing a single statements
288 |     - Page numbers at margin: other areas in the book the author made relevant points
289 |     - Writing at margin: questions, answers, reducing thoughts into a single statement
290 | - End papers: index of author's points, and outline of book
291 | - "There is no such thing as the right speed for intelligent reading... The sign of intelligence in reading is the ability to read different things differently according to their worth"
292 | 
293 | 
294 | Random
295 | ------
296 | 
297 | ### Never Talk to the Police
298 | 
299 | [Article](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/law-professor-police-interrogation-law-constitution-survival)
300 | 
301 | - Always ask for a lawyer, and keep on asking
302 | - Anyone may misinterpret or forget what you said
303 | - You never know if what you're saying could implicate you
304 | 
305 | ### VR
306 | 
307 | [Article](https://blog.ycombinator.com/vr/)
308 | 
309 | - "With VR, there isn't already an app for that"
310 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2017-january.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | January 2017
 2 | ============
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### LLVM for Grad Students
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~asampson/blog/llvm.html)
10 | 
11 | - LLVM is much more useful than just for hacking on compilers and other research!
12 | - LLVM's IR (intermediate representation) is awesome because it's actually human readable (similar to RISC machine code) unlike most other compilers
13 | 
14 | ### Why Haskell
15 | 
16 | [Article](http://blog.ezyang.com/2010/01/why-haskell/)
17 | 
18 | ### Socket Programming HOWTO
19 | 
20 | [Article](https://docs.python.org/3/howto/sockets.html)
21 | 
22 | - Just use `INET` (i.e. IPv4) and `STREAM` (i.e. TCP) sockets
23 | 
24 | ### Under the Hood: Building and open-sourcing RocksDB
25 | 
26 | [Article](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-building-and-open-sourcing-rocksdb/10151822347683920)
27 | 
28 | - Embeddable database: skips network overhead (potentially makes queries twice as slow)
29 | - Traditional databases don't have good locking strategies to scale well with multiple cores (making them unable to max out available storage IOPS)
30 | 
31 | ### The History of RocksDB
32 | 
33 | [Article](http://rocksdb.blogspot.de/2013/11/the-history-of-rocksdb.html)
34 | 
35 | - The advent of flash memory meant that network latency became a much higher cost to performance than before (0.5% impact with disk vs. 50% impact with flash)
36 | 
37 | ### You Might Not Need a WebSocket
38 | 
39 | [Article](http://blog.fanout.io/2014/06/24/you-might-not-need-a-websocket/)
40 | 
41 | - Web realtime users usually want to data sync, not actually have bidirectional streams
42 | - Why not build a nicer abstraction for end use case (e.g. pub/sub, data sync) rather than falling back to a stream?
43 | 
44 | ### To AMQP or to XMPP, that is the question
45 | 
46 | [Article](https://www.opensourcery.co.za/2009/04/19/to-amqp-or-to-xmpp-that-is-the-question/)
47 | 
48 | - Don't use XMPP if all you want is a message queue
49 | 
50 | ### Disable Your Antivirus Software (Except Microsoft's)
51 | 
52 | [Article](http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/01/disable-your-antivirus-software-except.html)
53 | 
54 | - Antivirus software generally sucks, they can kill your product
55 | 
56 | 
57 | Life
58 | ----
59 | 
60 | 
61 | Random
62 | ------
63 | 
64 | ### P vs NP survey article
65 | 
66 | [Article](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3095)
67 | 
68 | - "On the Internet, it is do or do not. There is no disclaim."
69 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2017-july.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | July 2017
  2 | =========
  3 | 
  4 | Tech
  5 | ----
  6 | 
  7 | ### The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence
  8 | 
  9 | [Article](https://hbr.org/2016/11/the-simple-economics-of-machine-intelligence)
 10 | 
 11 | - **"Technological revolutions tend to involve some important activity becoming cheap, like the cost of communication or finding information"**
 12 | - Machine learning makes prediction cheap
 13 |     - This increases the value of tasks that complement prediction and decreases the value of substitutes
 14 | - Some problems will be reframed as prediction problems
 15 |     - E.g. semiconductors made arithmetic cheap, so we started to digitalize everything (e.g. photos)
 16 |     - E.g. driving: rather than program exact decisions based on environmental factors, we now ask the computer to **predict what a human would do**
 17 | - **Humans activities have five high-level components: data, prediction, judgment, action, and outcomes**
 18 |     - Data was made cheap with computers and communications networks (search)
 19 |     - Prediction has been made cheap with AI
 20 |     - **Human judgment** based on data and predictions will be key
 21 | 
 22 | Life
 23 | ----
 24 | 
 25 | ### Master Productivity and Eliminate Noise Using the Eisenhower Matrix
 26 | 
 27 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2013/04/how-to-work-more-efficiently-the-eisenhower-matrix/)
 28 | 
 29 | - "The most urgent decisions are rarely the most important ones." -- Eisenhower
 30 | - "Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking and indiscriminate action." -- Tim Ferris
 31 | - Four quadrants:
 32 |     - **Urgent and important**: do it immediately
 33 |     - Urgent but not important: delegate
 34 |     - Important but not urgent: decide when to do it
 35 |     - Not urgent or important: do it later (or drop it!)
 36 | - Distinguish between important and urgent!
 37 | - Don't put off important tasks; give them the proper amount of time or you'll likely have to spend even more time on it later
 38 |     - Don't put yourself in a position where you'll have to fix problems made by past reactive decision making
 39 | 
 40 | ### Five Elements of Effective Thinking
 41 | 
 42 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2013/07/five-elements-of-effective-thinking/)
 43 | 
 44 | - **"It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent"** -- Charlie Munger
 45 | - Habits:
 46 |     - Understand deeply: know what you know, and understand the simple deeply
 47 |     - Make mistakes
 48 |     - Raise questions: to find connections that are otherwise invisible
 49 |     - Follow the flow of ideas: see where ideas came from, and where they'll take us
 50 |     - Change: embrace it and improve
 51 | 
 52 | ### Improving Your Performance
 53 | 
 54 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2014/05/improving-your-performance/)
 55 | 
 56 | 1. Deliberately practice, and intentionally practice the hardest and most tedious
 57 | 1. Measure your skillset visibily
 58 | 1. Practice and work in chunks, so much that you can only sustain it for that chunk
 59 | 1. Take responsibility for your failures; improve your skills and planning for next time, learn from the failure
 60 | 1. Focus on variety, reps, and feedback during improvement
 61 | 1. Make routines out of unimportant decisions, save your energy for important tasks
 62 | 1. Exercise
 63 | 
 64 | ### Charlie Munger: A Two-Step Process to Improve Your Thinking
 65 | 
 66 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2013/04/a-two-step-process-for-making-effective-decisions/)
 67 | 
 68 | 1. Understand the forces at play (what's important and who's gaining from them)
 69 |     - Know what you know and where your competencies lie
 70 | 1. Understand how your subconscious might be leading your astray (e.g. psychological factors)
 71 | 
 72 | ### The Power of Full Engagement
 73 | 
 74 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2015/06/the-power-of-full-engagement/)
 75 | 
 76 | - **"Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance"**
 77 | - New paradigm:
 78 |     - Manage energy
 79 |     - Seek stress: push ourselves beyond our limits, systematically
 80 |     - Life is a series of sprints: fully engage, and then refuel in-between
 81 |     - Downtime is productive time
 82 |     - Purpose fuels performance rituals rule: look at what you're effective at and figure out what habits and rituals you follow that make you so
 83 |     - Power of full engagement
 84 | - Sources of energy:
 85 |     - Physical
 86 |     - Emotional
 87 |     - Mental
 88 |     - Spiritual
 89 | - Learn to hold ourselves accountable for how we manage our energy
 90 | 
 91 | ### Solitude and Leadership
 92 | 
 93 | [Article](https://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/)
 94 | 
 95 | - Don't aim to just keep the ship running, to go along for the ride and make it up the ladder; aim to make a difference and be yourself
 96 | - People expect (and reward) conformity; ask why and if that's positive
 97 | - Ask your own questions, set your own goals and worthwhile desires
 98 | - Moral courage: "the courage to stand up for what you believe"
 99 | - "Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it" -- not learning someone else's ideas
100 | - Remember to slow down and concentrate -- most of your best thought needs time to be cultivated
101 | - Find our own **reality**; hear your own voice; discover your own path
102 | 
103 | ### Are You Solving the Right Problems?
104 | 
105 | [Article](https://hbr.org/2017/01/are-you-solving-the-right-problems)
106 | 
107 | - The hard part is figuring out *which* problems to solve, not *how* to solve them
108 | - Most people struggle with daily problems, not annual strategic ones
109 | - **Reframe** your problems
110 |     - Why is the problem actually happening? What are people complaining about? What are they feeling? Why does it need to be fixed?
111 |     - "The point of reframing is not to find the 'real' problem but, rather, to see if there is a better one to solve"
112 | - Practices:
113 |     1. **Establish legitimacy**: get others accustomed to reframing problems
114 |     1. **Bring outsiders into the discussion**: get their unentrenched perspective
115 |         - Find a *boundary spanner* who is able to speak their mind
116 |         - Ask for inputs, not solutions
117 |     1. **Get people's definitions in writing**: see what people actually think the problem is, and how they frame it
118 |         - We can try to imagine different perspectives, but we often get it wrong
119 |     1. **Ask what's missing**: what is missing from our definition of the problem (or why we think it's happening)?
120 |     1. **Consider multiple categories**: what do we think categorizes the problem? Are there any other categories we haven't considered?
121 |         - Metacognition: thinking about how we think
122 |     1. **Analyze positive exceptions**: what was different when the problem wasn't a problem?
123 |         - This also makes the discussion less threatening and confrontational
124 |     1. **Question the objective**: what do people actually want (their hidden agenda)? Clarify and then challenge.
125 | - "Tools can be the subtlest of traps" -- Neil Gaiman
126 | 
127 | ### Platonically irrational
128 | 
129 | [Article](https://aeon.co/essays/what-plato-knew-about-behavioural-economics-a-lot)
130 | 
131 | - "New catchwords hide from us the thoughts and feelings of our ancestors, even when they differed little from our own" -- Bertrand Russel
132 |     - Related to recency bias; we can only affirm and relate to what we know well (more likely recent things)
133 | - Greek philosophers (e.g. Plato) thought about behaviour psychology long before modern science
134 | - Don't mistake relative for absoltue values
135 | - Intellectual humility is both a **moral** and mental trait
136 | 
137 | ### Why Your Brain Hates Other People
138 | 
139 | [Article](http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/why-your-brain-hates-other-people)
140 | 
141 | - Be careful of the automatic association your brain makes between similar Us people vs. who you think are They people; stop to notice and think about if you've made a correct judgement
142 |     - We're always more favored and forgiving towards Us people, and more quick to judge and spiteful toward Thems (confirmation bias)
143 |     - Supposed rationality is often just rationalization (to fool ourselves)
144 | - We're most hostile between envy and disgust
145 | - We're most likely to associate between pride and envy
146 | - Lots of tragedies happen when we transform a group from low warmth and high competence into low warmth and low competence
147 |     - When a group is low warmth and low competence, it's easy to destroy as Us are trained to think they're disgusting
148 | - **Distrust essentialism**, err on individualism
149 | 
150 | ### Periodization: How Cycling Your Goals Helps You Gain New Skills Without Losing the Ones You Have
151 | 
152 | [Article](https://gmb.io/periodization/)
153 | 
154 | - Focus training on one specific goal at a time, and then transitioning to another in a planned schedule
155 | - At the end of a schedule, cycle back to the first goal
156 | - Two types:
157 |     - Linear: Break attributes you want to obtain into 4-6 week (or however long) blocks
158 |     - Non-linear: Work on different attributes on different days (i.e. blocks are one day each)
159 | - Attributes are things like agility, endurance, power, etc rather than a specific muscle group
160 |   (think generalized end goal vs. specific physical or knowledge domain)
161 | - **Key is to focus on one specfic thing during a single block of time!**
162 | - Distill your general goals (by asking who and where motivation comes from, specific targets) into specific attributes
163 | - Know where you are now and where you'd like to be
164 |     - Break your end goal down into building blocks and assess where you need the most improvement
165 | - "Priorities are like arms – if you think you have more than two, you’re crazy." – Merlin Mann
166 | 
167 | Random
168 | ------
169 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2017-june.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | June 2017
  2 | =========
  3 | 
  4 | Tech
  5 | ----
  6 | 
  7 | ### Fat Protocols
  8 | 
  9 | [Article](http://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols)
 10 | 
 11 | - For the internet (TCP/IP, HTTP, etc), most value was captured by applications
 12 | - For blockchains, the value of the protocol encompasses any single application value
 13 |     - Information isn't siloed, but shared across all parties (assuming not encrypted; original intent was to be shared)
 14 |         - Forces competition (functionality, reduce costs) on application layer
 15 |     - Tokens create a feedback loop based on market speculation
 16 |         - Token value continuously swings up and down based on market speculation; early investors and enterpreneurs are initially attracted by appreciation, they later become stakeholders and build their own products (some funded by their own investment)
 17 |         - Bubble situations are beneficial to technological innovation (on a holistic sense), based on historical justifications: boom creates interest, bust creates financial affordability for long-term adoption and incentivizes initial stakeholder effort; new applications create boom (hopefully)
 18 |     - "The market cap of the protocol always grows faster than the combined value of the applications built on top [assuming applications are built around a single chain], since the success of the application layer drives further speculation at the protocol layer"
 19 | - Maybe this is just a function of time, as blockchains are still new and valued on potential?
 20 | - Higher value-adding apps could cross-function across multiple blockchains?
 21 | - How does disrupting traditional "winner-take-all" markets mean to those trying to create monopolies (i.e. Zero to One)?
 22 |     - What are the new rules regarding businesses built on this model?
 23 | 
 24 | ### Crypto Tokens and the Coming Age of Protocol Innovation
 25 | 
 26 | [Article](http://continuations.com/post/148098927445/crypto-tokens-and-the-coming-age-of-protocol)
 27 | 
 28 | - "Because we didn’t know how to maintain state in a decentralized fashion it was the data layer that was driving the centralization of the web that we have observed."
 29 | - Tokens create incentives to work on protocol layer technologies; they allow creators to retain and sell retained tokens at a different price later (to the extent it's adopted and used)
 30 | 
 31 | 
 32 | Life
 33 | ----
 34 | 
 35 | ### The Noise Bottleneck: When More Information is Harmful
 36 | 
 37 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2012/05/noise-and-signal-nassim-taleb/)
 38 | 
 39 | - "Noise is what you are supposed to ignore; signal what you need to heed." -- Nassim Taleb
 40 | - "The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on" -- Nassim Taleb
 41 |     - Bottlenecks our thinking; frames our perception
 42 | - Be careful with more data; when you intervene because of it (possibly for the sake of intervening), double check your thinking (and ponder potential consequences)
 43 | 
 44 | ### Two Types of Knowledge
 45 | 
 46 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2015/09/two-types-of-knowledge/)
 47 | 
 48 | - Make a distinction between knowing *something* vs knowing *the name of something*
 49 | - Ask why, to get to the bottom of if they're bullshitting
 50 | - "True experts recognize the limits of what they know and what they do not know. If they find themselves outside their circle of competence, they keep quiet or simply say, 'I don’t know.'" -- Rolf Dobelli
 51 | 
 52 | ### The Work Required To Have An Opinion
 53 | 
 54 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2013/04/the-work-required-to-have-an-opinion/)
 55 | 
 56 | - "Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire." -- Charlie Munger
 57 | 
 58 | ### Winning An Argument
 59 | 
 60 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2014/06/winning-an-argument/)
 61 | 
 62 | - "If you want to win an argument, ask the person trying to convince you of something to explain how it would work."
 63 | - "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Richard Feynman
 64 | 
 65 | ### Seneca on The Shortness Of Time
 66 | 
 67 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/03/seneca-on-the-shortness-of-time/)
 68 | 
 69 | - "The life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it" -- Seneca
 70 | 
 71 | ### The Three Lessons of Biological History
 72 | 
 73 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2015/08/will-durant-the-three-lessons-of-biological-history/)
 74 | 
 75 | - "Life is competition"
 76 |     - Although we may cooperate to form groups, groups are still competing
 77 | - "Life is selection"
 78 |     - Inequality is natural, and only increases with the complexity of civilization
 79 |     - "Only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way"
 80 | - "Life must breed"
 81 |     - Nature is "more interested in the species than in the individual"
 82 |     - Despite certain advances in productivity, breeding will always follow to nullify them until curtailed by something drastic (e.g. war or famine)
 83 | 
 84 | ### What Can the Three Buckets of Knowledge Teach Us About History?
 85 | 
 86 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2016/02/three-buckets-lessons-of-history/)
 87 | 
 88 | - Three major buckets of time:
 89 |     - Geological (13.7 billion years) for laws of physics, chemistry, math
 90 |     - Biological (3.5 billion years) for biological nature
 91 |         - Gradualism; slow changes over time produce large effects (e.g. evolution)
 92 |         - Everything is changing, albeit perhaps some of it is at a pace we can't detect
 93 |         - Some things change slow enough we can take them for constants (e.g. biological human nature)
 94 |         - Laws of competition; long-term sustainability
 95 |     - Human (20 thousand years) for human nature
 96 |         - Political and economic systems try to provide order and fairness between humans (resulting from internal competition)
 97 |         - Human history, stripped down, is simply competition and survival
 98 | - Some things in lower (younger) buckets don't follow the laws of higher buckets, e.g. everlasting ideas from notable humans
 99 | - Ideas and knowledge compound; having more grows more; spreading more spreads more
100 | - Ideas go through natural selection via competition (for propagation -- the most enduring are those that are best propagated, not those that are best)
101 | 
102 | ### How to Think
103 | 
104 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2015/01/how-to-think-2/)
105 | 
106 | - Get better at probing other's thinking and understanding
107 |     - E.g. Ask what information would cause someone to change their current thinking
108 | - Probe yourself: do you really know? What are your limits?
109 | - Slow down to make sure you've had enough time to think things through
110 | 
111 | ### Changing How We Think
112 | 
113 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2014/07/changing-how-we-think/)
114 | 
115 | - "The successful thinker is an integrator who can quickly and effectively abstract the best qualities of radically different ways of seeing and representing" -- Roger Martin
116 | - "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to **hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function**. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
117 | - Our minds are habitual and pattern-match aggressively; try to notice it and stop to think of other models to apply
118 | - Interesting thought: "In what circumstances should logical depth dominate informational breadth and, vice versa? In what situations is more thinking better than more foraging or more asking, given that one can only think (or forage) more if one forages (or thinks) less?" -- Roger Martin
119 | - Make an effort to **deliberately** think, rather than **intuitively**
120 |     - "If you want to think differently, first learn to act differently" -- Heinz von Foerster
121 | 
122 | ### How Online Shopping Makes Fools of Us All
123 | 
124 | [Article](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/05/how-online-shopping-makes-suckers-of-us-all/521448/)
125 | 
126 | - Two types of value:
127 |     - Acquisitional: value of actually obtaining something
128 |     - Transactional: value of winning or losing in negotiating
129 | - Early 2000s: one hour of online bargain hunting was worth $15
130 | - "Online consumers do not comparison shop as zealously for cheaper items as they do for expensive ones"
131 | - "'The madness of doubt': there’s a finite amount of uncertainty we can absorb (and how much we can keep checking it before we stop caring)"
132 | - Idea: prices set by auction (similar to backend deals in advertising auctions)
133 | - Idea: decentralized, crowd-sourced low price marketplace
134 | 
135 | Random
136 | ------
137 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2017-may.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | May 2017
  2 | ========
  3 | 
  4 | Tech
  5 | ----
  6 | 
  7 | ### Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
  8 | 
  9 | [Article](http://norvig.com/21-days.html)
 10 | 
 11 | - "A little learning is a dangerous thing" -- Alexander Pope
 12 | 
 13 | Life
 14 | ----
 15 | 
 16 | ### Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge
 17 | 
 18 | [Article](https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules#Cloze%20deletion)
 19 | 
 20 | - Formulating knowledge impacts how you learn
 21 | - Assume that you'll use SRS
 22 | 
 23 | 1. Do not learn if you do not understand
 24 |     - Don't be blind when you learn
 25 | 1. Learn before you memorize
 26 |     - Understand the whole picture before memorizing
 27 | 1. Build upon the basics
 28 |     - A simple initial picture is better; you can always improve as needed
 29 |     - "Usually you spend 50% of your time repeating just 3-5% of the learned material"
 30 | 1. Stick to the minimum information principle
 31 |     - Stick to simple, easily retained information
 32 |     - Break complex items into more specific and smaller, easier to remember items
 33 |     - Ask questions that are as specific as possible, so that the answers are also as short as possible
 34 | 1. Cloze deletion is easy and effective
 35 |     - Cloze deletion: blank the part you want to learn from a sentence (e.g. X is the second president)
 36 | 1. Use imagery
 37 |     - Remember to weight the costs and profits between a question/answer pair and a visual image
 38 | 1. Use mnemonic techniques
 39 |     - Usually you only need to use these techniques for 1-5% of what you learn
 40 | 1. Graphic deletion is as good as cloze deletion
 41 |     - Similar to cloze deletion, but remove parts of an image
 42 | 1. Avoid sets
 43 |     - Retaining information in sets is very expensive
 44 |     - Turn sets into enumerations (e.g. alphabetically sorted or etc)
 45 |     - "You should always try to make sure your brain works in the exactly same way at each repetition"
 46 |     - Memorizing a 5+ set is almost impossible (without other mnemonic techniques)
 47 | 1. Avoid enumerations
 48 |     - If you have to memorize them, use cloze deletions (and overlapping ones; different blanks in the same material for different questions) to help
 49 |     - Memorizing phrases and quotes is also an enumeration! (Learn to recognize them!)
 50 | 1. Combat interference
 51 |     - Sometimes similar information will conflict (e.g. memorizing lots of similar numbers)
 52 |         - You will get confused as to what is what
 53 |     - Detect and eliminate
 54 |     - Make learning items as unambiguous as possible
 55 | 1. Optimize wording
 56 |     - Make items as short as possible (figure out which loses of information are acceptable and inconsequential to your goal, or test them in other questions)
 57 | 1. Refer to other memories
 58 |     - Use prior memories or learnings to help provide more context
 59 | 1. Personalize and provide examples
 60 |     - Add personal information to provide more context
 61 | 1. Rely on emotional states
 62 |     - Illustrate examples with strong emotions to aid recall and avoid interference
 63 | 1. Context cues simplify wording
 64 |     - Use categories and reference labels to more efficiently provide context than in the question
 65 | 1. Redundancy does not contradict minimum information principle
 66 |     - Redundancy: more information than minimum necessary, or duplicate
 67 |     - You may want different perspectives (e.g. reversed questions or differing views), deviations, or alternative answers to also be included
 68 | 1. Provide sources
 69 |     - Can provide sources when challenged in real life
 70 |     - Should accompany information, but don't make a point to learn them unless necessary
 71 | 1. Provide date stamping
 72 |     - Useful for volatile information, to easier update items later
 73 |     - In some cases the date stamp may be an important part of the learned knowledge (usually when looking to compare / trends)
 74 | 1. Prioritize
 75 |     - Stages of prioritizing
 76 |         1. Prioritize sources
 77 |         1. Extracting knowledge
 78 |         1. Formulate items and learn via SRS
 79 | 
 80 | ### The Roots of Creativity and Genius
 81 | 
 82 | [Article](https://www.supermemo.com/articles/genius.htm)
 83 | 
 84 | - Nice long read on using knowledge with intuition (definition of wisdom?) to achieve creative genius
 85 | - Try to learn and apply abstract rules to life (the more abstract the rule, the more you'll be able to apply it)
 86 | - In most creative aspirations, quality is more important than speed
 87 | - "Creativity and cold meticulousness are often at odds"
 88 |     - Sometimes speed, or sureness of implementation are more important than perfection of an idea
 89 | - "A typical characteristic of a creative mind: craving for creative opportunities away from the spotlight"
 90 | - Personality is key for genius: emotional control allows you to optimally channel creativity; personality is much larger influencer than pure specs of the brain
 91 | - Conditions of creativity:
 92 |     - Suitable state of mind, suitable environment, time, motivation, curiosity, knowledge
 93 | - "Creative balance is the key! There is an optimum level of creativity for any given task."
 94 | - Creating genius: rage to master, self-discipline and will power
 95 | - Be able to handle delayed gratification
 96 | - Be domineering to a child (for pursuit of mastery) until that child develops his own views on life
 97 |     - Study developmental psychology
 98 | - Using systems theory to represent reality (as a means of simplification) may be a useful perspective
 99 | - "It is better to get a poorly paid job that will let you grow than to enslave your mental potential in an environment that will pull you into the proverbial rate race."
100 | - "Human emotion is often rationalized, i.e. it may lay at the root of an endeavor that is otherwise covered up with rational excuses"
101 | - **"Learn to capitalize on positive emotions and circumvent negative emotions"**
102 | - "Look for people who will have positive influence on you... positive emotions beget positive emotions"
103 | - "Instead of living to be happy, you should rather happily live up to your highest ideals"
104 | - "Pick something you love and make it your life's work. Do what is important and not what is easy" -- Dean Kamen
105 | - Goal setting: "Instead of optimizing for your goal, maximize the results of your day using the criteria determined by the goal"
106 | - Most satisfying factors: self-esteem, relatedness, autonomy, and competence
107 | - "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" -- Thomas Edison
108 | - Don't tunnel vision towards something; e.g. education: some things are better memorized (or absolutely required) whereas others may be learned more easily by doing or by reasoning
109 | - "There is no limit to what a man can accomplish if he does not mind who gets the credit" -- Robert Woodruff
110 | - Have self-confidence and an unshakeable belief that problems are solvable
111 | 
112 | ### Memorizing a programming language using spaced repetition software
113 | 
114 | [Article](https://sivers.org/srs)
115 | 
116 | - Remember, flash cards are for what **you** learned; make new ones as you go (rather than just taking someone else's and sticking with it)
117 | - Making cards (for programming):
118 |     - Turn prose into (short tidbits of) code
119 |     - Try to trick your future self (highlight gotchas)
120 |     - Save cool tricks
121 |     - Require more than one answer (if there's alternative ways that are just as good, or better in other situations)
122 |     - Turn broad concepts into succinct examples
123 | 
124 | ### Janki Method
125 | 
126 | Articles: [1](http://www.jackkinsella.ie/articles/janki-method), [2](https://www.oxbridgenotes.com/articles/janki_method_refined), [3](https://www.oxbridgenotes.com/articles/autodidactism/note_taking)
127 | 
128 | - Problems with learning:
129 |     - We forget too quickly
130 |     - We give up too quickly
131 |     - We learn out of context (lack mental context to apply learnings to practical problems you face)
132 |     - We think we can learn without doing
133 |     - We make more mistakes than we need to --> **Turn real life mistakes (in all aspects: technology, people, etc) into reviewable material**
134 |     - We do not reflect on the big picture --> **Reflect and create abstract rules you can apply later**
135 |     - We let our knowledge representations grow messy
136 |     - We do not reference primary sources
137 | - Rules:
138 |     - “Every time you learn something new create a question and answer flashcard and add this card to Anki.”
139 |     - “You must use Anki every single day - including weekends and holidays - and commit to doing so indefinitely.”
140 |     - “Learn in context. Pick a project, and learn only what you need to get it done.”
141 |     - “Only add a card to your deck after having tried to use the item of knowledge therein.”
142 |     - “Every time you make a mistake carry out a post-mortem and try to figure out the lessons in the experience. Think about what you would need to know to prevent that mistake from occurring again, and turn this insight into new flashcards.”
143 |     - “At the end of every project ask yourself what lessons you learned and what you would do differently if you were to repeat the project with the benefit of hindsight.”
144 |     - “Delete or modify any incorrect, outdated, difficult to remember, incomplete or unnecessary cards. Update existing cards as improved understanding dawns.”
145 |     - “Read code regularly. If you come across something interesting – be that an algorithm, a hack, or an architectural decision - create a card detailing the technique and showing the code.”
146 | - "Skill in a technical field is the product of your intelligence and your knowledge."
147 | - Keep adding increasingly abstract rules and concepts
148 | - Only add cards if:
149 |     - It's a general concept applicable to many areas
150 |     - It relates to a major technology you'll likely keep using for a long time
151 |     - It's something I use everyday and likely will be for a while
152 | - Tips:
153 |     - Cards with screenshots may be useful
154 |     - Don't try to make concepts too detailed if they can be generalized across an area (e.g. programming languages); it's more important to understand the concept than detailed usage
155 |     - Ordered information is difficult (see 20 rules above)
156 |     - Suspend cards on topics you may not need to use anymore
157 |     - Lower the intensity if it's too burdensome (better to commit to practicing than be too scared to)
158 |     - After repeated review failures, try out / do what the card asks (e.g. a commands)
159 |     - Fail a card if you haven't used it recently (and could have) rather than if you "know" it / have memorized it
160 |     - Add explanations as to how to get an answer in quiz cards
161 |     - Have a fresh thought / challenge every time you review a card (e.g. create a new example)
162 |     - Challenge yourself early on potential confusions
163 |     - Resolve inconsistencies: research descrepancies and either eliminate, generalize, or learn exceptions
164 |     - Assign names, mental images, or locations to ideas and techniques (i.e. mnemonics)
165 | 
166 | ### Autodidactism
167 | 
168 | [Article](https://www.oxbridgenotes.com/articles/autodidactism/oxbridge_notes_guide_to_autodidactism)
169 | 
170 | - Useful guide for learning *strategies*, including malgorithms, note taking, social reinforcement, etc
171 | - Probe experts about their intuition and what they were thinking while doing something
172 | - **"Where prepackaged knowledge runs out, observation and analysis begins."**
173 | - To obtain skills, ask yourself "How can I do that?"
174 | - Practice doing work that mirrors your end-goal output
175 | - "Mindless practice can lift you to a local maximum, only experimentation can take you to a global maximum"
176 | - **Maximize mistakes made per minute**
177 | - "Knowledge, even if sound, can become degraded through transmission; it’s your responsibility to ensure the signal reaches its destination intact."
178 | 
179 | ### How to Love What You Do
180 | 
181 | [Article](http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html)
182 | 
183 | - "If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong."
184 | - Doing what you love depends on the timespan; think about the long term (rather than *this instant*)
185 | - "Just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself."
186 |     - If the task didn't suck, it wouldn't be prestigious
187 |     - If two things are equally admirable, but one has more prestige, pick the other --> similar to going against dogma; one side is usually clouded by emotional attachment rather than real value
188 | - Notice when connected parties share the risk, but not the rewards (e.g. parents: share the risk of their child doing risky things, but not the inherent fun)
189 | - Test for work you love: **always produce**
190 | - "You should prevent your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how you wish they were"
191 | 
192 | ### Mental Models
193 | 
194 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/)
195 | 
196 | - "You can get in way more trouble with a good idea than a bad idea, because you forget that the good idea has limits." -- Benjamin Graham
197 |     - Add more models to see the limits
198 | 
199 | ### Welcome to the Hyper Meritocracy
200 | 
201 | [Article](https://themission.co/welcome-to-the-hyper-meritocracy-c3621fc62936)
202 | 
203 | - "It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself." -- Charles Darwin
204 | 
205 | ### How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
206 | 
207 | [Article](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/05/arnold-bennett-living-meaningful-life/)
208 | 
209 | - "We shall never have more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is." -- Arnold Bennett
210 | - Don't mindlessly spend your time; invest it in things that will be useful into the future
211 | 
212 | Random
213 | ------
214 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2017-quotes.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | Quotes
 2 | ======
 3 | 
 4 | - **"What's not going to change in the next 10 years? ... You can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time"** -- Jeff Bezos
 5 | - "Inspiration exists but it has to find you working." -- Picasso
 6 | - "Every mathematician believes that he is ahead of the others. The reason none state this belief in public is because they are intelligent people." -- Kolmogorov
 7 | - "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Einstein
 8 | - "We become, neurologically, what we think." -- Nicholas Carr
 9 | - "If you want to be a clever person, you have to learn how to ask cleverly, how to listen attentively, how to respond quietly, and how to stop talking when there is nothing more to say." — Leo Tolstoy
10 | - "Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness." -- Seneca
11 | - "We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality." -- Seneca
12 | - "He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary." -- Seneca
13 | - "The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately." -- Seneca
14 | - "Those who are not aware they are walking in darkness will never seek the light" -- Bruce Lee
15 | - "If you want to feel good, brainstorm it. If you want to appear good, test it. If you want to know if you’re any good, ship it." -- Jason Fried
16 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2018-april.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | April 2018
  2 | ==========
  3 | 
  4 | Tech
  5 | ----
  6 | 
  7 | ### Against Economic Abstraction
  8 | 
  9 | [Article](https://medium.com/@Vlad_Zamfir/against-economic-abstraction-e27f4cbba5a7)
 10 | 
 11 | - Economic abstraction: blockchain architecture can be modified to remove the existence of a single native blockchain token; potentially any  number could be used
 12 | - Proof of stake:
 13 |     - Economic abstraction makes calculating economic security more difficult, and increases attack surface on the calculation
 14 | - Transaction fees:
 15 |     - Validators would have to calculate which fees offered are adequate
 16 | 
 17 | 
 18 | Life
 19 | ----
 20 | 
 21 | ### What Makes A Good Engineering Culture
 22 | 
 23 | [Article](http://www.effectiveengineer.com/blog/what-makes-a-good-engineering-culture)
 24 | 
 25 | - Optimize for iteration speed
 26 |     - Barriers to deploying code and features is super frustrating!
 27 |     - Leaders need to "commit, explode, recover": commit to a plan, execute, and react to results
 28 | - Automate
 29 |     - Automation must be driven by data and monitoring
 30 | - Build the right abstractions
 31 |     - Build the right underlying framework and use the crap out of it
 32 | - Do code reviews right. Period.
 33 | - Foster a respectful environment
 34 |     - People should be comfortable challenging each other
 35 | - Shared ownership of code
 36 |     - Don't build walls between teams; incentivize going across those walls
 37 | - 20% time
 38 |     - You can also use it to incentivize people to learn about other parts of the tech stack, by working on it or documenting it
 39 | 
 40 | ### A quick guide to Stripe's culture
 41 | 
 42 | [Article](https://stripe.com/us/jobs/candidate-info?a=1#culture)
 43 | 
 44 | - There a still a lot of hard problems with significant impact left. That being said, success is not assured; are you ok with a substantial amount of risk and ambiguity?
 45 | - Responsibilities are serious. People are motivated; if you set a high bar, someone will try to push it higher.
 46 |     - Give high performers the room to work on the most interesting and high-impact problems
 47 | - Seek truth, rather than follow. Follow the facts, from first principles, and allow your mind to be changed.
 48 | - The "no asshole" rule is far too low. Overtrust your colleagues.
 49 | - Recognize, award, and admire people who contribute to everyone's success (global vs. local); ownership over the whole vs. your share
 50 | - Opinionated on what to build, neutral in who gets access to the results.
 51 | - Micro pessimists but macro optimists: problems are everywhere, but things will be better in the future, and we will make positive impact
 52 | 
 53 | ### Engineering culture at Airbnb
 54 | 
 55 | [Article](https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/engineering-culture-at-airbnb-345797c17cbe)
 56 | 
 57 | - Engineers own their impact: everyone is responsible for creating as much value for users and the company as possible
 58 |     - Hire problem solvers, and leave decision making up to the individuals (but also help them get the most and best quality information to make decisions with via tools and processes)
 59 |     - Engineers define and prioritize impactful work with the rest of their teams
 60 | - Default to information sharing
 61 | - Helping others takes priority
 62 |     - Help your colleagues find leveraged problems to solve
 63 | - Goals
 64 |     - Create a numeric target, to measure effectiveness against
 65 |     - Teams define their own subgoals and projects on a quarterly basis, guided by overall company strategy
 66 | - "**We believe in shaping good judgment in individuals instead of imposing rules across the team"**
 67 |     - Empower the individual, align them with your overall strategy
 68 | - On new processes or tools:
 69 |     - Facilitate awareness of the idea or tool, and then let it stand on its own merit. If it .doesn't catch on, it'll organically die
 70 | - Values:
 71 |     - **Leave it better than you found it**
 72 | - Managers are facilitators; get obstacles out of the way (career obstacles, prioritizations, technical help, etc)
 73 | 
 74 | ### Palantir's Engineering Culture
 75 | 
 76 | [Article](https://www.palantir.com/engineering-culture/)
 77 | 
 78 | - "You just have to speak up when things aren't right, evaluate ideas on their merits, and build things that fix what's broken"
 79 | - "We hire people to have an opinion and be creative"
 80 | - "Inventing the future requires detaching yourself from the past"; celebrate your work getting replaced
 81 | 
 82 | ### Objectives and Key Results
 83 | 
 84 | [Article](https://medium.com/startup-tools/okrs-5afdc298bc28)
 85 | 
 86 | - Objectives: write out what you hope to accomplish such that later you can easily tell if you have reached, or have a clear path to reaching, that objective
 87 | - Key results: numerically-based expressions of success towards an objective
 88 |     - Its up to individual contributors to figure out how to get to these metrics
 89 |     - Make these flexible enough to allow for a number of creative solutions
 90 | - **OKRs are a communication framework!**
 91 | 
 92 | ### Reimagining work/life balance — Jason Fried
 93 | 
 94 | [Podcast](https://soundcloud.com/the-journal/jason-fried)
 95 | 
 96 | ### Embracing Both Sides of Yourself (Amir Salihefendic)
 97 | 
 98 | [Podcast](https://www.reboot.io/episode/47-embracing-both-sides-of-yourself-with-amir-salihefendic/)
 99 | 
100 | ### The Two Biggest Drags On Productivity: Meetings And Managers (Or, As We Call Them, M&Ms)
101 | 
102 | [Article](https://www.inc.com/jason-fried/excerpt-easy-on-the-mms.html)
103 | 
104 | - Meetings and managers are the greatest causes of work not getting done at an office
105 |     - Don't default to meetings to communicate; save it for when you absolutely need them!
106 |     - "Too many meetings  destroy morale and motivation"
107 | 
108 | ### How We Work #4: "Knowns vs. Unknowns"
109 | 
110 | [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwrI6rxELFw)
111 | 
112 | - Hill charts are **genius**
113 | 
114 | Random
115 | ------
116 | 
117 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2018-august.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | August 2018
 2 | ===========
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### Augur hijack via dormant service workers
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](https://medium.com/@peter_szilagyi/augur-hijack-via-dormant-service-workers-bea254258f98)
10 | 
11 | - "From a technical perspective, the reason the exploit can be considered of a significant impact is because it **doesn’t require elevated permissions** to run, after running a single time it **remains dormant forever** in the user’s system and it’s a **fully legitimate browser functionality**, so no exploit detection software can ever catch it."
12 | - Avoid running apps from `localhost`, due to `origin` clashes (`localhost` is typically treated special to make it easier for development)
13 | 
14 | ### How to Hire World Class Engineers
15 | 
16 | [Article](https://angel.co/talent-hacks/how-to-hire-world-class-engineers)
17 | 
18 | - What engineers are looking for (beyond compensation):
19 |   - Opportunity
20 |   - Challenge
21 |   - Community
22 | - Steps:
23 |   1. Build brand
24 |     - Make your org more desirable
25 |     - Document and promote your org's mission, culture, and philosophy so that others can rally behind it
26 |       - Easiest is to start with what you're specializing in, and why that's interesting
27 |     - Don't be sloppy
28 |   1. Always be sourcing
29 |   1. Screen at scale
30 |     - Screen after spending some time with the candidate
31 |     - Questions:
32 |       - "Why are you taking the time for me today?"
33 |       - "What's your proudest achievement?"
34 |       - "What's a recent find (blog post, github repo, etc) you recommend we check out?"
35 |   1. Interview effectively
36 |     - Pair program with an actual engineer on real problems
37 |     - Use a recent problem you've had to solve, and re-solve it with them
38 |   1. Close quickly
39 |     - Discuss and negotiate compensation openly
40 |     - Stay responsive in your communication
41 |     - Showcase your own passion
42 | 
43 | ### Real Work vs. Imaginary Work
44 | 
45 | [Article](https://m.signalvnoise.com/real-work-vs-imaginary-work-8bdb84a7d1da)
46 | 
47 | - "Thinking about how you’re going to do something is not the same as rolling up your sleeves and trying."
48 | - Test out ideas by writing real code, to hit the unknowns before declaring something as "downhill"
49 | 
50 | ### How To Write Fast, Memory-Efficient JavaScript
51 | 
52 | [Article](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/11/writing-fast-memory-efficient-javascript/)
53 | 
54 | - V8
55 |   - **Base compiler**: parses JS and generates machine code
56 |   - V8 represents code in an internal type system optimized for lookups
57 |   - **Runtime profiler** identifies "hot" functions that then gets optimized by the **optimizing compiler**
58 |   - **Deoptimization**: backs out of optimizing code that the optimizer realizes it made bad assumptions about
59 | - Avoid using `delete` to dereference: it changes an object's hidden class
60 |   - Especially hot objects that get used a lot!
61 | - Be careful when using timers; they're kept alive (to continue executing) and may leak state
62 | - Use `DocumentFragment`s to avoid page reflows
63 | 
64 | 
65 | Life
66 | ----
67 | 
68 | 
69 | Random
70 | ------
71 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2018-books.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | Books 2018
  2 | ==========
  3 | 
  4 | ### Freakonomics
  5 | 
  6 | Author: Stephen J. Dubner, Steven Levitt
  7 | 
  8 | - Chaos theory applied to economics; hunt for data rather than "logical" / "rational" / emotional explanations to phenomenon
  9 | 
 10 | ### Think Like a Freak
 11 | 
 12 | Author: Stephen J. Dubner, Steven Levitt
 13 | 
 14 | - Rethink your solution, restate your problems :)
 15 | 
 16 | ### The Cathedral and the Bazaar
 17 | 
 18 | [Book](http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/)
 19 | 
 20 | - Cathedral: "carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation"
 21 | - Bazaar: "release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity"
 22 | - Key lessons:
 23 |     - "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch"
 24 |     - **"Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)"**
 25 |         - Constructive laziness
 26 |     - "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow" -- Fred Brooks
 27 |         - You probably don't understand the problem until after the first implementation
 28 |         - Be ready to start over, at least once
 29 |     - "When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor"
 30 |     - "Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging"
 31 |     - "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers"
 32 |     - Optimize for the minimum-effort path from point A to point B
 33 |     - Linus's Law: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"
 34 |         - Finding and solving a problem is necessarily done by the same person
 35 |         - The **Delphi effect** (the crowd is smarter than the individual) applied to debugging
 36 |         - "Debugging is parallelizable"; debugging doesn't require that much coordination between people and thus has less fall off in Brook's Law
 37 |         - Non-developer sourced bugs usually lack a lot of context that make debugging easier
 38 |         - Open source makes it easier for tester (/ user) and developers to share context
 39 |         - Brook's Law is based on development groups communicating in complete-graph patterns, but open-source projects separate the work of external contributors to parallelizable subtasks
 40 |     - "Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around"
 41 |     - "If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource"
 42 |     - "The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better"
 43 |     - "Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong"
 44 |         - Reframe the problem! Your users will tell you :)
 45 |         - Open source parallelizes exploration of the design space
 46 |     - "When your code is getting both better and simpler, that is when you know it's right"
 47 |     - **Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected"**
 48 |     - "When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!"
 49 |     - "When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend"
 50 |     - **"A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets."**
 51 |     - "To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you"
 52 |     - "Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one"
 53 | - Necessary preconditions for bootstrapping a community:
 54 |     - Runnable
 55 |     - Convince others it has potential to grow into something really useful
 56 | - **"While coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities"**
 57 | - **[Open source acts like a free-market, aligning a community of individuals' free wills with collective "principles of understanding"](http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html)**
 58 | - "Feeling comforted by having somebody to sue would be missing the point. You didn't want to be in a lawsuit; you wanted working software."
 59 |     - Utility function for hackers is ego satisfaction and reputation
 60 |     - Altruism is a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist
 61 | - Boring tasks / problems in open software:
 62 |     - **You don't need "motivation" (by whip and cash) to get people incentivized to solve these problems; somebody will choose to solve it because they have a fascination with the problem itself**
 63 | - **"Play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work"**
 64 | - Open source ownership is similar to Lockean, common-law theory of land tenure
 65 | - Gift vs exchange economy
 66 |     - Exchange: social status primarily determined by what you have to use or trade
 67 |     - Gift: social status primarily determined by what you give away
 68 |     - Is open source more of a gift economy; the only measure of competitive success is the reputation among one's peers
 69 |         - Optimizing reputation incentives?
 70 |         - Is this the globally optimal way to cooperate for generating high-quality creative work?
 71 |         - Creative work may be demotivated by scarcity rewards (assuming nobody is worried of dying from scarcity); better to recognize and value output than to expect
 72 |     - For most, the exchange game has lost its appeal but not ability to constrain
 73 | - "Authority follows responsibility"
 74 | - Conflict resolution
 75 |     1. Territorial rule
 76 |     1. Seniority / Most invested wins
 77 | - Against tragedy of the commons in open source (inverse commons):
 78 |     - Using software does not decrease its value; widespread use tends to increase its value
 79 |     - People need solutions _on time_, so they if they derive value from fixing it, they'd rather fix it than be a free rider and wait
 80 |         - Also, they're incentivized to publish any patch to alleviate further maintainence themselves
 81 |     - Free-rider problems are exhibited mainly in friction costs of submitting patches
 82 |         - **Make submission easy and simple!**
 83 | - Use-value funding models
 84 |     - Cost-sharing (e.g. Apache web server)
 85 |     - Risk-spreading (e.g. software that might outlive someone's employment)
 86 | - The right to fork software is like the right to sue: nobody wants to employ them, but it's a signal of danger if they're taken away
 87 | - "When your key business processes are executed by opaque blocks of bits that you can't even see inside (let alone modify) you have lost control of your business"
 88 | - Rebranding free software to open source:
 89 |     - Free Software Foundation was damaging: "free" is really confusing because it can denote both "free speech" and "free beer"
 90 |     - Top-down > bottom-up: furthering the OS movement required evangelizing to CEO/CTO/CIO types
 91 |     - Focus on Fortune 500: lots of concentrated money that's relatively accessible
 92 |         - Capture the media that serves the Fortune 500
 93 |     - Make sure the hacker community was aligned in speaking the same language
 94 |     - Mitigate serious abuse of the language by corporates
 95 | - "Open source is [great, but it's] not magic pixie dust" -- JAmie Zawinski
 96 | - **"Computers are tools for human beings. Ultimately, therefore, the challenges of designing hardware and software must come back to designing for human beings"**
 97 | 
 98 | ### Skin in the Game
 99 | 
100 | Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
101 | 
102 | - Find the asymmetries, where someone's risk doesn't match their gain
103 | 
104 | *See notes in book*
105 | 
106 | ### Lords of Finance
107 | 
108 | Author: Liaquat ahamed
109 | 
110 | - Even the best can go bankrupt
111 | - Gold standard ties world economic growth to how much of a mineral we can mine
112 | - Stubbornish towards dogma --> catastrophe
113 | 
114 | *See notes in book*
115 | 
116 | ### The Definitive Book of Body Languange
117 | 
118 | Author: Allan & Barbara Pease
119 | 
120 | - Keep practicing!
121 | 
122 | ### The Decision Book
123 | 
124 | Authors: Mikael Krogerus, Roman Tschappeler
125 | 
126 | - Handbook for making decisions and mental models
127 | 
128 | ### Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field
129 | 
130 | Authors: Nancy Forbes, Basil Mahon
131 | 
132 | - Laws to live by:
133 |   - "One should be not too hasty to erect general theories from a few particular observations"
134 |   - "Take imagination to its limits but draw no conlusions without solid experimental proof"
135 |   - "Explore; observe; experiment; eliminate sources of error"
136 |   - "Don't become a prisoner of your own ideas"
137 |   - "Nothing can be proved, except in mathematics, and much of what we take to be fact is merely conjecture (or opinion)"
138 |   - Don't heed to everyone's wishes to be a slave to their lives; **live your own life**
139 |   - Learn the **principles** on which laws and formulas stand
140 | - **Work, Finish, Publish** -- Michael Faraday
141 | - Inventions (e.g. electricial appliances) often need infrastructure to be laid before they're feasible for mass consumption
142 |   - See "Techhnological Revolutions and Financial Capital" (Carlota Perez) on phases (irruption and frenzy lay infrastructure)
143 |   - Often also need "scaffolding" to build them up pto a point where they can stand by themselves (and the scaffolds are realized as false or unnecessary)
144 | - Faraday: the experienting dreamer
145 | - Maxwell: a combination of "boldness, imagination, ingenuity, and sheer ppersistence"
146 |   - Built a "bridge" from physical Newtonian physics to abstract (but present) electromagnetic fields
147 | - **Visionaries change our concept of reality and what we perceive to be real**
148 |   - Paradigm shift
149 | - Determination: what is your _duty_?
150 | - Science: the ideal of the human intellect trying to understand nature; seekers of truth
151 |   - No theory can stand unless it's tested by experiments (adverse environments)
152 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2018-december.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | December 2018
 2 | ==============
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | 
 8 | Life
 9 | ----
10 | 
11 | ### Scaling Engineering Organizations
12 | 
13 | [Article](https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/scaling-eng)
14 | 
15 | - Continuously iterate and evolve processes to your needs, **not** your users' needs
16 | - Recruiting and hiring:
17 |   - Recruit consistently
18 |   - Make sure to leave a good impression and have examples for different levels of proficiency
19 |   - Test only a single critical skill in each interview
20 | - Culture:
21 |   - Psychological safety to take risks and share beliefs
22 | - Engagement:
23 |   - Employee happiness often rests on knowing impact of work and autonomy in decisions
24 |   - Keep tabs on engagement; people often don't manifest concerns about their engagement externally
25 |   - Help employees discover new opportunities within the organization
26 |   - Ask for feedback quarterly about what could be improved in the organization and their scope of work
27 | 
28 | 
29 | Random
30 | ------
31 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2018-february.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | February 2018
  2 | =============
  3 | 
  4 | Tech
  5 | ----
  6 | 
  7 | ### Premises, Promises, and Reality
  8 | 
  9 | [Article](http://blog.ycombinator.com/the-decentralized-future-series/)
 10 | 
 11 | - Technological breakthroughs: what did they unlock that wasn't previously possible?
 12 | - Distributed databases: without an incentive, who would maintain it? Cryptoeconomics to the rescue.
 13 | 
 14 | ### You Could Have Invented Monads
 15 | 
 16 | [Article](http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monads-and.html)
 17 | 
 18 | - Monads: mostly related to solving side effects
 19 |     - Bind: mostly for plumbing
 20 |     - Set of `(m, unit, bind)` is a monad (where `m` is the "other" dimension of return, e.g. a debug string)
 21 | 
 22 | ### Placeholder Investment Thesis
 23 | 
 24 | [Thesis](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmZL4eT1gxnE168Pmw3KyejW6fUfMNzMgeKMgcWJUfYGRj/Placeholder%20Thesis%20Summary.pdf)
 25 | 
 26 | - IT cycles: expansion, conslidation, decentralization
 27 | - Value creation shifts upwards as old platforms become commoditized and standardized
 28 | - Current web distribution incumbents (e.g. Google, FB, Amazon, Apple) are too entrenched and too expensive to overcome
 29 |     - Conslidating market; best to invest heavily into them and then progressively invest in new platforms that may grow to commoditize the incumbent business models
 30 | - Cryptonetworks: collapses the cost of building and scaling information networks by replacing centralized coordination with universal financial incentives
 31 |     - Cryptoeconomic incentives incentivize independent 3rd parties to scale the network (leveraging the community)
 32 |         - Diminishing capex of scale
 33 |     - ==> Native business model of any network
 34 | - **Traditional valuation: price of stock reflects ability to monetize user base, rather than actual network value**
 35 | - Key developer-side infrastructure (cryptocommodities) are still under-developed
 36 | - Networks don't die like businesses die; decentralized is inherently more robust
 37 | - **Cryptoeconomic model is to a network what a business model is to a company**
 38 | - Token valuations are more like national currencies: they track the overall activity within a network / economy
 39 | 
 40 | ### How to Make Bonding Curves for continuous Token Models
 41 | 
 42 | [Article](https://hackernoon.com/how-to-make-bonding-curves-for-continuous-token-models-3784653f8b17)
 43 | 
 44 | - Bonding curve: defines token price as a function of supply
 45 |     - Allows us to have instant liquidity
 46 |     - Dynamic inflation rates according to demand
 47 |     - Difficulty in computing: every small adjustment of supply will change the price
 48 |         - Sounds like a task for integration
 49 |     - Child tokens have compounded risk, and are likely to be extremely volatile
 50 | - Power functions allow us to define our bonding curve in terms of a reserve ratio:
 51 |     - ratio = poolBalance / (currentPrice * tokenSupply)
 52 |         - poolBalance is the integral of the pricing function (e.g. 1/3*x^3 if pricing function is x^2)
 53 |         - Often simplifies down to a constant value, e.g. 1/3 for quadratic curves
 54 | 
 55 | 
 56 | Life
 57 | ----
 58 | 
 59 | ### 36 Ways To Hire, Develop, and Retain Great People
 60 | 
 61 | [Article](https://medium.com/@barmstrong/35-ways-coinbase-hires-develops-and-retains-great-people-cbfdf93b1c5c)
 62 | 
 63 | 1. Don't let managers make unilateral decision (Ray Dalio: believability weighted decision making)
 64 | 1. Give people freedom (Montessori method)
 65 | 1. Default to open
 66 | 1. Have an ambitious mission
 67 | 1. Create internal competition
 68 | 1. Create "bureaucracy busters" (aka fix what's annoying with your ops / processes)
 69 | 1. Culture isn't static; keep your values consistent
 70 | 1. Have a Chief Culture Officer (consistency over constancy)
 71 | 1. Invest more in hiring than in training
 72 | 1. Don't rely on inbound applications; seek out superstars
 73 | 1. When you find someone great, pursue them for years
 74 | 1. Only hire people who are better than you
 75 | 1. The CEO should review every hire
 76 | 1. If you're not a hell yes, you're a no
 77 | 1. Referrals can be a high quality source of hires: jog people's memories and go through their network
 78 | 1. Increasing hte referral bonus does not increase the referral rate
 79 | 1. Pay unfairly for top talent: human performance follows a power law distribution
 80 | 1. Be more like an all-star team than a family
 81 | 1. Most people aren't good interviewers
 82 | 1. Interview based on sample work and structured interview questions
 83 | 1. Find and develop your best interviewers
 84 | 1. Have at least two interviewers assess each value or key competency
 85 | 1. Create a safe space for employees to speak up: encourage revealing pain instead of concealing blame
 86 | 1. Encourage acting like an owner, rather than an employee
 87 | 1. People Ops should be transparent on the process and statistics, but private on individual details
 88 | 1. Constantly A/B test People Ops
 89 | 1. Remind people about bias, right before the performance review
 90 | 1. Identify and transition low performers
 91 | 1. Manager quality is the single best predictor of whether an employee will stay or leave
 92 | 1. Remind/nudge people frequently about how to be good managers
 93 |     - Be a good coach
 94 |     - Empower the team and don't micromanage
 95 |     - Express interest/concern for team members' success and personal well being
 96 |     - Be very productive/results oriented
 97 |     - Help the team with career development
 98 |     - Have a clear vision/strategy for the team
 99 |     - Have important skills that help advise the team
100 | 1. Survey employees about how well managers are doing on the above
101 | 1. In training, spend more time on practice/repetition, and less on content
102 | 1. Have the best employees in each area run trainings
103 | 1. Give experiential awards, not monetary awards (non cash rewards trigger emotional responses)
104 | 1. Reward thoughtful culture
105 | 1. Hire only one-third "traditional HR" people in People Ops
106 | 
107 | ### Netflix Culture Deck
108 | 
109 | [Article](https://www.slideshare.net/BarbaraGill3/netflix-culture-deck)
110 | 
111 | - "The **real** company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go"
112 |     - Behavious and skills we value in colleagues
113 | - The best workplaces are those where you have stunning colleagues: direct all your processes towards attracting them
114 | - "Adequate performance gets a generous severance package"
115 |     - If you're not going to fight hard to keep an employee, give them a severance package now
116 | - Don't curtail freedom to avoid errors; relying too much on processes makes you fragile and lose out on talent
117 |     - Find responsible, self-disciplined people to avoid chaos when growing
118 |     - Increase talent density faster than complexity grows!
119 | - Make mistakes, recover rapidly
120 | - Processes:
121 |     - Good: help good people get more done
122 |     - Bad: attempt to prevent recoverable mistakes
123 |     - Avoid rule creep!
124 | - Get outcomes through context, rather than control
125 |     - Inspire through goals, vision, strategy
126 | - Highly aligned, loosely coupled teams
127 |     - Interactions are about strategy and goals, not tactics
128 | - Compensation reviews should be adjusted to their market: "rehire" each year
129 | - Individuals should manage their own career paths, rather than relying on their corporation for planning their careers
130 | 
131 | Random
132 | ------
133 | 
134 | ### Why I am an Austrian Economist
135 | 
136 | [Take 1](http://bytemaster.github.io/article/2015/01/04/Why-I-am-an-Austrian-Economist/)
137 | [Take 2](http://bytemaster.github.io/article/2015/01/06/Why-I-am-an-Austrian-Economist-Take-2/)
138 | 
139 | - Using complex math / logic to describe humans is often a mistake: using complicated measures for complex systems is systemically hiding risks / simplifications
140 |     - If you can't follow it, most will assume it's right (pose smart; appeal to authority)
141 | - Principles:
142 |     1. All value is perceived value (wealth is the cumulative perceived value of all parties); subjective value (vs. objective value)
143 |         - Controlled by each individual and can only be changed by that individual
144 |     1. There is no unit of value
145 |     1. An individual can only rank how they value things
146 |     1. You cannot compare value judgements among mulitple people
147 |     1. A price is only valid the instant it happened and only for the parties involved
148 |     1. You cannot perform mathematical operations on prices to draw conclusions
149 |     1. Only voluntary trade can reveal relative value of items
150 | - Heuristic: when you get results that justify violating "do not do unto others what you do not want done to you", there was probably a mistake somewhere
151 | - Challenge: a voluntary trade between two people may result in a loss of value to a third party
152 |     - However, the change in value of property due to 3rd party transactions is controlled by the owner, and only when a transaction is made with the property
153 | 
154 | ### Why I am Not an Austrian Economist
155 | 
156 | [Article](http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm)
157 | 
158 | - Modern neoclassical economics draws from microeconomic blocks:
159 |     - Utility functions
160 |     - Indifference analysis
161 |     - Kaldor-Hicks (cost-benefit)
162 | - Austrian: reject all of these elements
163 | - Utility functions vs. value scales
164 |     - Utility functions model individual preferences
165 |     - Value scales: ordered set of preferences
166 |     - Both are used to approximate utility maximization, either to maximize the function or finding the highest ranked feasible preferences in the set
167 |     - Austrians: scales are better because you can't measure the distance between preferences; utilities are not quantities and cannot be measured / have mathematical operations done to them
168 |     - Neoclassical: utility functions are not meant to be cardinal; they only signal preference; you can only monotonically scale (re-scale however you scaled it)
169 |         - Argues that Austrians got this part wrong: the math does not bound the thereoms to cardinal utility
170 | - Indifference curves
171 |     - Utility of two choices are the same
172 |     - Austrian: however, action demonstrates preference; no preference can exist which cannot be revealed in action
173 |     - Neoclassical: there are more to actions than just the manifestation (what happened and what you can observe)
174 | - Continuity
175 |     - Utility functions, supply and demand curves are continuous
176 |     - Austrian: human beings' perceptions are not continuous
177 |     - Neoclassical: without continuous functions, supply and demand will rarely be equal
178 | - Welfare
179 |     - Austrian: every market transaction benefits all participants, every government intervention benefits some people at the cost of others
180 |         - Changes in social utility from intervention are ambiguous
181 |     - Neoclassical: using utility values allows you to make hard judgments about which choices are more or less efficient than others
182 | - Socialism
183 |     - Austrian: socialism is impossible because it lacks any method of economic calculation
184 |         - However, Austrian economics is all about qualitative judgments rather than quantiative judgments...
185 |         - The economic calculation problem is overstated as an argument against socialism; hardly empirical science backing it up
186 | - Monopoly Theory
187 |     - Neoclassical: free-market structures are "second-best" efficient; there is no feasible real-world way to improve them
188 | - Austrian Business Cycle
189 |     - Widely accepted:
190 |         1. Unemployment increases during downturns; caused by excessive wages and inflation as a unreliable means of reducing wages
191 | 
192 | ### Decentralized Governance in Sovrin
193 | 
194 | [Article](http://www.windley.com/archives/2018/02/decentralized_governance_in_sovrin.shtml)
195 | 
196 | - Governance is in everything we do, the question is whether this governance is ad-hoc and implicit or formal and explicit
197 | - Explicit governance is a *protocol*
198 | - Both code and operators are governance questions in blockchains
199 | - "Rules and regulations, laws and contracts, can never replace clarity of shared purpose and clear, deeply held principles about conduct in pursuit of that purpose." -- Dee Hock
200 |     - Can this clarity be encoded into a consitution?
201 | - Argument for permissioned / known set of validator nodes: protecting decentralization and trust-minimization by using a binding constitution (that minimizes ability for parties to force actions from one another / control others)
202 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2018-january.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | January 2018
  2 | ============
  3 | 
  4 | Tech
  5 | ----
  6 | 
  7 | ### Confidential Transaction, the Initial Investigation
  8 | 
  9 | [Article](https://www.elementsproject.org/elements/confidential-transactions/investigation.html)
 10 | 
 11 | - Pseudoanonymity breaks down when transaction amounts are known
 12 | - Confidential Transactions: makes the transaction amounts private, while preserving the ability of the public network to verify that the ledger entries still add up
 13 |     - Possible due to homomorphic commitments (Pedersen commitment): commitments that can be added (the sum of a set of commitments is the same as a commitment of the sum of the data)
 14 | 
 15 | ### Ethereum Casper 101
 16 | 
 17 | [Article](https://medium.com/@jonchoi/ethereum-casper-101-7a851a4f1eb0)
 18 | 
 19 | - Proof of Stake offers:
 20 |     - Explicit Economic Security: has flexibility to design explicit penalties for Byzantine behaviour (rather than just energy or hardware costs); cost of damage is a proxy for security
 21 |         - Repeated attacks in PoS are much more costly: as if "your ASIC farm burned down" with each round
 22 |     - Mitigation of Centralization: mitigates economies of scale that exist in PoW consensus
 23 |     - Lower energy costs: substitutes realized costs (non-reversible, e.g. power and depreciation) with potential economic value-at-loss (risk of slashing)
 24 | - Issuance costs:
 25 |     - Internalized costs: PoW miners pass them on to holders
 26 |     - Externalized costs: environmental and governmental costs
 27 |     - PoS has much lower issuance costs (and may even reach negative if there are enough tx fees and penalties)
 28 | - Casper establishes explicit finality (as opposed to probablistic)
 29 |     - Explicit finality enables maintaining network security when sharding is introduced
 30 | - Design principles:
 31 |     1. Economics to design behaviour
 32 |     1. Maximize cost of attack
 33 |     1. Public (social) cost-benefit, not just private
 34 |     1. Prevent economies of scale
 35 |     1. network security is derived from "skin in the game"
 36 |     1. Design for oligopolies
 37 |     1. Accountable safety (attribute faults to bad actors)
 38 |     1. Plausible liveness (avoid "blocks")
 39 |     1. Minimal synchronicity assumptions (validators can deliberately go offline)
 40 |     1. Decentralized things should be able to regenerate (recoverable from last node standing)
 41 |     1. Disincentivize censorship
 42 | - Challenges:
 43 |     - Nothing-at-stake: during forks, optimal strategy for validators is to validate every chain
 44 |     - Long range attack: rewrite the entire chain's history; problematic because PoS isn't secured by time-intensive operations
 45 | - Criticisms:
 46 |     - Adverse selection: potentially large risk to participate, so participants will likely be ones with more to gain via some advantage or attack
 47 |     - Rich get richer: PoS is actually more egalitarian than PoW due to economies of scale in PoS
 48 | - 3 Es of Sybil resistence:
 49 |     1. Entry Cost
 50 |     1. Existence Cost
 51 |     1. Exit Penalty
 52 | 
 53 | ### The History of Casper 4
 54 | 
 55 | [Article](https://medium.com/@Vlad_Zamfir/the-history-of-casper-chapter-4-3855638b5f0e)
 56 | 
 57 | - **"Blockchain architecture is mechanism design for oligopolistic markets"** -- Vlad Zamfir
 58 | 
 59 | ### Money, blockchains, and social scalability
 60 | 
 61 | [Article](http://unenumerated.blogspot.ca/2017/02/money-blockchains-and-social-scalability.html)
 62 | 
 63 | - Social scalability: ability of an institution (relationship or shared endeavor) to overcome shortcomings in human minds in determining who or how many can successfully participate
 64 |     - All about human limitations!
 65 |     - How does technology constrain or motivate participation in an institution?
 66 |     - Extra benefits of new person joining - expected costs and harms to other participants
 67 | - Technology: moving function from mind to paper or mind to machine, lowering cognitive costs while increasing the value of information flowing between minds, lowering the cost of discovering new participants
 68 | - "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them" -- Alfred North Whitehead
 69 | - Trust-minimized: reducing the vulnerability of participants to each other's and to outsiders' and intermediaries' potential for harmful behaviour
 70 | - Nothing can completely remove all vulnerabilities: trustless is a misnomer (easy to use though)
 71 | - Internet: all about matchmaking, baby
 72 | - Markets: removing trust in other's altruism but incentivising them to work on our behalf
 73 |     - Pricing: monopolizing collective intelligence for costs and demands
 74 | - Blockchains: trust minimization
 75 |     - Bitcoin: computationally expensive, but institutionally (socially) cheap
 76 | - Scalable markets and prices require scalable money, and scalable money comes from scalable security
 77 | - **"Lawyers are costly. Regulation is to the moon."**
 78 | - "Typical computers are computational etch-a-sketch, while blockchains are computational amber"
 79 | - "Public blockchains are automated, secure, and global, but identity is labor-intensive, insecure, and local."
 80 | - We are limited by our minds; we require redesigned institutions that take advantage of social technological advances
 81 | 
 82 | ### Notes on Blockchain Governance
 83 | 
 84 | [Article](http://vitalik.ca/general/2017/12/17/voting.html)
 85 | 
 86 | - On chain governance has a number of upsides, e.g. evolves rapidly inside the protocol, not informal and has due process, can impose arbitrary performance requirements for nodes without economic centralization
 87 | - Blockchain governance:
 88 |     - Decision function: inputs are a bunch of decisions / opinions from people; output is decision
 89 |     - Coordination: governance in layers, where bottom-most is truth, but it can be influenced from above (i.e. coordination institutions that create focal points around how and when individuals should act to coordinate)
 90 |         - Coordination flags (in coordination games): everyone's watching a signal to do the same things as others; incentivized into mob behaviour because most beneficial (e.g. charging into battle)
 91 | - Key questions concerning governance:
 92 |     1. What should the bottom layer be, e.g. what is the "truth" layer, and what parameters / levers can we manipulate in it?
 93 |     1. What should layer 2, i.e. coordination institutions, be?
 94 | - Where should voting occur? Layer 1? Layer 2?
 95 |     - Voting has a lot of bribing vulnerabilities, and so to have things committed automatically via threshold voting may be dangerous
 96 | - Think about multifactor systems; e.g. using voting and dev team voice as signals
 97 | 
 98 | ### The Problem with Voting
 99 | 
100 | [Article](https://medium.com/@nayafia/the-problem-with-voting-8cff39f771e8)
101 | 
102 | - Voting is a competitive game
103 | - What would cooperative governance look like?
104 |     - Work with others to achieve a shared outcome
105 |         - Default mode is failure, so bias is towards action
106 | 
107 | ### Non-Interactive Proofs of Proof of Work
108 | 
109 | [Paper / Video](https://iohk.io/research/papers/#67CHCNP8)
110 | 
111 | - Using NiPoPoW / NiPoPoS to prove transactions across chains (to transfer funds across sidechains)
112 | - Gist of PoPoW: only 1/(2^n) blocks will exist in the chain given _n_ and total number of blocks _N_ such that there are 2^_n_ partitions in the blockhashes in _N_
113 |     - If we choose _n_ large enough, there will only be a small amount number of blocks that should exist within N that maintain the property of existing within a certain partition
114 |     - For ~400k blocks, if we choose _n_ = 15, there should only be about 10 blocks with this property
115 | 
116 | ### Mechanism Design Security in Smart Contracts
117 | 
118 | [Article](https://medium.com/@matthewdif/mechanism-design-security-in-smart-contracts-87f08555b38b)
119 | 
120 | - Frontrunning
121 |     - Transactions can be front-runned! Any secrets getting exposed in a transaction (e.g. to solve a puzzle) can be detected and mined earlier by someone else (or a miner)
122 |     - Solution: use blind commitments (e.g. ENS: first give hash bids, then later reveal)
123 | - Malicious Wrappers
124 |     - Contracts can be constructed to "wrap" existing contracts, potentially avoiding conditions set out in the original contracts (e.g. lock-in periods for tokens)
125 |     - Solution: case-by-case, but can be difficult. For some use cases, simply ensuring that users are not smart contracts can be enough (done by asking for a signature that can be checked via `ecrecover`: contracts can never own private keys, and hence they cannot create signatures)
126 |         - `EXTCODESIZE` will not work if a call happens from a constructor: be aware (it returns 0)!
127 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2018-july.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | July 2018
 2 | =========
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### Nature 2.0
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](https://medium.com/@trentmc0/nature-2-0-27bdf8238071)
10 | 
11 | - How to move from scarcity to abundance?
12 | - "Network technology provides a disintermediating layer where you may not know what’s on the other side"
13 | - Decentralized networks that enable social scalability are also **public utility networks**
14 | - Software's anti-fragileness: if a piece of software is attacked (and survives), it'll be patched later and be stronger than before
15 | - Blockchains as a new life form: it survives because it can pay people to keep it alive, and performs a useful service to incentivize that
16 | - AI DAOs **live** and **evolve** rather than being simulations
17 | 
18 | ### Thinking in Solidity
19 | 
20 | [Article](https://blog.cotten.io/thinking-in-solidity-6670c06390a9)
21 | 
22 | - XOR swap can be incredibly efficient (way more than `(arr[uint(i)], arr[uint(j)]) = (arr[uint(j)], arr[uint(i)])`)
23 | 
24 | ### Fat protocols aren't new: What blockchain can learn from p2p file sharing
25 | 
26 | [Article](https://medium.com/@jbackus/fat-protocols-arent-new-42d2c538db41)
27 | 
28 | - Fat protocols:
29 |     - Enable more experimentation; network effects don't lie inside the client itself so more are built
30 |         - Better UX comes in varieties: interfaces, supporting more networks, additional features, etc.
31 |         - **These differentiating clients have sovereignty**; they are able to do anything the underlying protocol supports, and the protocol owners can't censor them
32 |     - Live by themselves, outside of their original creators
33 | - **Protocols split product / market fit into two:**
34 |     - Protocol / market fit: is the protocol powerful and general enough?
35 |         - Evolve democratically in civil communities
36 |         - Fork when relationships feel adversarial
37 |     - Application / consumer fit: does the application optimize how the user wants to use the protocol?
38 |         - Finding this fit may be embarrassingly parallel
39 |         - These applications can find their fit by narrowing the use case of a protocol (e.g. video instead of all media)
40 | 
41 | ### Worse is Better
42 | 
43 | [Article](https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html)
44 | 
45 | - The "right way" maximizes on all fronts:
46 |     - Simplicity
47 |     - Correctness
48 |     - Consistency
49 |     - Completeness
50 | - The "worse-is-better" approach:
51 |     - Simplicity: most important
52 |     - Correctness: in all observable aspects; better to be simple than correct
53 |     - Consistency: not overly inconsistent, best to drop parts that deal with less common parts that introduce complexity or inconsistency
54 |     - Completeness: as much as practical; never sacrifice for simplicity, can sacrifice consistency for completeness (especially for interface consistency)
55 | - Simplicity means it's easier to spread to areas that are below the median (e.g. simpler implementation means it's easier to port to slow machines)
56 |     - Condition users to accept worse than the right thing, **if the initial product is good**
57 | - **It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus.**
58 |     - Afterwards, the community will improve upon it naturally
59 | 
60 | 
61 | Life
62 | ----
63 | 
64 | 
65 | Random
66 | ------
67 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2018-june.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | June 2018
 2 | =========
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### What Every Engineer Should Know About Open Source Software Licenses and IP
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](https://eng.uber.com/oss-ip/)
10 | 
11 | - Patent: underlying idea
12 | - Copyright: instance of the idea (e.g. written code)
13 | - MIT: permissive for use, except it does not expressly permit patent use
14 | - Apache 2.0: similar to MIT, but with permissions for patent use
15 | 
16 | ### The pyramid of clarity
17 | 
18 | [Article](https://wavelength.asana.com/pyramid-clarity-strategic-alignment/)
19 | 
20 | - Remember to not optimize for the wrong goal
21 | - Pyramid of clarity: shows how the longer-term aspirations are built on top of shorter-term goals
22 |     - Mission -> Strategy -> Company-Wide Objective -> Group Objectives -> Key Results (over a time period) -> Individual Projects
23 | 
24 | ### Clarity in the design process: how to create a process map for your team
25 | 
26 | [Article](https://wavelength.asana.com/clarity-design-process-create-process-map/)
27 | 
28 | - "A template that everyone can refer to as they bring a product from idea to ship"
29 |     - There can be execptions, but it's the process everyone's expected to follow
30 | - "What’s your ideal design process?"
31 | - Elements:
32 |     1. Ideation: understanding customer issues and product strategy
33 |     1. Definition: defining strategy and requirements
34 |     1. Iteration: prototyping and testing
35 |     1. Implementation: refining
36 | 
37 | ### How we build our Product Roadmap at Asana
38 | 
39 | [Article](https://medium.com/@jackiebo/how-we-build-our-product-roadmap-at-asana-56953b1e25ad)
40 | 
41 | - Balance autonomy and individual contribution with strategic goals
42 | - How to get input for goals?
43 | - Objectives and product roadmap are built from each other: consider what work is required to achieve an objective, and what objective a product improvement fulfills
44 | - What will the company / product look like in a year?
45 | - At the end, each piece of work should be directly relatable to a KR, Objective, and Mission
46 | 
47 | Life
48 | ----
49 | 
50 | ### How to lead with clarity of purpose, plan, and responsibility
51 | 
52 | [Article](https://wavelength.asana.com/types-clarity-high-performing-teams/)
53 | 
54 | - Moving teams from chaos / confusion to clarity is one of the most vital functions of leadership
55 | - Rule of thumb: underestimate how much clarity the team has
56 | - Three types of clarity:
57 |     1. Clarity of purpose: why
58 |         - Link the team's mission with the larger organization
59 |         - **The work to maintain clarity continues indefinitely!**
60 |         - Answer: "If we’re wildly successful, how will the world be different?", "How is the work you’re doing now directly contributing to that success?"
61 |     1. Clarity of plan: how to get there
62 |         - Everyone should have easy access to an accurate source of truth of the current plan
63 |     1. Clarity of responsibility: role in execution
64 |         - Each part of the plan has an owner (best one)
65 | - Best way to unearth lack of clarity: proactively ask questions, and solicit questions
66 | 
67 | Random
68 | ------
69 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2018-march.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | March 2018
  2 | ==========
  3 | 
  4 | Tech
  5 | ----
  6 | 
  7 | ### Juristopia
  8 | 
  9 | [Article](http://unenumerated.blogspot.de/2007/05/juritopia.html)
 10 | 
 11 | ### Microkernel government
 12 | 
 13 | [Article](http://unenumerated.blogspot.de/2007/05/microkernel-government.html?m=1)
 14 | 
 15 | - "An efficient market is an outcome, not a cause, of good law"
 16 | - Juristopia: replacing delegation with property and peer contract relationships
 17 |     - Unbundling of power
 18 | - Keep government minimized (microkernel) and spin off all other functionality into franchises that deal with more substantive law
 19 | 
 20 | ### Today's Crypto Asset Valuation Frameworks
 21 | 
 22 | [Article](https://blockchainatberkeley.blog/todays-crypto-asset-valuation-frameworks-573a38eda27e)
 23 | 
 24 | - Currency features: store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account
 25 | - Store of Value
 26 |     - Ecosystem's acceptance / collective belief is foundational to a currency's position as a store of value
 27 | - Token Velocity
 28 |     - Basically MV=PQ
 29 |     - Hodling => higher price
 30 |     - Asset design could incentivize hodling, e.g. staking
 31 |     - Hard to measure all variables, when velocity changes, hard to determine which of M, P, or Q to record corresponding change
 32 | - INET, Crypto J-curve
 33 |     - Current utility value + discounted expected utility value, using MV=PQ to calculate price
 34 |     - M calculated as value of on-chain transaction value (PQ/V), aka network GDP
 35 | - Network Value-to-Transaction Ratio (NVT)
 36 |     - NVT = network value / daily tx volume
 37 |     - Similar to P/E
 38 |     - Volume represents utility users derive from network
 39 | - Daily active addresses/users
 40 |     - Similar to daily active users
 41 | 
 42 | ### A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
 43 | 
 44 | [Article](https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence)
 45 | 
 46 | - "In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish."
 47 | 
 48 | ### A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
 49 | 
 50 | [Article](https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/cypherpunk.manifesto)
 51 | 
 52 | - **"Privacy is not secrecy"** -> "privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world"
 53 | - Anonymity empowers us to reveal ourselves as desired and only when desired
 54 | - To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy
 55 | - **"We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down"**
 56 | 
 57 | ### Deep-copying in Javascript
 58 | 
 59 | [Article](https://dassur.ma/things/deep-copy/)
 60 | 
 61 | - `JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(...))` is the fastest (lol)
 62 | - `MessageChannel` is best right now for structured cloning
 63 | 
 64 | ### 30-seconds of CSS
 65 | 
 66 | [Article](https://atomiks.github.io/30-seconds-of-css/)
 67 | 
 68 | ### 10 cheat codes for designing User Interfaces
 69 | 
 70 | [Article](https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/design-cheatsheet-274384775da9)
 71 | 
 72 | - This is awesome!
 73 | 
 74 | ### Lesser known CSS quirks & advanced tips
 75 | 
 76 | [Article](https://medium.com/@peedutuisk/lesser-known-css-quirks-oddities-and-advanced-tips-css-is-awesome-8ee3d16295bb)
 77 | 
 78 | - Vertical padding is relative to element’s width not height (for e.g. `padding-top: 50%`), lolwat
 79 | 
 80 | ### Axiomatic CSS and Lobotomized Owls
 81 | 
 82 | [Article](https://alistapart.com/article/axiomatic-css-and-lobotomized-owls)
 83 | 
 84 | - `* + *` is a pretty good sibling selector (ie. no more `*:last-of-type` queries)!
 85 | 
 86 | ### HEAD
 87 | 
 88 | [HEAD](https://gethead.info/)
 89 | 
 90 | Life
 91 | ----
 92 | 
 93 | ### How Light Holacracy Transformed Our Startup
 94 | 
 95 | [Article](https://www.blinkist.com/magazine/posts/light-holacracy-transformed-startup)
 96 | 
 97 | - Holacracy: "eliminate all hierarchies and job titles in organizations, and replace them with a formal structure that is fully focused on getting the job done"
 98 |     - Not about decentralized chaos, but about adopting a ruleset that allows everyone to make smart and effective decisions
 99 |     - No departments, just overlapping circles that are flexible in design and function, easy to spin up and stop
100 |     - Focus on people and _their_ abilities, rather than their _role_ or _title_
101 | 
102 | ### The The Whole Story of Holacracy at Blinkist
103 | 
104 | [Article](https://www.blinkist.com/magazine/posts/whole-story-holacracy-blinkist)
105 | 
106 | - Holacracy has a lot of misconceptions, causing clarity chaos
107 | - Are the best organizational systems invisible and in the aether?
108 | - People > process
109 | 
110 | ### Tribe of Mentors (Quick Lessons)
111 | 
112 | [Article](https://addicted2success.com/success-advice/after-weeks-of-reading-tribe-of-mentors-heres-the-quick-lessons-you-can-learn/)
113 | 
114 | - Have a question for everything
115 | - Everyone (including your superheroes) are flawed, but they stayed focused and executed
116 | - Success still comes with a side of weakness; you will always have some so focus on the strengths
117 | - Heuristic: increase the number of uncomfortable moments in your life; they will make you stronger and more courageous
118 |     - Always make the hard choice
119 | - Let kindness guide you in difficult times
120 | - Commit to decisions by avoiding ranking anything a seven
121 | - Criticism means you are doing something meaningful; push the boundaries (but listen to the feedback)
122 | - Being vulnerable is uncommon, and draws people closer
123 | - Knowing nothing is an advantage: new ideas and strategies comes from being naive
124 | - Plateaus before gains: "when you think there’s no progress, it’s in fact, invisible progress that you can’t see"
125 | 
126 | ### The Artist and the Innovator
127 | 
128 | [Article](https://blog.leanstack.com/the-artist-and-the-innovator-e6b4888c5869)
129 | 
130 | - Traction is evidence of a business model, and today, **business models are the product** (rather than the solution)
131 | - Customers don't care about your solution, they care about their problems
132 | - Build something you **know** customers will buy (rather than something you **hope** they will buy)
133 | - Remove the biggest risks first by confronting them!
134 | - "Innovators turn inventions into working business models"
135 | 
136 | Random
137 | ------
138 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2018-november.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | November 2018
 2 | =============
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### Trust Minimized Governance Tokens
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](http://blog.aragon.one/trust-minimized-governance-tokens/)
10 | 
11 | - Governance tokens need at least these mechanisms:
12 | 
13 |   1. Only proposals which align with the stated intent of the organization are executed
14 |     - Traditional stakeholders in organizations are protected by the legal system that enforces an organization's charter and bylaws
15 |     - A way to protect decentralized organizations, whose execution is irreversible, is to prevent malicious intentions from reaching a stage where they could be considered (e.g. a challenge response system for intents)
16 |   2. Ability for participants to safely exit en masse in response to contentious policies
17 |     - Rather than mass selling, allow "rage quitting" individuals a equal share to the pie
18 |       - The organization may be forced to hold fully liquid assets
19 |       - The organization could fund the "rage quitting" by taking on debt and then liquidating its other assets
20 | 
21 | ### How Contract Migration Works
22 | 
23 | [Article](https://blog.trailofbits.com/2018/10/29/how-contract-migration-works/)
24 | 
25 | - Rather than use proxies to upgrade, full data migration could be used to _migrate_ a contract
26 | - Really depends on the use case
27 | 
28 | ### Building Ethereum’s public smart contract infrastructure
29 | 
30 | [Article](https://medium.com/authio/building-ethereums-public-smart-contract-infrastructure-part-2-of-2-74e32f52c9fe)
31 | 
32 | - Runtime utility: global public good, sometimes acting as a forwarder
33 |   - E.g. account registrar: only allow an action if it's been forwarded through the registar
34 |   - _Public_ aspect can leverage network effects
35 | - Gateway contracts: "frontend" gateway holding runtime utilities
36 |   - Interesting: the gateway would hold both _code_ and _state_; the utilities provide code, and all their state is shared
37 |   - Delegatecalls into the runtime utility, and expects a `revert` to ensure that no state changes happened; the return data is parsed and set
38 | 
39 | 
40 | Life
41 | ----
42 | 
43 | ### The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial
44 | 
45 | [Article](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-life-of-maya-millennial/)
46 | 
47 | - **Premium Mediocre**
48 |   - "Mediocre with just an irrelevant touch of premium, not enough to ruin the delicious essential mediocrity."
49 |   - "Creating an aura of exclusivity without actually excluding anyone."
50 |   - "Dressing for the lifestyle you’re supposed to want, in order to hold on to the lifestyle you can actually afford — for now — while trying to engineer a stroke of luck"
51 | - Social mobility options: illusion of upward potential, anxiety about downwards possibility
52 | - People pay for premium mediocracy for:
53 |   - Reassuring their parents
54 |   - Reassuring / cheerleading their heros
55 | 
56 | 
57 | Random
58 | ------
59 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2018-october.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | October 2018
 2 | ============
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### Diving into C++ internals of node
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](https://darksi.de/c.cpp-in-node/)
10 | 
11 | - History and layout of node.js source
12 | 
13 | Life
14 | ----
15 | 
16 | 
17 | Random
18 | ------
19 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2018-quotes.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | Quotes
2 | ======
3 | 
4 | - "Successful software always gets changed" -- Frederick Brooks
5 | - **Work, Finish, Publish** -- Michael Faraday
6 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2018-september.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | September 2018
 2 | ==============
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### A Peek Inside the Moonshot Factory Operating Manual
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](https://blog.x.company/a-peek-inside-the-moonshot-factory-operating-manual-f5c33c9ab4d7)
10 | 
11 | - An X project must:
12 |   - Solve a problem that affects millions or billions of people
13 |   - Have an audacious, sci-fi sounding technology
14 |   - There has to be at least a glimmer of hope that it’s actually achievable in the next 5–10 years
15 | - **Responsibly irresponsible**
16 |   - Identify risks early, learn cheaply, and be brutally honest what's working and what's not
17 | - **Fall in love with the problem, not the solution** (e.g. a technology)
18 |   - Find "T-shaped" people who are intellectually flexible but have deep domain expertise
19 |   - Centralized "design kitchen" of flexible staff that help independent teams on specific areas (e.g. hardware prototyping)
20 | - **Moving through the factory**
21 |   1. Rapid evaluation: find the breakthroughs that might offer the core ingredients needed
22 |     - Understand the biggest risks
23 |     - Build prototypes around the hardest and riskiest areas to understand the problem (while also satisfying economic requirements)
24 |     - Find out with more certainty if an idea can survive comfortably (and make money) in the real world
25 | - **Actively killing ideas**
26 |   - Kill fast, make it psychologically safe to walk away when something's not working
27 |   - Assume failure is the norm
28 |   - Progress based on risk factor (progress only counts if it's towards the riskiest aspects)
29 |   - Have planned kill switches
30 | 
31 | 
32 | Life
33 | ----
34 | 
35 | ### What Most Remote Companies Don’t Tell You About Remote Work
36 | 
37 | [Article](https://blog.doist.com/mental-health-and-remote-work-1b77616f6945)
38 | 
39 | - "The beauty of remote work lies in the ability to optimize your location for your well-being."
40 | - On mental health: when you don’t see your coworkers in person every day, it’s easy to assume that
41 |   everything is ok when it’s not
42 | 
43 | ### Anatomy of a JavaScript Error
44 | 
45 | [Article](https://blog.bugsnag.com/anatomy-of-a-javascript-error/)
46 | 
47 | - You can use `window.addEventListener('unhandledrejection', handler)` to handle all unhandled promise rejections
48 | - Make use of `Error.captureStackTrace(this, <ErrorName>)` when defining your own custom error classes
49 | 
50 | 
51 | Random
52 | ------
53 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2019-books.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | Books 2019
 2 | ==========
 3 | 
 4 | ### High Output Management
 5 | 
 6 | Author: Andy Grove
 7 | 
 8 | ### The Finance Curse
 9 | 
10 | Author: Nicholas Shaxson
11 | 
12 | ### What You Do Is Who You Are
13 | 
14 | Author: Ben Horowitz
15 | 
16 | ### The Silk Roads
17 | 
18 | Author: Peter Frankopan
19 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2019-december.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | December 2019
 2 | =============
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | Life
 8 | ----
 9 | 
10 | ### The Article I Should’ve Read Before Forming My Delaware LLC
11 | 
12 | [Article](https://gusto.com/blog/start-business/delaware-llc-advantages-disadvantages)
13 | 
14 | ### What's a C corp
15 | 
16 | [Article](https://gusto.com/blog/start-business/c-corporation)
17 | 
18 | ### What is an LLC
19 | 
20 | [Article](https://gusto.com/blog/start-business/what-is-an-llc)
21 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2019-january.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | January 2019
 2 | ============
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### Secure Interaction Design and the Principle of Least Authority
 8 | 
 9 | [Paper](http://zesty.ca/pubs/yee-sid-chi2003-workshop.pdf)
10 | 
11 | - Design principles:
12 |   1. *Path of Least Resistance*: The most natural way to do any task should also be the most secure way.
13 |   2. *Appropriate Boundaries*: The interface should expose, and the system should enforce, distinctions between objects and between actions along boundaries that matter to the user.
14 |   3. *Explicit Authorization*: A user’s authorities must only be provided to other actors as a result of an explicit user action that is understood to imply granting.
15 |   4. *Visibility*: The interface should allow the user to easily review any active actors and authority relationships that would affect security-relevant decisions.
16 |   5. *Revocability*: The interface should allow the user to easily revoke authorities that the user has granted, wherever revocation is possible.
17 |   6. *Expected Ability*: The interface must not give the user the impression that it is possible to do something that cannot actually be done.
18 |   7. *Trusted Path*: The interface must provide an unspoofable and faithful communication channel between the user and any entity trusted to manipulate authorities on the user’s behalf.
19 |   8. *Identifiability*: The interface should enforce that distinct objects and distinct actions have unspoofably identifiable and distinguishable representations.
20 |   9. *Expressiveness*: The interface should provide enough expressive power (a) to describe a safe security policy without undue difficulty; and (b) to allow users to express security policies in terms that fit their goals.
21 |   10. *Clarity*: The effect of any security-relevant action must be clearly apparent to the user before the action is taken.
22 | 
23 | ### Enter the Crypto Idea Maze
24 | 
25 | [Article](https://jonchoi.com/cryptoideamaze/)
26 | 
27 | - Theses:
28 |   - *Sound money*: “Trustless money” that cannot be inflated by any trusted authority such as a central bank.
29 |   - *Web3*: “Trustless internet” where Internet architecture is free of trusted centralized data & service monopolies. Users have more control over their data and Internet usage. These networks also compensate participants for economic value generated in the network.
30 |   - *Open finance*: “Trustless financial systems” that extend cryptocurrency to provide open software primitives for equities, debt, derivatives, checking accounts, remittances, work contracts, retirement accounts, property etc.
31 | - Features are not inherently valuable; they're only useful in the context of a user need
32 |   - Each of the theses have their own, diverging users
33 |   - What does success for a product / feature mean?
34 |   - What is its next best alternative? And how much worse is this alternative?
35 |   - If critical mass is necessary, is there any value before reaching that point?
36 | - Ethos-requiring products will only get so far without a compelling case for ethos-neutral people (i.e. most people)
37 | 
38 | 
39 | Life
40 | ----
41 | 
42 | 
43 | Random
44 | ------
45 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2019-june.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | June 2019
 2 | =========
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](https://doist.com/blog/decision-making-flat-organization/)
10 | 
11 | - Too much input results in being overwhelmed; work towards rough consensus instead
12 |   - "Engineering always involves a set of tradeoffs. It is almost certain that any time engineering choices need to be made, there will be options that appeal to some people, but are not appealing to some others."
13 |   - Take temperature of the room by humming instead of explicitly voting
14 |   - Make the distinction between "not the best choice" (loose disagreement) vs. fundamental flaws (disqualifying disagreement)
15 |     - Don't slow down the process due to loose disagreement
16 |     - Have a shared understanding of what "fundamentally flawed" looks like for a particular decision
17 |   - Conceding is not compromise
18 |   - Rule of thumb: if it's not worth committing to over-communicate a point, it's probably unnecessary feedback
19 | - Ask people if "can you live with this?" rather than "do you agree with this?"
20 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2019-may.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | May 2019
  2 | ========
  3 | 
  4 | Tech
  5 | ----
  6 | 
  7 | ### The Year in Ethereum (2019)
  8 | 
  9 | [Article](https://medium.com/@jjmstark/the-year-in-ethereum-87a17d6f8276)
 10 | 
 11 | ### Creating Animations and Interactions with Physical Models
 12 | 
 13 | [Article](https://iamralpht.github.io/physics/)
 14 | 
 15 | - Maintain the sense of physics via momentum and "virtual" friction
 16 |   - Makes interactions feel more natural (we intuitively understand the conservation of momentum)
 17 | - Spring values:
 18 |   - Spring constant: affects the speed of the feedback (tension?)
 19 |   - Damping: affects the size of the feedback (force?)
 20 | - You can slow things down with constant deceleration, or friction
 21 | - Humans are great at tracking linear motion, but terrible at tracking zoom
 22 |   - Avoid linear translations if the performance is bad!
 23 | 
 24 | ### Kubernetes monitoring with Prometheus in 15 minutes
 25 | 
 26 | [Article](https://itnext.io/kubernetes-monitoring-with-prometheus-in-15-minutes-8e54d1de2e13)
 27 | 
 28 | - Kubernetes Operator: an application-specific controller that extends the Kubernetes API to create, configure, and manage instances of complex stateful applications on behalf of a Kubernetes user
 29 | - Prometheus Operator provides easy monitoring for k8s services and deployments besides managing Prometheus, Alertmanager and Grafana configuration.
 30 | - ServiceMonitor
 31 |   - A [Custom Resource Definition](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/api-extension/custom-resources/)
 32 |   - Abstract how services are targetted by Prometheus, by defining custom rules (e.g. matching a label)
 33 | - AlertManager
 34 |   - Handle incoming alerts (dedupe, group, etc.) and send them to receivers
 35 | 
 36 | ### React Design Principles
 37 | 
 38 | [Article](https://reactjs.org/docs/design-principles.html)
 39 | 
 40 | 
 41 | Life
 42 | ----
 43 | 
 44 | ### A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
 45 | 
 46 | [Article](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/)
 47 | 
 48 | - A repeated pattern of failure by being fooled by your subjective lack of comprehension (of a complex system) into making false simplifications, attempting to maximize "legibility"
 49 |   - Maximizing "organization"
 50 |   - E.g. applied to states trying to simplify taxation, control, identity, etc.
 51 |   - What gets measured gets maximized
 52 | - Real societies look random, but are actually pseudorandom (e.g. random number vs. digits in pi)
 53 | - Sometimes replacing locally optimal solutions with globally optimal ones (e.g. standardization of time)
 54 |   - Engineering a shift in optima and power
 55 | 
 56 | ### Eight Metaphors of Organization
 57 | 
 58 | [Article](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/13/the-eight-metaphors-of-organization/)
 59 | 
 60 | - The organization as:
 61 |   - Machine
 62 |   - Organism
 63 |   - Brain
 64 |   - Culture
 65 |   - Political system
 66 |   - Psychic prison
 67 |   - System of change and flux
 68 |   - Instrument of domination
 69 | 
 70 | ### Aggregation Theory
 71 | 
 72 | [Article](https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/)
 73 | 
 74 | - Aggregation Theory: describes how platforms (i.e. aggregators) come to dominate the industries in which they compete in a systematic and predictable way
 75 | - Value chain: supplier, distributor, consumer/user
 76 |   - Outsized profits:
 77 |     - Horizontally integrate in one segment
 78 |     - Vertically integrate between two to gain UX advantage
 79 | - Before internet, control depended on controlling the distributor
 80 |   - Most integrated backwards into supply rather than forward into consumers: costly individual transactions means that controlling the smaller (and less chaotic) segment provides more leverage
 81 | - With internet, distribution is free, supply has grown, transaction costs minimized
 82 |   - Allows companies to focus on the consumers with UX, and the supply will be attracted to those who have the most scale
 83 | 
 84 | ### Defining Aggregators
 85 | 
 86 | [Article](https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/)
 87 | 
 88 | - Must have three characteristics:
 89 |   - Direct relationship with customers
 90 |   - Zero marginal costs for additional customer
 91 |   - Demand driven networks with decreasing acquisition costs (e.g. network effects)
 92 |     - Abundance in supply; most value comes at discovery and curation
 93 |     - Suppliers are drawn by more users; users are draw by more suppliers
 94 | 
 95 | ### How to build a successful movement in 4 steps
 96 | 
 97 | [Article](https://ideas.ted.com/how-to-build-a-successful-movement-in-4-steps/)
 98 | 
 99 | - "New power operates like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory and peer-driven. Like water or electricity, it’s more forceful when it surges. **The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it**."
100 | - Find connected connectors
101 | - Be frictionless; everyone else is also veying for attention and resource commitment
102 | - Move people up the participation scale; keep them engaged
103 |   - Complying
104 |   - Consuming
105 |   - Sharing
106 |   - Affliating
107 |   - Adapting
108 |   - Funding
109 |   - Producing
110 |   - Shaping
111 | 
112 | 
113 | Random
114 | ------
115 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2019-november.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | November 2019
 2 | =============
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | Life
 8 | ----
 9 | 
10 | ### Q&A With AngelList Co-founder Naval Ravikant
11 | 
12 | [Article](https://angel.co/blog/q-and-a-with-angellist-co-founder-naval-ravikant)
13 | 
14 | - "The best ones [deals] come through your network. The big advantage in Silicon Valley is access."
15 | - More investors driven to private deals because government bonds, equity, and hedge assets (art, wine, gold, etc) are not performing well anymore
16 | - "Behind most great tech companies there’s a great angel: This is the insight that led Paul Graham to start Y Combinator."
17 | 
18 | ### Tracking OKR Results with the Weekly Check-in
19 | 
20 | [Article](https://felipecastro.com/en/okr/tracking-okr-results/)
21 | 
22 | - Mindset during check ups: improve OKRs, not putting out fires or providing excuses
23 | - During check in:
24 |   - Progress update: what has changed?
25 |   - Confidence: are we feeling good about achieving it?
26 |   - Impediments: what's slowing us down? What's not working?
27 |   - Initiatives: what are we going to do to get there?
28 | 
29 | ### CEO Coaches
30 | 
31 | [Article](https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/ceo-coaches)
32 | 
33 | - 1:1 feedback cycle and radical candor
34 |   - Create a safe space for critical feedback and enforcing feedback cycles
35 |   - Collectively agree on commitments and direction; make the commitments accountable
36 | - [Conscious leadership](https://conscious.is/)?
37 | - Lead from vulnerability
38 |   - Trust your team and share your deepest fears; they'll handle the truth and can respect it
39 | - Conflict resolution
40 |   - Make sure both sides have been heard and understood; have their interests at heart
41 | - Weekly OKRs tracking with traffic lights
42 | 
43 | ### Feedback is not a evil word
44 | 
45 | [Article](https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/feedback-is-not-a-dirty-word)
46 | 
47 | - "You are not objective enough about yourself to grow effectively without external feedback"
48 | - **Effective criticism**
49 |   - Given in private
50 |   - Given when the receiver expects it
51 |   - Comes from a genuine place
52 |   - Is specific and avoids sweeping statements
53 |   - Is in a nonviolet communication format
54 |     - Feedback triggers anger and fear; the art is to avoid provoking these emotions
55 |     - Phrasing: “When you do *specific action*, I feel *emotion* because the story in my head is *your fear*”
56 |       - Specific action should be observable and recordable
57 |       - Emotion is a core emotion, like anger, sadness, disappointment, fear
58 |     - Example: " When you didn’t write any tests for that pull-request you submitted last week, I feel fear because the story in my head is that you don’t place enough value on testing, and that without tests we will introduce bugs that will upset customers, affect revenue, and ultimately destroy our chances of creating a successful company."
59 | - Receiving feedback
60 |   - Avoid fight-or-flight responses; your ego is not being destroyed!
61 |   - View feedback as a gift
62 |   - Repeat given feedback to make sure you've gotten it right, and that the other person knows you've heard them
63 |   - Make sure to track feedback and commit to improving it!
64 | - Be vulnerable; if you can, make the feedback public
65 | 
66 | ### Zone of Genius
67 | 
68 | [Article](https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/zone-of-genius)
69 | 
70 | - You are "in the flow" (zone of genius) if you're working in your
71 |   - Strengths (gives you energy)
72 |   - Talents (something you inexplicably love or are good at)
73 |   - Skills (something you were trained in)
74 | - Some people may fall in the "zone of excellence" if they're working with talents and skills, but not in a strength. Identify these people before they burn out!
75 | 
76 | Random
77 | ------
78 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2019-october.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | October 2019
 2 | ============
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### The Power User Curve
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](https://a16z.com/2018/08/06/power-user-curve-l30-l7/)
10 | 
11 | - L30 curve for understanding engagement
12 | - Not every product is a daily use product; if they don't they need to make those engagements count (monetization, etc)
13 | 
14 | ### Loomio Handbook
15 | 
16 | [Book](https://loomio.coop/)
17 | 
18 | - Strategy: a story we tell from 3 years into the future
19 | - Working groups: can be spun up for a single purpose and then dissolve
20 |   - They can also split, merge, or reorganize
21 | - Avoid the ["tyranny of structureless"](https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)
22 | 
23 | ### Replication is bad for decentralized storage
24 | 
25 | - [Part 1](https://storj.io/blog/2018/11/replication-is-bad-for-decentralized-storage-part-1-erasure-codes-for-fun-and-profit/)
26 | - [Part 2](https://storj.io/blog/2019/01/why-proof-of-replication-is-bad-for-decentralized-storage-part-2-churn-and-burn/)
27 | 
28 | - Erasure codes provide dramatically better durability for the same replication factor against replication
29 |   - However, the CPU cost of repairing erasure codes is fair higher (you have to reconstruct the full file, find which pieces are missing, and propagate them again)
30 | - "Increasing node churn dramatically decreases file availability and durability. Strategies like erasure coding and replication are means of insulating against the impact of node churn, but without a mechanism to replace the data, file loss is simply a factor of the rate of churn."
31 | 
32 | ### How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit
33 | 
34 | [Article](https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/)
35 | 
36 | - Approach to getting to PMF
37 | - Sean Ellis is a boss
38 |   - “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measure the percent who answer “very disappointed.”
39 |   - The magic number to this question is 40%
40 |   - You start to get directionally correct results around 40 respondents
41 | - "If you only double down on what users love, your product/market fit score won’t increase. If you only address what holds users back, your competition will likely overtake you"
42 | 
43 | Life
44 | ----
45 | 
46 | ### Talk Fast, Talk Smart
47 | 
48 | [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAnw168huqA)
49 | 
50 | - Frame conversations as questions rather than speaking points; answer them with your knowledge
51 | - Manage anxiety
52 |   - Be in the present, not the unknown (made up) future
53 | - Reframe to be an opportunity or a gift
54 |   - It is not a performance! There is no perfection or mistakes!
55 | - Focus on listening! Be spontaneous! Don't overanalyze and get out of your own way!
56 |   - **"Dare to be dull"**
57 | - Add structure to your communication
58 |   - Problem / opportunity, solution, benefits
59 |   - What, so what, now what
60 | 
61 | ### How to make stress your friend
62 | 
63 | [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcGyVTAoXEU)
64 | 
65 | - How you think about stress matters!
66 | - Be better at handling stress; don't believe it's always bad for you
67 |   - Your body is rising to a challenge, helping you grow
68 | - Stress helps make you social; part of the stress response is oxytocin
69 | 
70 | ### Tyranny of Structurelessness
71 | 
72 | [Article](https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)
73 | 
74 | - There is no such thing as a fully structureless group
75 |   - Structurelessness becomes a way of masking power
76 |   - Implicit structure becomes a way of hiding power; explicit means others know what's going on and how to contribute
77 | - Elites organically form in groups, based on shared beliefs and activities, and create their own tightly-bounded, informal communication channel
78 |   - "Once one knows with whom it is important to check before a decision is made, and whose approval is the stamp of acceptance, one knows who is running things"
79 |   - **For an organization to be effective, these "friendship" traits that commonly form elites have to give in to traits of competence and merit**
80 |   - Formation of elites is not bad; merely inevitable
81 |   - The informal group cannot be compelled to be responsible; it is left to the interests of the individuals
82 | - Tasks can implicitly structure groups
83 |   - If there is no task at hand, people resort to controlling others out of a lack of something better to do
84 | 
85 | Random
86 | ------
87 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2019-september.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | September 2019
 2 | ==============
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### Status as a Service
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service<Paste>)
10 | 
11 | - Most social networks are games of status, and younger people are better at understanding motivations and navigating the "game" to acquire status inside the social network
12 | - Artificial barrier that some are uniquely able to "mine" for status (continued effort, talent, etc.)
13 | 
14 | ### Quantitative Approach to Product Market Fit
15 | 
16 | [Article](https://tribecap.co/a-quantitative-approach-to-product-market-fit/)
17 | 
18 | A number of interesting metrics to quantify product/market fit
19 | 
20 | 1. Growth accounting
21 |   - Navigating revenue/engagement changes from various sources, and understanding the state of the business
22 |     - New
23 |     - Churned
24 |     - Resurrected
25 |     - Expansion
26 |     - Contraction
27 |     - Retained
28 | 2. Cohorts
29 |   - Segment customers via
30 |     - Lifetime value
31 |     - Revenue retention
32 |     - Customer (logo) retention: % of customers retained from a batch
33 | 3. Distribution of Product/Market Fit
34 |   - Distribution of revenue/engagement
35 |   - Don't just use the average, but plot the cumulative distribution function to see if there are concentrated activity from a smaller group of heavy users
36 |   - May also be good to check the L28 distribution of users
37 |     - Given N monthly active users, we plot the fraction that were active only 1 day in the month, then 2 days, and so on
38 | 
39 | Life
40 | ----
41 | 
42 | ### Lencioni's Five Disorders of a Team
43 | 
44 | [Article](https://medium.com/taskworld-blog/lencionis-5-dysfunctions-of-a-team-330d58b2cd81)
45 | 
46 | 1. Absence of trust
47 |   - Be vulnerable
48 | 1. Fear of conflict
49 |   - Encourage healthy conflict, and praise it
50 | 1. Lack of commitment
51 |   - Be clear and expect clarity
52 | 1. Avoidance of accountability
53 |   - Call out each other and be accountable
54 | 1. Inattention to results
55 |   - Put the needs of the team ahead of individuals, and organize status rewards based on this
56 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2020-april.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | April 2020
 2 | ==========
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### The Forgotten History of OOP
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](https://medium.com/javascript-scene/the-forgotten-history-of-oop-88d71b9b2d9f)
10 | 
11 | - Alan Kay invented OOP
12 |   - “I made up the term ‘object-oriented’, and I can tell you I didn’t have C++ in mind.”
13 | - The essential ingredients:
14 |   - Message passing (decoupling)
15 |   - Encapsulation (avoiding shared mutable state)
16 |   - Dynamic binding
17 | - Non-essential:
18 |   - Classes, inheritance, polymorphism
19 |   - Typing
20 | 
21 | ### Why Development Teams are Slow
22 | 
23 | [Article](https://medium.com/javascript-scene/why-development-teams-are-slow-89107985c75c)
24 | 
25 | - **"If a prediction tells you you can do something by some date, don’t believe it. If a prediction tells you that you can’t do something by some date, believe it."**
26 | Life
27 | ----
28 | 
29 | ### The Product Management Triangle
30 | 
31 | [Article](https://productlogic.org/2014/06/22/the-product-management-triangle/)
32 | 
33 | - Product managers "fill in the whitespace"
34 | - Rest of article explains the whitespace between the developers <> users <> business triangle
35 | 
36 | ### On Non-Violent Communication
37 | 
38 | [Article](https://medium.com/@eriktorenberg_/on-nonviolent-communication-33ca8c7ebfcb)
39 | 
40 | - Language framework for taking responsibility for our own thoughts, actions, and feelings:
41 |   - Observation: specific facts/data, no evaluation/judgment
42 |   - Feeling: state how we feel
43 |   - Need: the need underlying this feeling
44 |   - Request: must be specific action to address need
45 | - Example: “When <observation>, I feel <feeling>, because I am needing <need>. Therefore, I would now like <request>.”
46 | - Others may not use this framework, but observe it in them! They all express needs hidden in a judgement or demand.
47 | - Don't focus on being right, focus on the others' unmet needs
48 | - Clarify between needs and strategies (actions)
49 | - Anger is an alarm clock for unmet needs
50 | - "The basis of violence is when people are in pain and don’t know how to say that clearly"
51 | - Avoid motivating by guilt (confuses needs and feelings) or "should" (gives you a way out)
52 | - Apologizing vs. mourning: apologize is "should feel bad", mourn is to recognize an internal unmet need out of our own actions
53 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2020-august.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | August 2020
 2 | ===========
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### Exploring Bayesian Optimization
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](https://distill.pub/2020/bayesian-optimization/)
10 | 
11 | - Active learning: estimate an accurate model
12 |   1. Start with prior function (can assume uniform)
13 |   2. Evaluate point with greatest uncertainty (usually highest variance and furthest away from last evaluated point)
14 |   3. Go back to 1 until model is accurate enough or budget runs out
15 | - Bayesian optimization: find global optimization
16 |   1. Start with prior function (can assume uniform)
17 |   2. Evaluate next point by optimizing an _acquisition function_ around our current knowledge
18 |     - Probability of improvement
19 |     - Expected improvement
20 | - Based on prior knowledge, where should we evaluate next?
21 |   - Active: most uncertain
22 |   - Bayesian: balance between uncertain and current optimums
23 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2020-books.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1 | Books 2020
  2 | ==========
  3 | 
  4 | ### Radical Candor
  5 | 
  6 | Author: Kim Scott
  7 | 
  8 | ### The Changing World Order
  9 | 
 10 | [Book](https://www.principles.com/the-changing-world-order)
 11 | 
 12 | Author: Ray Dalio
 13 | 
 14 | - Measures of archetypical empire's rise and decline: education, innovation and technology, competitiveness, military, trade, output, financial center, reserve status
 15 |   - Education is the most leading indicator, reserve status is the most lagging indicator
 16 |   - Each aspect compounds the other, either upwards or downwards (e.g. education leads to competitiveness, which ultimately leads to financial center and reserve status, but it also means eventual uncompetitiveness and demise)
 17 |   - Empires are defined by forces of economic (production), political (governance), and military (protection)
 18 | - "Debt eats equity, money feeds the hunger of debt, and central banks can produce money"
 19 |   - Also read as: "central banks produce money [in bad times] to whet the appetite of debt, which would otherwise eat equity [to politically dangerous degrees]"
 20 | - Having a reserve currency allows the country exceptional power to borrow, but this borrowing sets the currency's eventual demise due to natural over-extension
 21 |   - Eventual credit collapse as the reserve currency spirals through devaluation and undesirability as debt instrument
 22 | - Both the real and financial economies can cause inflation:
 23 |   - Real: not enough goods produced relative to demand, price go up
 24 |   - Financial: too much credit, price go up
 25 |   - Important to note that you can experience financial inflation (lots of credit) while experiencing real deflation (little demand)
 26 | - Central banks can only influence the financial economy, not the real economy. At one point they will run out of the ability to stimulate the real economy through the financial economy.
 27 | - Currency devaluation can be either systematically beneficial and destructive
 28 |   - Beneficial if it raises real productivity by relaxing burdens on production
 29 |   - Destructive if it stimulates the migration to inflation-hedged assets
 30 | - Currency devaluation usually happens in episodic periods of stability followed by a large devaluation
 31 | - Three types of monetary policy (in progressing desperation):
 32 |   - MP1: change interest rates
 33 |   - MP2: print money to buoy and buy financial assets (e.g. QE)
 34 |     - QE is meant to be temporary, but usually becomes mandatory to continue
 35 |     - May not result in inflation; depends on where QE is injected (e.g. 2009-2014 QE was directed at re-capitalizing banks with base money rather than Main street with broad money, so little inflation)
 36 |   - MP3: central government and central bank working together to distribute targeted money (e.g. helicopter money and debt monetization)
 37 |     - In debt monetization  the central bank just prints away the government's debt
 38 |     - Usually results in broad money going up, as fiscal policies can directly inject broad money
 39 |   - Note that monetary policy can only affect base money (banks control broad money via loans), and so only in MP3 is broad money directly injected
 40 | - Triffin dilemma: the country with the reserve currency has difficulty balancing domestic vs. international currency needs as the currency's value is propped up by international demand (e.g. petrodollars for oil purchases)
 41 |   - Affected both Bretton Woods (not enough gold for guns and butter) as well as Petrodollar (unbalanced trade, large external demand propping dollar)
 42 | - Wars
 43 |   - Trade/economic
 44 |     - Most dangerous part of trade/economic war is when countries cut others off from essential imports
 45 |   - Technology
 46 |     - Whoever wins the technology war will likely win the economic and military wars
 47 |   - Geopolitical
 48 |     - Dominant power eventually retreats from being geopolitcally overstretched, with emerging powers filling the gap created
 49 |   - Capital
 50 |     - Cutting off from capital and its movements (i.e. sanctions); no money = no power
 51 |     - Holder of reserve currency has the strongest ability to sanction to control capital flows
 52 |     - However, abusing the ability to sanction causes loss in confidence and usefulness of the reserve currency
 53 |     - USD currently testing the limits of:
 54 |       - Enormous amounts of dollar-denominated money and debt
 55 |       - Falling and negative real returns
 56 |       - Dollar being used as a weapon
 57 |       - Fiat monetary system
 58 |     - Whenever currencies are not desired, they are sold off and devalued with capital moving to other areas. There is no need to have an alternative reserve currency to go into.
 59 |   - Military
 60 |   - Culture
 61 |     - Failing to understand and empathize with the other's values and not allowing others to do what they think is best
 62 |     - Worst thing is to have a leader be untruthful and emotional in dealing with their populations; this becomes blinding and leads to stupidly excessive wars
 63 | - **Only rule in international relations is that there is no rule.** Show up and fight with power.
 64 | - Internal disputes and order
 65 |   - Human nature and the inevitable struggles to make, take, and distribute wealth lead to instability and re-establishment of prosperity
 66 |   - When the struggles are in healthy competition, productivity rises and prosperity ensues. When it becomes destructive, internal disorder and difficult times ensue.
 67 |   - Because the big swings happen once in a lifetime, what we know to be true is unlikely to be true next. It is more likely going to be the opposite of what we know.
 68 |   - Forces shaping internal order:
 69 |     - Wealth and power class struggle
 70 |       - Eventually the lower classes reform and then revolt
 71 |       - Instead of establishing a just or popular government in victory, political supremacy is regarded as the prize
 72 |       - Peace and prosperity leads to large wealth inequality, who then become overextended, and bad times hit worst for those with little
 73 |       - Those who have wealth are those who own the means of wealth production, and to maintain it, they work with those who have the power to set and enforce the rules
 74 |     - Balance of power
 75 |       - The odds of peace rather than war depend on the willingness to abide by the rules, be mutually agreeable in adapting when necessary to avoid war, and threat of mutually assured destruction
 76 |       - Cycle of power:
 77 |         - Formation of alliances, creating factions of roughly equal power
 78 |           - Without balanced power, little or no fights occur because destruction is assured
 79 |         - Struggle to determine winner and losers
 80 |         - Fights among winners and losers (the "purge"), to decide who will lead each side
 81 |         - Peace and prosperity leading to future power and wealth imbalances
 82 |         - Increasing conflict as sides are picked
 83 |     - Favoring short term over long term
 84 |     - Failure to learn from history
 85 | - To have an accurate picture, we have to keep in mind the existing system as well as the changes of the people in the system. If the people change, we should expect outcomes to be different than the past.
 86 | - Internal stability cycles:
 87 |   1. New order begins, leadership consolidates power
 88 |     - Revolutions usually come in two parts: first deposing the old, and then firmly establishing the new via purges of everyone else
 89 |     - Best leaders are "consolidators of power"
 90 |   2. Resource allocation systems and government bureaucracies are built and refined
 91 |     - Creating and managing systems that effectively allocate resources to improve productivity
 92 |     - To be successful, the system has to produce prosperity for the middle class
 93 |     - Best leaders are "civil engineers"
 94 |   3. Peace and prosperity
 95 |     - Opportunity and prosperity are abundant and everyone is excited and optimistic
 96 |     - Wide, equal opportunity for education, resources allocated on merit, debt fuels productive growth
 97 |     - Best leaders are "inspirational visionary" who can imagine and convey and exciting future, go build that future, and broaden inclusiveness of the prosperity and invest it into the future
 98 |   4. Period of excesses
 99 |     - Entered via widening gaps of opportunity, wealth, and values, along with unfair conditions entrenching the poor and elites, and declining productivity financed by excessive debts
100 |     - Finances of country continue to deteriorate, supporting luxury and overstretched militaries rather than productive assets
101 |     - Best leader is "well-grounded, disciplined" who creates restraints on excesses and promotes sound fundamental behaviours and finances
102 |   5. Bad financial conditions and intense conflict
103 |     - Interclass tensions along with worsening financial conditions come to a head
104 |     - Classic toxic mix:
105 |       - Bad financial shape; bad debts and fiscal obligations
106 |       - Large income, wealth, and values gaps
107 |       - Severe negative economic shock
108 |     - Financial problems occur typically first with the private sector and then into the public sector
109 |     - Collapse happens when the government runs out of buying power (e.g. no more currency or devalued currency)
110 |       - Government produces more debt than buyers other than the central bank are willing to buy
111 |       - If the country can't print more, it has to increase taxes and lower spending
112 |       - If it can print, it'll devalue its currency
113 |       - In either way, capital flight occurs and then rules are placed on capital movement
114 |       - **Raising taxes and cutting spending when there are large wealth gaps and bad economic conditions is greatest leading indicator of civil wars or revolutions**
115 |     - **Debt and money that is created at this period can only improve the situation if they are used to produce productivity gains rather than just given away**
116 |       - What matters most is what the system puts the credit and money into; ideally it is an investment that will raise productivity and real incomes for the whole
117 |     - Other rising conditions:
118 |       - Decadence
119 |       - Bureaucracy
120 |         - May make sensible and needed decisions difficult; hiding behind the established law to maintain entrenchment
121 |         - Legal and police systems may be used as political weapons
122 |       - Populism and extremism
123 |         - They are typically more confrontational and likely to lead into conflict
124 |       - Class warfare
125 |         - Increasing demonization of particular classes
126 |       - Loss of truth in the public domain
127 |         - Media distorts truth to manipulate people for the benefit of the powers that be
128 |         - Fear of speaking truth or standing out
129 |       - Rule following fades and raw fighting begins
130 |         - Reason is abandoned for passion; winning is the only thing that matters and all ethics are thrown out
131 |         - Private police systems form
132 |     - Question is how much the existing system will bend before it breaks?
133 |     - Best leader is a "strong peacemaker" who can bring together moderates to reshape the existing order in a way that's more fair to everyone
134 |     - Alternatively, a "strong revolutionary" who is capable of going through the hell of a civil war and then rebuild
135 |   6. Civil wars
136 |     - All systems will encounter civil wars eventually because all systems benefit some classes at the expense of other classes
137 |     - Best leaders are "inspirational generals" who are brutal enough to do whatever is necessary to win
138 | 
139 | ### Creative Selection
140 | 
141 | Author: Ken Kocienda
142 | 
143 | ### The Infinite Machine
144 | 
145 | Author: Camila Russo
146 | 
147 | ### The Bezos Letters
148 | 
149 | Author: Steve Anderson
150 | 
151 | Lessons:
152 | 
153 | - Master of risk; take thoughtful risk and learn
154 | - Four parts of the growth cycle:
155 |   - Test
156 |     - Encourage successful failure
157 |     - Bet on big ideas
158 |     - Practice dynamic invention and innovation
159 |   - Build
160 |     - Obsess over customers
161 |     - Apply long-term thinking
162 |     - Understand your flywheel
163 |       - See Jim Collins
164 |   - Accelerate
165 |     - Generate high-velocity decisions
166 |       - 6 pagers
167 |       - Two types of decisions; categorize decisions you can walk back from and optimize for speed
168 |     - Make complexity simple
169 |     - Accelerate time with technology
170 |     - Promote ownership
171 |   - Scale
172 |     - Maintain your culture
173 |     - Focus on high standards
174 |     - Measure what matters, question what's measured, and trust your gut
175 |       - 2004 on free cash flow as most important metric
176 |     - Believe it's always day 1
177 |       - 2016 on staving off from day 2
178 |     - A risk and growth mindset
179 | - Leadership principles (everyone is a leader)
180 |   - Customer obsession
181 |   - Ownership
182 |   - Invent and simplify
183 |   - Are right, a lot
184 |   - Learn and be curious
185 |   - Hire and develop the best
186 |   - Insist on the highest standards
187 |   - Think big
188 |   - Bias for action
189 |   - Frugality
190 |   - Earn trust
191 |   - Dive deep
192 |   - Have backbone; disagree and commit
193 |   - Deliver results
194 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2020-february.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | February 2020
 2 | =============
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### React 16: A look inside an API-compatible rewrite of our frontend UI library
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](https://engineering.fb.com/web/react-16-a-look-inside-an-api-compatible-rewrite-of-our-frontend-ui-library/)
10 | 
11 | - Talks about the operations of a fairly large library rewrite, aim to be backwards API-compatible
12 |   - Running old vs. new via a feature flag is pretty useful ehre
13 |   - TDD against old test cases (really, this safety net is the best bit of adding tests)
14 | 
15 | Life
16 | ----
17 | 
18 | ### Dan Abramov's Decade in Review
19 | 
20 | [Article](https://overreacted.io/my-decade-in-review/)
21 | 
22 | ### The Unending Chasm, and How to Survive It
23 | 
24 | [Article](https://a16z.com/2018/12/27/endless-chasm-enterprise-startups/)
25 | 
26 | - Companies can be still successful if theyr'e stuck in the chasm (primarily relying on push-based sales)
27 | - Some markets will never be "pull" based
28 |   - Learn into providing services / integration work
29 | - Some buyer groups can be very hard to sell to, causing lower contract values and higher acquisition costs
30 | - **Premium on survival**
31 | 
32 | ### Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager
33 | 
34 | [Article](https://a16z.com/2012/06/15/good-product-managerbad-product-manager/)
35 | 
36 | - Various good / bad skills and behaviours of product managers
37 | - Dictate your product story, manage it, deliver it, and **own it**
38 | 
39 | ### Hire a VP of Engineering
40 | 
41 | [Article](https://a16z.com/2017/05/26/hiring-vp-engineering-why-what/)
42 | 
43 | - "Head of engineering or VP of engineering is the executive that grows and manages the engineering team, is responsible for assessing the time it will take to deliver features (or products), and delivering quality releases on that schedule."
44 | - Brings sanity into the engineering process; has mental accounting of when development, tech debt, etc. make sense
45 | - Builds, maintains, and evolves the engineering culture and processes as it scales
46 | 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2020-january.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | January 2020
 2 | ============
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### Rauchg: 2019 in review
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](https://rauchg.com/2020/2019-in-review)
10 | 
11 | - Some interesting thoughts about JAMstack, how web apps are transforming
12 | - "The flakiness of your integration tests is a lower bound for the flakiness of your user experience."
13 | - "Settings are for successful products. For MVP, just get the defaults right."
14 | 
15 | ### Web security specifications you should know about
16 | 
17 | [Article](https://taravancil.com/blog/web-security-specifications/)
18 | 
19 | Life
20 | ----
21 | 
22 | ### Product Zeitgeist Fit: A Cheat Code for Spotting and Building the Next Big Thing
23 | 
24 | [Article](https://a16z.com/2019/12/09/product-zeitgeist-fit/)
25 | 
26 | - People try new things out because it connects with them emotionally rather than functionally
27 | - "When you have PZF, the product resonates with users not because it’s better, but because it feels extremely culturally relevant at that particular moment in time for a particular group of people"
28 | - "The death of most startups is indifference"
29 |   - "Most companies fail to launch because no one cares: not users, not employees, not investors, and certainly not the media"
30 | - How to spot PZF:
31 |   - "Nerd heat": the best are working on it or excited by it
32 |   - "Despite test": people are using it despite (it sucks | its not as good | its frustrating)
33 |   - "T-shirt test": people with no connection are shilling it
34 |   - "Eyebrow test": idea is misunderstood or controversial
35 | - Zeitgeist tends to be generational, reactionary, and usually towards a villian
36 |   - Note how this plays with building fame through what adults hate vs. kids like
37 |   - Be polarizing!
38 | 
39 | ### “Need More Time” or Lack of Product-Market Fit?
40 | 
41 | [Article](https://a16z.com/2018/01/24/mixed-signals-going-to-market-pre-chasm/)
42 | 
43 | - How do you know if you just need more time to wait for a bigger market / more willing market or if you just don't have product/market fit?
44 | - Don't get stuck in the "innovation-friend zone"
45 |   - Get real deals, not exploratory ones that dry up or are just leading you
46 | - Customers want it, but can't buy
47 |   - Focus on product marketing, cultivate leads rather than focusing on lead generation
48 | - Your biggest competitor is probably the status quo
49 |   - Educate customers on the problem, not the solution
50 |   - Why should they care or be worried about it? How do you solve it?
51 | - Pricing
52 |   - "No matter what, matching existing prices [of comparables] automatically underprices your product from the get-go"
53 |   - Convince, then discuss pricing
54 | - Sales partners
55 |   - "Pre-chasm companies have to create a pull-based market — not a push based one — before they can truly engage the benefits of such partners"
56 | 
57 | ### Digital Ocean: Culture
58 | 
59 | [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5u3zHd5-tI&feature=youtu.be&t=2118)
60 | 
61 | - Distinct cultures from bunch.ai (pick one, max 2):
62 |   - Adaptability
63 |   - Principles
64 |   - Results-oriented
65 |   - Detail-oriented
66 |   - Customer-oriented
67 |   - Collaboration
68 | 


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/2020-july.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | July 2020
 2 | =========
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | Life
 8 | ----
 9 | 
10 | ### A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100
11 | 
12 | [Article](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/)
13 | 
14 | - Forces of human world:
15 |   - Culture (least legible, but most powerful)
16 |   - Politics
17 |   - War
18 |   - Business (most legible, but least powerful)
19 | - "There is no meaningful way for a businessman from (say) 2000 BC to comprehend what Mark Zuckerberg does, let alone take over for him"
20 | - Corporate form existed from 1600 to 1800 in the backdrop of mercantilism (organized around *space*, e.g. land and trade routes)
21 |   - East India Company (EIC) balanced trade between West and East (trade history up to then had always been West importing more than East)
22 |   - Successful in marketing but not innovation
23 | - Only after 1800 did technology play a large part (industrial revolution) (organized around *time*)
24 |   - Productive growth: not zero sum!
25 |   - "The Schumpeterian corporation was about colonizing individual minds"
26 |   - Sailing was a craft; railroads were an engineering discipline (reliable and efficient)
27 |   - "Move humans at the speed of technology instead of moving technology at the speed of humans"
28 | 


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/2020-june.md:
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 1 | June 2020
 2 | =========
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | 
 8 | Life
 9 | ----
10 | 
11 | ### How to Succeed in Business by Bundling – and Unbundling
12 | 
13 | [Article](https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundling-and-unbundling)
14 | 
15 | - "There are only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is unbundle"
16 | 
17 | ### Progressive Decentralization: A Playbook for Building Crypto Applications
18 | 
19 | [Article](https://a16z.com/2020/01/09/progressive-decentralization-crypto-product-management/)
20 | 


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/2020-march.md:
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  1 | March 2020
  2 | ==========
  3 | 
  4 | Tech
  5 | ----
  6 | 
  7 | ### The Monitoring Death Spiral
  8 | 
  9 | [Article](https://grafana.com/blog/2016/01/11/the-monitoring-death-spiral/)
 10 | 
 11 | - Rather than blindingly trusting instinct, intuition, or a single instrument, get the full picture
 12 | - Observability practically means we bring telemetry data together under a seamless experience to help people troubleshoot, understand, and explore the data that is coming out at an increasingly rapid rate from all systems and application
 13 | 
 14 | ### Monitoring for Everybody
 15 | 
 16 | [Video](https://grafana.com/blog/2018/05/23/monitoring-for-everyone/)
 17 | 
 18 | - Good introduction to logging, metrics, and tracing, and when each should be applied
 19 | 
 20 | ### An Inside Look at the Life of a Technical Writer at Grafana Labs
 21 | 
 22 | [Article](https://grafana.com/blog/2020/02/20/an-inside-look-at-the-life-of-a-technical-writer-at-grafana-labs/)
 23 | 
 24 | - Technical content should be separated into:
 25 |   - Concept
 26 |   - Task
 27 |   - Reference
 28 | 
 29 | ### Shitty First Software Drafts
 30 | 
 31 | [Article](https://sirupsen.com/drafts/)
 32 | 
 33 | - Simplify, simplify, and then simplify
 34 | - "If you can't rewrite what you did in an hour, it wasn't simple enough"
 35 | 
 36 | ### Research Debt
 37 | 
 38 | [Article](https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/)
 39 | 
 40 | - Research can have debt similar to technical or institutional debt
 41 | - Research debt is the accumulation of missing interpretive labor
 42 | 
 43 | ### Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
 44 | 
 45 | [Article](http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/)
 46 | 
 47 | - Ladder of abstraction: technique for explicitly defining and navigating the different levels of abstraction available
 48 | - As an engineer, you should not be doing something if you don't know what you're supposed to do
 49 | - "The most exciting engineering challenges lie on the boundary of theory and the unknown"
 50 |   - Emergent behaviour: "high-level effects that arise indirectly from low-level interactions"
 51 |   - Challenge lies not in constructing the system, but understanding it
 52 | - Design which parameters should be controllable
 53 |   - Do not be a slave to real time! Design tools that will allow you to skip forward, backward, or play in loops and reverse!
 54 | - Abstract over a parameter (e.g. time) to visualize it against other parameters: first layer up
 55 |   - It will be useful to view these abstraction as "layers" that we can also apply as we go down the ladder (e.g. visualizing path over time, but still seeing position at a specific moment in time)
 56 | - As you abstract over more parameters, you step higher up the ladder. Once you do this, it's useful to take these into mind and "layer" over previous steps to examine and compare specific cases
 57 | - At some point, you will have to abstract over the data that the system works over (e.g. all possible input variations)
 58 | 
 59 | ### The Best Advice We Overheard at First Round's CTO Unconference
 60 | 
 61 | [Article](https://firstround.com/review/the-best-advice-we-overheard-at-first-rounds-cto-unconference/)
 62 | 
 63 | - "Debate, decide and persuade"
 64 |   - Every pending decision will be in one of in one of these modes (early, middle, or late); be clear with the team on where a particular decision is in this cycle
 65 | 
 66 | ### Track and Facilitate Your Engineers’ Flow States In This Simple Way
 67 | 
 68 | [Article](https://firstround.com/review/track-and-facilitate-your-engineers-flow-states-in-this-simple-way/)
 69 | 
 70 | - Interesting article on managing flow states of managees
 71 | 
 72 | Life
 73 | ----
 74 | 
 75 | ### User and player types in gamified systems
 76 | 
 77 | [Article](https://yukaichou.com/gamification-study/user-types-gamified-systems/)
 78 | 
 79 | - Bartle's four player archetypes in games:
 80 |   - Achievers (diamonds): obtain success or rewards, even if they don't translate to gameplay advantages
 81 |   - Explorers (spades): focus on discovery; want to dig and uncover new pathways or treasure
 82 |   - Socializers (hearts): social elements and building relationships are most interesting
 83 |   - Killers (clubs): compete and beat others
 84 | - Gamified systems do not have as much freedom to explore or play
 85 | - Andrzej's archetypes in gamified systems:
 86 |   - Player (only one "willing" to play): reacts to extrinsic rewards
 87 |   - Socializer: social and relatedness
 88 |   - Free Spirit: autonomy, self expression
 89 |   - Achiever: mastery
 90 |   - Philanthropist: purpose, selfless dedication for a "cause"
 91 | - Quadrants according to acting (vs. interacting) and system (vs. user) (all intrinsically motivated):
 92 |   - Achievers: acting, system
 93 |   - Free spirits: interacting, system
 94 |   - Philanthropist: acting, user
 95 |   - Socializer: interacting, user
 96 | - Quadrants according to material desires and amount of structure (all extrinsically motivated):
 97 |   - Consumer: acting, system
 98 |   - Exploiter: interacting, user
 99 |   - Self seeker: acting, user
100 |   - Networker: interacting, user
101 | - **Design around the four intrinsic motivations, and then build rewards on top; it be self-sustainable even without the rewards**
102 | 
103 | ### Gamifying Corporate Politics: Chou’s Corporate Player Types
104 | 
105 | [Article](https://yukaichou.com/workplace-gamification/gamifying-company-politics-chous-corporate-matrix/)
106 | 
107 | - Quadrants according to performance and political ability:
108 |   - Survivors: lowest effort to stay alive ("NPC"s, "losers" in Gervais Principle)
109 |   - Performers: passionate, don't care about politics ("clueless" in Gervais Principle)
110 |   - Politicians: just want to get ahead via politics (wannabe "sociopaths" in Gervais Principle)
111 |   - Stars: sociopaths
112 | - Motivational design moves survivors into performers
113 |   - Epic meaning, development and creativity, coaching
114 | - Leadership training moves performers into stars
115 | - Rewarding politicians, while easy, destroys the company ("the dark side"); others will see that as the path and lose motivation / increase scheming
116 | 
117 | ### Warning: This Is Not Your Grandfather’s Talent Planning
118 | 
119 | [Article](https://firstround.com/review/warning-this-is-not-your-grandfathers-talent-planning/)
120 | 
121 | - **Superstar mode**: the people on your team who are going to change everything; responsible for Schumpeterian change; a force — and source — of growth on a team.
122 |   - Continue offering them challenges
123 | - **Rock star mode**: the people on your team who don’t want their boss’ job; very talented at their role and will keep doing and digging into it for years if a boss doesn’t screw it up; a force — and source — of excellence and stability on a team.
124 | - "People in superstar mode want a world they can change. Those in rock star mode seek a world they can stabilize. You’ll need both."
125 | - Be care with overvaluing _potential_--your rock stars are not going to be directing their energy for upwards mobility
126 |   - Look instead for _growth trajectory_
127 | 


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/2021-january.md:
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 1 | January 2021
 2 | ============
 3 | 
 4 | Tech
 5 | ----
 6 | 
 7 | ### The Open Society and its Media
 8 | 
 9 | [Article](http://www.caplet.com/papers/open-media.html)
10 | 
11 | - Succeed by not doing worse: don't ask how things could be better, demonstrate how things could be worse
12 | - "In closed societies, when arguments cannot be spoken, hard truths cannot be figured out. When people cannot openly criticize, cannot openly defend against criticism, or cannot openly propose ideas that conflict with the official truths, then they are left with mistrust and cynicism as their only defense."
13 | - "In looking at the dangers, I saw that none of us individually is clever enough to figure out how to solve those problems. The only hope that I saw in 1988--1 no longer believe it is the only hope--is that by creating better media for the process of societal discourse and societal decision-making, we stand a much better chance of surviving the dangers posed by new technologies, so that we may live to enjoy their benefits."
14 | 
15 | ### Graphics
16 | 
17 | [Video (physics of lighting)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6UKhR0T6cs&loop=0)
18 | 
19 | [Playlist (ray tracing)](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5B692fm6--sgm8Uiava0IIvUojjFOCSR)
20 | 
21 | [Playlist (computer graphics)](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzH6n4zXuckrPkEUK5iMQrQyvj9Z6WCrm)
22 | 
23 | - Everything is a triangle: simplest bi-planar (flat) representation
24 | - 3d object files are just a collection of vertices (e.g. `v 101`) and faces (e.g. `f abc`)
25 | - Scale, translation, and rotations can be applied via a single matrix operation to vertices to transform them
26 | - Viewport changes are also just a matrix transform to adjust the vertex representations "on-screen"
27 | - Rasterization "paints" the 3d object into a 2d presentation, checking which pixels should be coloured with which colour given the 3d scene
28 | - Visibility problem is now generally brute-forced via large memory buffers (z-buffers), where each vertex has an encoded depth value
29 | - Lighting can be approximated via the z-buffer as well, checking for what the light source can see (and repeating for each light source)
30 | - Ray tracing is the "ideal" 1:1 representation of how real physics for lighting work, but only at the limit
31 | - Denoising "blends" a sampled approximation (e.g. 5 ray samples per pixel) into a complete image
32 | - Ray tracing has advanced extremely quickly in recent years due to enhancements in special purpose hardware (extreme memory and optimized integrated circuits for BVH traversal) but also large improvements in denoising from deep learning
33 | 
34 | 
35 | Life
36 | ----
37 | 
38 | ### 100 Tips For A Better Life
39 | 
40 | [Article](https://ideopunk.com/2020/12/22/100-tips-for-a-better-life/)
41 | 
42 | ### 100 Ways To Live Better
43 | 
44 | [Article](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HJeD6XbMGEfcrx3mD/100-ways-to-live-better)
45 | 


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/README.md:
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1 | # Reading
2 | 
3 | Random notes and summaries of things I've ever ~~read~~ bothered to take digital notes of, starting
4 | summer 2016. [Cue music.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebXbLfLACGM)
5 | 


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