In the middle of the desert you can say anything you want
If you want to maximize the happiness of your experiencing self, plan a lengthy vacation. An extra week of sipping cocktails in the sun will almost certainly keep your stress levels lower than hunching over your keyboard at work.
But if you want to maximize the happiness of your remembering self –
mind you, a self that lasts far longer than the fleeting experiencing
self – a lengthy vacation makes far less sense.
You can switch up the vacation dramatically halfway through, so you
create new memories for your remembering self. Or you can spend half the
time doing something less expensive, like staying at home and avoiding
hotel and rental car fees – because in the long run, chances are the
money isn’t buying much anyway.
Additionally: https://www.businessinsider.nl/perfect-vacation-according-to-science-2017-7/?international=true&r=US
Path dependence explains how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant.
spend a little more time identifying what you need before approaching your manager. Fortunately, there are only a few types of asks. Here are some of the common ones I’ve experienced, along with suggestions for effectively introducing them to your manager. Help me identify a problem. Something is not quite right. I’ve observed the following concrete things, and I sense an issue but am having a hard time putting my finger on it. I’m looking to leverage your experience to help me identify the problem. Help me frame the problem. I’m looking to solve the following problem. I’m inexperienced when it comes to framing possible options, and I could use your help. Review my analysis. I’m looking to solve the following problem. I’ve spent some time framing possible solutions. I’d like to discuss the options with you and hear your critical feedback so that I can improve the options and make an informed recommendation. Sanity-check my choice. I’m looking to solve the following problem. I’ve developed a few options and identified my preferred path forward. I’d like you to sanity-check my preferred path. Heads up. I just wanted to give you a quick heads-up. I’ve made the following decision and am planning on implementing it on the following date. Just Venting I need to vent about something. I don’t need anything solved for me, just a sympathetic ear.
TL;DR: the most productive development happens when one person knows the system intimately because they wrote it; this is in conflict with growing a system beyond what one person maintains.
If you are this person, please realize that no one else experiences this work the way you do. For other people, every change is scary, because they don’t know what effect it will have. They spend hours forming theories about how a piece works, and then struggle to confirm this with experiment; they don’t have the testing setup you do. They study every log message instead of skimming over the irrelevant ones, the ones you’ve skipped over so often you don’t even see them anymore. By the time they do figure something out, you’ve changed it; they can’t gain comprehension of the system as quickly as you can alter it. When they do make a change, they spend lots of time limiting the scope of it, because they don’t know which changes will cause problems. They get it wrong, because they don’t know the users personally; communication is hard.
If you are this person, please go easy on everyone else. You are a synthetic biologist and can alter the DNA of the system from within; they are xenosurgeons and have to cut in through the skin and try not to damage unfamiliar organs.
Hi, I’m Hilary. I’m an anthropology PhD student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. My Master’s research, which was the inception for this blog, was on on the subject of drug use, harm reduction and electronic dance music culture in Toronto. (I usually call it rave culture for short but I do know how contentious the term ‘rave’ can be.)
I started this blog as a way of engaging with fellow ravers and the communities I’m working with, both online and in Toronto. Tell me when you think I’m right, wrong, missing something or completely full of shit. Academic research needs to be a much more transparent process, so this is my attempt at helping to bridge that gap.
A nice example of blog made for a certain academic purpose. This is excellent.
No matter how complex your product is, a few simple business models tend to move the needle most. Make intimidating things painless. The smartest person you know understands how 0.01% of the world works, tops. An 18-year-old applying for college is asked to determine on their own whether their lifetime earnings will justify five figures of non-dischargeable debt. What do you think that feels like? Build a service around the empathy of others’ intimidation and they will run towards you, arms wide open. We recently invested in NextGenVest for this very reason. Make boring things exciting. Rule of thumb: Boring tasks will be ignored until their neglect hurts you. Which means boring products leave enormous potential on the table. Kahn Academy made learning fun. Long Game makes savings a game. Mint made personal finance easy. Bring joy to painful activities and you multiply your addressable market. Make complicated things simple. Lyft and Uber made it easier to get a ride. That’s all they did. But when you consider the number of steps it took to get a cab – giving yourself enough time to find one, hailing one, telling the driver where you’re going, trusting him to figure out how to get there, making sure you have enough cash to pay him, saving your receipt – you realize how much potential there is in reducing a lengthy set of tasks. Make obfuscation transparent. A surprisingly large percentage of consumers have finely tuned BS detectors. Brute-force honesty in an industry plagued with concealment is a great way to build trust. Even revealing your faults does wonders for trust. My colleague Sophie Bakalar recently wrote: “Honesty can be its own marketing strategy. That’s because authentic transparency is a proxy for a company’s values, which modern consumers increasingly care about.” Totally agree. Make middlemen irrelevant. Someone told me most economic growth is just “the elimination of one middleman at a time.” Directionally true. Narrowing the gap between production and purchase, without sacrificing quality or distribution, will almost always be a winning formula. This is especially true when middlemen are gatekeepers of data. Empower customers to make better decisions and you’re indispensable. Make things disappear. More value has been created taking stuff away from consumers than has by offering them more. That stuff includes: The need to farm, standalone cameras, cassette tapes, cable TV subscriptions, physical books, physical newspapers, filing cabinets, fax machines, mail, malls, a second car, and maybe soon, any car. All of these were replaced by something as good or better, but so invisible that you barely know it exists. Which can make customers happier than getting something new.
80 years ago tomorrow, one of the finest moments in BBC history
occurred.
Lt.-Cmdr. Thomas Woodrooffe was a retired Royal Navy office who covered
the navy for BBC news. He’d previously served on the battleship HMS
Nelson.
In 1937 the fleet held a large review at Spithead, which included the visiting battleship USS New York. The plan was for him to broadcast that evening from aboard HMS Nelson, when all the ships would have lights strung in their rigging.
Unfortunately, after he boarded Nelson he ran into many of his old
shipmates, and they decided to have a drink… then another… then a
few more… With the end result being that when Woodrooffe took the
microphone that night he was completely smashed drunk.
“There’s nothing between us and heaven. There’s nothing at all."
The Gist: Taking good breaks is important for your daily productivity. Breaks reduce fatigue, alleviate boredom, and can restore attention. Using tech during our breaks may backfire and make us more susceptible to boredom and want more breaks, more often. Restorative breaks can improve attention and refresh our focus. Break ideas based on research include: Nature exposure Doodle and daydream Eye exercises — 20/20/20 Laugh Brief exercise
My notepad about stuff related to IT-security, and specifically penetration testing. Stuff I have come across that I don’t feel like googeling again.
Interestingly, the subjects who held the “smaller” key in their left
hand and the “larger” key in their right responded more quickly and with
fewer errors than those in the opposite group. This suggests that
we carry around a mental number line
in our heads, implicitly associating left with “small” and
right with “large”;
Interestingly, Iranian students living in France who had initially
learned to read from right to left showed
a reverse SNARC effect (associating small numbers with
the right and large numbers with the left) if they’d recently
immigrated, but those who had lived in France for some time showed the
same SNARC effect as native French students.
Because monetizing your open-source project means you take on a second
job.
Here are your choices:
* Turn your OSS project into a company (Docker). The pro is that you
can capture a lot of the value, the con is that you’re splitting your
project into CE/EE and also now you’re a CEO
* Give the software away for free and charge for the hosting (Gitlab).
Pro here is that you get recurring revenue, but the con is that now
you’re in DevOps and wear a pager. Also this model doesn’t work well for
libraries, only “apps”.
* Charge for support (Ubuntu, Nginx-ish). Pro here is that by helping
folks implement your software, you’ll have a long line of success
stories. Con here is that it isn’t scalable - your upside is bounded by
the hours you can bill
* Get a job at a company that will fund you to work on it (React,
Angular). Pro here is that you can make tons of money with a job you
love. Nice work, if you can get it. Con is that now you work for that
company and you’re subject to whatever whims they have.
* Run a Kickstarter (Light Table, Diaspora). Pro: you can gauge demand
and you don’t have a boss. Cons: it’s one-time revenue, you have
potentially inflated expectations, and just kidding, now you have 1,000
bosses.
* Run a Patreon (Vue). Pro: you have autonomy and recurring revenue
(yay!). Con: now you’re a personality. This is limited to celebs who
are good at marketing _themselves_ as much as their software
* Ask for donations (Babel, Webpack). Pro: this works for tools and
libraries (not just apps) and you can keep your mission. Con: Companies
feel these donations have ambiguous deliverables. There’s a lot of
mental overhead too (How many projects can one company fund per
month?)
* Sell documentation, books, videos (React Training, my current gig).
Pro: JavaScript fatigue makes you money! Con: Writing the docs isn’t as
satisfying as writing software (for many developers)
So to answer your question: monetizing your open-source project means
you take on another job _besides writing software_.
In an ideal world if you write software and it gets used, you’d be able
to capture some share of that value. But we’re not there yet.
[If you want to chat more about funding OSS, reach out to me (see my
profile). I’m working on a few new ideas.]
In fact, if you test 20 hypothesis you don’t need to even bother
collecting data to get a p-value of 0.05, the number of hypotheses
virtually guarantees it.
I didn’t edit any of the data. I didn’t throw out any data points as
“outliers”. I used the same technique (linear regression) with the
same data set used by the researchers, and I reached the opposite
conclusion with a p-value that’s 5 times more significant. It took me
less than two hours.
That’s the power of multiplicity – it can “prove” any hypothesis you throw at it, and the opposite of that hypothesis as well.
A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek
mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in
the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, after which
they decided the planet was unsuitable for their needs and disappeared.
The only clue to their existence were the children they had with local
women.
The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was led by a
group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890
and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb
creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene
Wigner, and legendary polymath John von Neumann, namesake of the List Of
Things Named After John Von Neumann.
Here’s something interesting: every single person I mentioned above is
of Jewish descent. Every single one.
Due to persecution, Jews were pushed into cognitively-demanding
occupations like banker or merchant and forced to sink or swim. The ones
who swam – people who were intellectually up to the challenge – had more
kids than the ones who sank, producing an evolutionary pressure in favor
of intelligence greater than that in any other ethnic group. Just as
Africans experiencing evolutionary pressure for malaria resistance
developed the sickle cell gene, so Ashkenazim experiencing evolutionary
pressure for intelligence developed a bunch of genes which increased
heterozygotes’ IQ but caused serious genetic disease in homozygotes.
For centuries, Europe was sitting on this vast untapped resource of
potential geniuses. Around 1880, in a few countries only, economic and
political conditions finally became ripe for the potential to be
realized. The result was one of the greatest spurts of progress in
scientific history, bringing us relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear
bombs, dazzling new mathematical systems, the foundations of digital
computing, and various other abstruse ideas I don’t even pretend to
understand. This lasted for approximately one generation, after which a
psychopath with a stupid mustache killed everyone involved.
Some of Riches' defendants are not even persons subject to suit. These include “Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party” and the “13 tribes of Israel."[22] One lawsuit, which includes George Bush, also includes another 783 defendants that cover 57 pages. They include Plato, Nostradamus, Che Guevara, James Hoffa, “Various Buddhist Monks,” all survivors of the Holocaust, the Lincoln Memorial, the Eiffel Tower, the USS Cole, the book Mein Kampf, the Garden of Eden, the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the Appalachian Trail, Plymouth Rock, the Holy Grail, Nordic gods, the dwarf planet Pluto, and the entire Three Mile Island.[