Links Archive
(Links, Notes, Upcoming, OneTab, Starred, Add, Admin, Logout)
- "Travels with John Conway, in 258 Septillion Dimensions" [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Show HN: Hacker News Dark Mode [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Coronavirus: A third of hospital patients develop dangerous blood clots [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Shibuya Pixel Art 2020 [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Modern C++ gamedev: thoughts and misconceptions [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Macropy: Syntactic Macros for Python [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Quiz: Who Said It? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Quizzes [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- From Lockdown to Liberty [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Is the coronavirus making UBI look better? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- On the all too frequent split between theory and practice [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- What is the FDA Doing Now??! [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- The F.D.A. halts a virus testing program backed by Bill Gates [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Small steps toward a much better world [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- How to think about uni-disciplinary advice [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Request for requests [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Non-monetary demand shocks are a “barbarous relic” [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Some data on active caseloads [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Links 5/15/20 [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- "Yes, Trump Has a Plan to Deal with COVID-19" [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Links 5/14/20 [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- "MiB: Henry Cornell, Cornell Capital" [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Succinct Summation of Week’s Events 5.15.20 [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Distressed Assets: 2010 versus 2020 [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- 1939 Buick Roadmaster Phaeton Convertible 81-C [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- John Oliver on the USPS [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Links 5/16/2020 [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- "Because Culture Matters, There Is No One-Size-Fits-All Exit Strategy from Covid-19 Lockdowns" [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Coronavirus Dashboard: Updating the State Petri Dishes of Democracy [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- 2:00PM Water Cooler 5/15/2020 [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Contact Tracing Via Old Shoe-Leather Epidemiology While Spurning the Techno-Fix Fairy: How Hong Kong Quells COVID-19 Without Killing Civil Liberties [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Links 5/15/2020 [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Wall Street’s Useful Idiot: Financial Times Shills for CLOs….as Fed Hasn’t Bailed Them Out [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- "Reminder: When the Very Very Rich Are Done With Us, They Plan to Leave Us Behind" [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- America’s Chilling Experiment in Human Sacrifice [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- An industry and occupation perspective on the effects of COVID-19 [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Moving the goalposts on lockdown end dates can affect compliance [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- The need to issue long-dated gilts [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Culture and lockdown exit strategies [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Health and economic objectives are not mutually exclusive [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Covid social distancing is driven mostly by voluntary demobilisation [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- The labour market policy response to COVID-19 must leverage the power of age [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Corona policy according to HANK [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Consumer responses to the COVID-19 crisis [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- I stopped judging panic shoppers. My grocery list reveals uncomfortable truths about my own life. [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- "When my boyfriend would make sous vide ribs and soufflé, I thought he was just showing off. Now, in lockdown, I see it’s how he cares for me." [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- NO WAR BUT PATENT WAR [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- COVID-19 and the Need for Unions [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Outflanked XV: the Hoover Outflankening [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Gaming out future SCOTUS nominations [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- The Beaches of COVID [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- And we couldn’t do nothin’ about it [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- The Fact That Presidents Are “Undermined” By Scandals Does Not Make Congressional Oversight Unconstitutional [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Has the Roberts Court Finally Met An Attempt to Undermine Democracy It Doesn’t Like? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Who goes Nazi? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- How Investors Can Navigate Pandemic-Related Risk in Emerging Markets [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Develop Agility That Outlasts the Pandemic [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- 5 Tips to Reduce Screen Time While You’re WFH [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- The Key to Successful Succession Planning for Family Businesses [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Unlock the Hidden Value of Your Data [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Rescuing Scientific Innovation from Corporate Bureaucracy [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Plague-proof the U.S. with nursing home and hotel pairings? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Only about 1.7 percent of Danes had Covid-19 antibodies back in April [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- "Tele-primary care costs during the Coronapanic: $1,220 per hour" [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Use testing and tracing infrastructure to enforce alcohol Prohibition? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Aliens Exist? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Unmasking? The Real Story Is When Flynn Was <i>Not</i> Masked in the First Place [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- What to Read to Your Kids During the Pandemic [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- "How Artists, and Doctors, See Patients" [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Antifa: The Video Game [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Raiding the Art Vault to Cover Museum Budget Holes [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- House Passes $3 Trillion Coronavirus Relief Bill [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- A Hit and Run Damages Diplomacy [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- "DOJ, State AGs to Sue Google for Antitrust Violations: Report" [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- "Governors, Use the CARES Act for Transformational Education Reform" [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- "Colorado State Health Dept. Classified Man Who Died of Alcohol Poisoning as Covid Death, Coroner Claims" [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Our Nevermind Media [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Public Choice and the Pandemic [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- "A New, Better Normal in Health Care?" [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- The Supreme Court Should Not Rewrite Title VII [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Jerry Nadler Says House Judiciary Will Hold Hearings on DOJ Decision to Drop Flynn Case [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- The Cockamamie Blackmail Theory of the Flynn Case [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- "China Threatens to Place Apple, Boeing, and Other U.S. Firms on ‘Unreliable Entities’ List" [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Hungarian P.M. Orban Announces He Will Return His Emergency Powers ‘At the End of May’ [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- The Libertarian Case for Masks [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- How Have Fox and CNN Differed in their Coronavirus Responses? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Understanding Conditional Variational Autoencoders [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Do my Repeat Customers Tend to Spend More on Their 2nd Purchase? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- A common man’s guide to MAE and RMSE [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Is Normal Distribution Necessary in Regression? How to track and fix it? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Time Series Analysis: Creating Synthetic Datasets [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- How To Avoid Writing Sloppy SQL [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Natural Language Processing Pipeline Decoded! [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Turkish Phonetics: A Quick Intro [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Towards a Better Urbanism [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Tara Reade’s Dubious Claims and Shifting Stories Show the Limits of #BelieveWomen [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- PODCAST 90: John Lloyd on the Geopolitical Fall-Out From the Coronavirus Crisis [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Life With the Muslim Brotherhood: One Woman’s Story [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Wall Street Heavyweights Are Sounding Alarm about Stock Prices [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Those litigious men in their flying machines [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Iterated Prisoners Dilemma Strategies Dominate Any Evolutionary Opponent (2012) [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- How I Used Machine Learning and Smartwatches to Track Weightlifting Activity [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- How Etsy became America’s unlikeliest breadbasket [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Bad Washington Post Story on Apple and Google's Exposure Notification Project [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Ask HN: What are some hard-tech blogs that you follow? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Learn Go: 1000 handcrafted Go exercises and examples [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- "Nearly 40% of Icelanders are using a Covid app, but it hasn’t helped much" [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Designing the Nteract Data Explorer [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Twitter Deletes Tweet about Censorship on Twitter After Retweet by President [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- What every software engineer should know about Apache Kafka [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Against Set Theory (2005) [pdf] [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Serve Videos Instead of GIFs [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Show HN: Hacker Feud [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Getting Started with Rust by Building a Tiny Markdown Compiler [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Show HN: A GitOps development environment in the comfort of your own localhost [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Common origin of Fermi bubbles and galactic center X-ray outflows shown [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Low-cost passive microwave spectral imaging of radio wave sources [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth (2015) [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Common *nix commands written in Rust [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- How to confuse Rip van Winkle from 2008 [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Links 5/16/20 [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- In Memoriam [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- A Dutchman and his (man-made) mountain [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Facing Freedom [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- A Product Manager’s Guide to Machine Learning: Balanced Scorecard [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Space Science with Python — The Origin of Comets [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Fraud Detection in Healthcare [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Cognitive Biases Facing Data Scientists [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Why Data Science might just not be worth it [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- PCA in a single line of code. [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- How Many Industries are There? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Fascinating Origins of Python Package Names [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Distributed Birding [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- ChromeGalvanizer – Harden your browser against extension backdoors and exploits [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Accelerated discovery of CO2 electrocatalysts using active machine learning [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Web Scraping — Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Kafka Removing Zookeeper Dependency [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Turf war: Detroit Mower Gang competes in 12-hour playground cleanup [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Show HN: XP.css – Windows XP CSS file and framework for building GUIs [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- State of Loom [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Ask HN: What is the best way to target restaurants and small businesses? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- AWS VPC design studio with best practices default [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Just Room Enough Island [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- No One Goes There Anymore [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- The Cannonball Run record has been broken seven times in five weeks [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Democratic tipping points [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- COVID-19 restrictions hit sea transportation [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- The effect of unequal voting rights on policies [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Drastic Makeover Looms for S&P 500 [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Game of Life in one Ruby statement inspired by APL [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Legendary Paris bookshop reveals reading habits of illustrious clientele [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Show HN: Visual Brainfuck Interpreter [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- "Show HN: Hacker Spring – Instant blog by email, no signup required" [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Ask HN: What PostgreSQL client do you use? [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Democratizing image classification [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Return to ‘The Unheavenly City’ [Nan]: NaN ('19 Dec 31Added Tue 2019-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin NaN | a)
- Remembering Priscilla Cohn’s work for wild animals [Animal-ethics]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin animals | a)
- "80,000 Hours: Mistakes people make when deciding what work to do" [EA Forum]: "Doing something that they don’t enjoy at all, not focusing on becoming really good at something, following the paths of similar people, not thinking about roles that don’t exist yet, working on the most interesting puzzles, not thinking enough about developing skills, not spreading out among many different fields, assuming direct work is best, valuing breadth over depth, thinking that their cause is “the one true cause”" ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin career | a)
- Amazon is about to host a homeless shelter in its Seattle headquarters [Businessinsider]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin news | a)
- My 2018 donations [BenKuhn]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin giving | a)
- 8 things I believe about climate change [EA Forum]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- The best New Year’s Resolution I ever made [Socialproblemsarelikemaths.wordpress]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- A Discussion of the Wealth Tax [Gregmankiw.blogspot]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- "The Meaning of Generations of Winter, by Bryan Caplan" [Econlib]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- But Have They Engaged with the Arguments? [Philiptrammell]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- 2010s Predictions Review [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Propagating Facts into Aesthetics [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- "Squoosh: Make images smaller using best-in-class codecs, right in the browser" [Squoosh.app]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Meditation Retreat: Immoral Mazes Sequence Introduction [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Introduction to moral uncertainty [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- The Private and External Costs of Germany's Nuclear Phase-Out [Nber]: "Many countries have phased out nuclear electricity production in response to concerns about nuclear waste and the risk of nuclear accidents. This paper examines the impact of the shutdown of roughly half of the nuclear production capacity in Germany after the Fukushima accident in 2011. [...] We find that the lost nuclear electricity production due to the phase-out was replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately 12 billion dollars per year. Over 70% of this cost comes from the increased mortality risk associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Ask HN: What are your best shell scripts that you use? [News.ycombinator]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- One for All and All for One [Qualiacomputing]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- The Four-Inch Flight – A Lesson from History [Rs-online]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Folding Couch Monitor [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Police Departments Are Using Swatting Registries to Protect Swatting Targets [Techdirt]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- [Link] Moloch Hasn’t Won (Zvi) [EA Forum]: "The world is filled with people whose lives have value and include nice things. Each day we look Moloch in the face, know exactly what the local personal incentives are, see the ancient doom looming over all of us, and say what we say to the God of Death: Not today." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Improving Pest Management for Wild Insect Welfare [EA Forum]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin animals | a)
- l [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Rohin Shah on reasons for AI optimism [Aiimpacts]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Can You Call it Meat? [Jaysonlusk]: "The counter response is that people might associate words like “beef”, "meat”, or “milk” with other product attributes such as nutritional content, which might (sometimes inappropriately) carry over to the plant- or lab-based products. Nutritional facts panels may serve to mitigate some of these concerns, but there is little doubt that labels create various taste and health halos that extend beyond the objective facts. At the same time, words are needed to convey meaning to consumers beyond just animal content. Using the word ground “meat” tells me something about how the food is expected to be cooked and served and which condiments are appropriate. In this instance, using “meat” with “plant-based” is helpful to the consumer insofar as quickly conveying key information about how the product is to be cooked and consumed. Thus, there are pros and cons and costs and benefits to these types of labeling laws." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin animals | a)
- The Immortal Game [En.wikipedia]: "The Immortal Game was a chess game played by Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky on 21 June 1851 in London, during a break of the first international tournament. The bold sacrifices made by Anderssen to secure victory have made it one of the most famous chess games of all time. Anderssen gave up both rooks and a bishop, then his queen, checkmating his opponent with his three remaining minor pieces. In 1996, Bill Hartston called the game an achievement "perhaps unparalleled in chess literature"." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Conversation with Adam Gleave [Aiimpacts]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin career | a)
- An Emergency Fund for Effective Altruists [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin giving | a)
- The unreasonable effectiveness of one-on-ones [BenKuhn]: "1-1s can dramatically improve the productivity of the employee by helping them build stronger habits and self-improve, understand failures, improve communication, align on goals, and resolve uncertainties. It helps to really care a lot about the employee." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Any intelligent person will ask themselves a simple question: Should I pay... [Reddit]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- Which Harvard students are least comfortable expressing their opinions? [Gregmankiw.blogspot]: "Harvard recently released the results of a survey on "Inclusion and Belonging." One question asked students whether they agreed with the statement "I feel comfortable expressing my opinions to others at Harvard." Overall, 68 percent of students agreed. Moreover, the statement received majority agreement for most subgroups--men and women; white, black, Hispanic, and Asian; straight and gay; U.S. citizen and foreign; Christian, Jewish, and Muslim; and so on. The only subgroup for which the statement did not generate majority agreement was those students who self-identified as conservative." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Imperfect Competition [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin economics | a)
- Microsoft Japan’s 4-day workweek experiment sees productivity jump 40% [Cnbc]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- NPR on The Pigou Club [Gregmankiw.blogspot]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin economics | a)
- Gears-Level Models are Capital Investments [LessWrong]: "Building gears-level models [a.k.a. building fundamental understanding about a topic] is expensive - often prohibitively expensive. Black-box approaches [a.k.a. generating predictions without generating understanding, e.g., A-B testing] are usually much cheaper and faster. But black-box approaches rarely generalize - they’re subject to Goodhart [a.k.a. gaming metrics], need to be rebuilt when conditions change, don’t identify unknown unknowns, and are hard to build on top of. Gears-level models, on the other hand, offer permanent, generalizable knowledge which can be applied to many problems in the future, even if conditions shift." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- UML (IV): Linear Predictors [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin datascience | a)
- How to dramatically reduce gun violence in American cities [Vox]: "Policing strategies like stop-and-frisk harass a lot of innocent people and breed resentment. But community policing can work. "In Bleeding Out, Abt argues that law enforcement and other government agencies can address these problems by focusing on three elements: focus, balance, and fairness. Police, other officials, and community leaders should focus on the few individuals who commit and are victim to the great majority of local violence, balancing the threat of punishment with offers of help. To give the process a sense of fairness, officials should communicate clearly and transparently, bringing in the community to provide feedback and accountability. There’s real-world evidence that this could work." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Research says there are ways to reduce racial bias. Calling people racist isn’t one of them. [Vox]: "In talking with researchers and looking at the studies on this in 2016, I found that it is possible to reduce people’s racial anxiety and prejudices. And the canvassing idea was regarded as very promising. But, researchers cautioned, the process of reducing people’s racism will take time and, crucially, empathy. [...] It’s the direct opposite of the kind of culture the internet has fostered — typically focused on calling out racists and shaming them in public. This doesn’t work. And as much as it might seem like a lost cause to understand the perspectives of people who may qualify as racist, understanding where they come from is a needed step to being able to speak to them in a way that will help reduce the racial biases they hold." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- I was skeptical of unions. Then I joined one. [Vox]: "I thought unions could be good for some workplaces but others were good enough without unions and so they should be avoided. I was wrong. We need more unions everywhere." Unions help balance out workplaces and address income and wealth inequality. "[A]as I dug deeper and deeper into the research, and as I engaged in the actual organizing and bargaining processes, I was repeatedly proven wrong, in large part because I initially focused way too much on the bad examples of unions instead of the good ones. When you stack up all the research and look at the broader picture, though, the net effect of unions — bad examples included — is good for the typical worker." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- The Market for Lemons [En.wikipedia]: "[T]he quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only 'lemons' behind." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin economics | a)
- We only hire the trendiest [Danluu]: "Software companies are biased toward hiring people with "trendy" experience, rather than what works. However, many of these companies can't afford to hire the best trendy people, so they lose out. Instead, it would be better to play moneyball and deliberately hire underrated devs, of which there are a myriad. Additionally, investments in setting up existing hires for success through superior process, tools, and culture, could provide superior returns over hiring better people." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- "If you're feeling sad or anxious, try the wise woman exercise" [Deliberatehappiness]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Leave No American Uninsured [Dataforprogress]: "In Medicare for All polling, people prefer a public option because they like being able to keep private health care and not raise taxes. They like Medicare for All because they want all Americans to be insured, to keep cost increases under control, and to avoid the limitations of insurance networks." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- "Emotional CPR: cognitive, physiological, and resets" [Deliberatehappiness]: "When you’re feeling anxious, upset, angry, or otherwise in a bad emotional state, a good general approach to fix it, in escalating levels of time and probability of success, is to do emotional CPR. CPR stands for cognitive, physiological, and reset. Cognitive refers to cognitive approaches [...t]hese involve things like: Challenging distorted thoughts, Reframing the situation [...] If those don’t work, changing your physiology will often do the trick. [...] This can be things like: Doing a quick bout of exercise, Splashing your face with cold water, Taking a walk outside, Having an espresso [...] Lastly, if none of those work, you can do what I call a hard emotional reset. [...] Some examples might be: Getting a bag of popcorn and some hot chocolate, watching your favorite comedy, ideally with a partner or close friend, then playing a fun board game with them; Going out to a party and drinking and dancing; Going out to a park or the woods with a book and hiking, reading, and meditating in nature." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Trump Got His Wall After All [Huffpost]: "In the two years and 308 days that Donald Trump has been president, he has constructed zero miles of wall along the southern border of the United States. [...] And it doesn’t matter. [...]his administration has constructed far more effective barriers to immigration. No new laws have actually been passed. This transformation has mostly come about through subtle administrative shifts—a phrase that vanishes from an internal manual, a form that gets longer, an unannounced revision to a website, a memo, a footnote in a memo. [...] In the two years after Trump took office, denials for H1Bs, the most common form of visa for skilled workers, more than doubled. In the same period, wait times for citizenship also doubled[...] In 2018, the United States added just 200,000 immigrants to the population, a startling 70 percent less than the year before." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- How the 2010s changed interior design [Curbed]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- The Hidden Meanings Behind 15 Company Names [Getpocket]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- 2019 in Review: 10 AI Failures [Medium]: "This is the third Synced year-end compilation of “Artificial Intelligence Failures.” Despite AI’s rapid growth and remarkable achievements, a review of AI failures remains necessary and meaningful. Our aim is not to downplay or mock research and development results, but rather to take a look at what went wrong with the hope we can do better next time." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Top 5 Epic Artificial Intelligence Fails [Analyticsindiamag]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Three Things to Unlearn from School [Casnocha]: "(1) The importance of opinion ("Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge; it requires no accountability, no understanding."); (2) The importance of solving given problems. ("Schools teach us to be clever, great problem solvers, but not to include ourselves in the problem that’s being solved."); (3) The importance of earning the approval of others ("First seek people, work for people who don’t have to like you, people who can easily disapprove of you, people that you can’t easily please. Their skepticism or indifference will define you. Second, if you don’t how to do so already, begin working for yourself, and let the teachers be damned.")" ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Two More Things to Unlearn from School [LessWrong]: "I suspect the most dangerous habit of thought taught in schools is that even if you don't really understand something, you should parrot it back anyway. One of the most fundamental life skills is realizing when you are confused, and school actively destroys this ability - teaches students that they "understand" when they can successfully answer questions on an exam, which is very very very far from absorbing the knowledge and making it a part of you." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- 7 worst international aid ideas [Matadornetwork]: "(1) One million t-shirts for Africa (it isn't actually needed and dramatically distorts the local economy), (2) TOMS Buy-One-Give-One (see #1), (3) Machine gun preacher (similar to #1 and #2 - it acts outside the local institutions that require support as vigilante justice is not usually helpful in the long-run), (4) 50 Cent ransoming children in Somalia (if you have money to give, no need to make some lame publicity campaign about it), (5) Donor fund restrictions (see #7), (6) Making food aid the same colour as cluster munitions, and (7) Making USAID a foreign policy tool." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin development | a)
- "Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, Book Summary" [Medium]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Randomize HN [Danluu]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin math | a)
- Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years [Norvig]: "Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. [...] The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about programming, or that programming is somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. [...] In 24 hours you won't have time to write several significant programs, and learn from your successes and failures with them." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Prepare to Be Shocked! [Slate]: "You’ve seen them. Peeking out from sidebars, jiggling and wiggling for your attention, popping up where you most expect them: those 'One Weird Trick' ads. These crudely drawn Web advertisements promise easy tricks to reduce your belly fat, learn a new language, and boost your credit score by 217 points. They seem like obvious scams, but part of me has always wanted to follow the link. What, I wonder, makes the tricks so weird? How come only one trick (or sometimes 'tip'), never more? Why are the illustrations done by small children using MS Paint? [...] Thankfully, Slate has allowed me to slake my curiosity, and yours. They gave me a loaner laptop, a prepaid debit card, and a quest: to investigate these weird tricks and report back to you." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Does the Left Have Any Better Ideas Than Obama’s? [Nymag]: "There are surely cautionary tales to be drawn from Obama’s experience. But in its haste to bury both Obama and liberalism, TNR’s authors downplay the scope of his success. (While understandably short of comprehensive, their assessment completely omits such enormous reforms as the bank rescue, auto bailout, green-energy subsidies, energy-efficiency and pollution regulations, DACA, the Iran nuclear deal, the Cuba opening, and ending the ban on gays in the military.) Most important, they barely acknowledge, and utterly refuse to grapple with, the barriers Obama and his allies had to overcome." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Anonymous benchmark markets [Danluu]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- E-Cigarettes and Adult Smoking: Evidence from Minnesota [Nber]: "We provide some of the first evidence on how e-cigarette taxes impact adult smokers, exploiting the large tax increase in Minnesota. That state was the first to impose a tax on e-cigarettes by extending the definition of tobacco products to include e-cigarettes. This tax, which is 95% of the wholesale price, provides a plausibly exogenous deterrent to e-cigarette use. We utilize data from the Current Population Survey Tobacco Use Supplements from 1992 to 2015, in conjunction with a synthetic control difference-in-differences approach. [...] Our results suggest that in the sample period about 32,400 additional adult smokers would have quit smoking in Minnesota in the absence of the tax. If this tax were imposed on a national level about 1.8 million smokers would be deterred from quitting in a ten year period." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Reinforcement Learning Progress [Blog.samaltman]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- E Pur Si Muove [Blog.samaltman]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- The Merge [Blog.samaltman]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- American Equity [Blog.samaltman]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- The United Slate [Blog.samaltman]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Quora [Blog.samaltman]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Tech Worker's Values [Blog.samaltman]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Time to Take a Stand [Blog.samaltman]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- The 2016 Election [Blog.samaltman]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Don't Read the Comments [Blog.samaltman]: "A friend of mine likes to say "there are two kinds of people in the world--the people that build the future, and the people who write posts on the internet about why they'll fail". Keep trying to be in former category." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin entrepreneurship | a)
- Trump [Blog.samaltman]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Housing in the Bay Area [Blog.samaltman]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Cruise [Blog.samaltman]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- Before Growth [Blog.samaltman]: "In the first few weeks of a startup’s life, the founders really need to figure out what they’re doing and why. Then they need to build a product some users really love. Only after that they should focus on growth above all else." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin entrepreneurship | a)
- More interesting dinner conversations [Blog.samaltman]: "When seated at a table with people you don't know, ask "what are you interested in?" or "what have you been thinking about lately?" instead of "what do you do?"." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Successful People [Blog.samaltman]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Aliens [Blog.samaltman]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- The battle to save America’s undercover spies in the digital age [News.yahoo]: NaN ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- 90% of the battle is won when we solve the XY Problem in Product Management [Medium]: "XY Problem is about having X problem but asked help for Y instead. Usually, because he/she thinks that Y will solve X. This usually leads to wasted time and effort." ('19 Dec 30Added Mon 2019-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Programmers Should Plan for Lower Pay [Jefftk]: "[W]e don't understand why programmers are paid so well. If you're a programmer, there's enough of a chance that this is temporary that it's worth explicitly planning for a future in which you're laid off and unable to find similarly high-paying work." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin career | a)
- 12 Habits That Changed My Life [Youtube]: "One year series of 30 day challenges to build new habits. Lessons learned: (1) Just get started; (2) it is very difficult to successfully layer multiple difficult habits, so ditch habits that don't work; (3) what works well for others won't work for you; (4) experimentation can be helpful; (5) embracing discomfort can be helpful; (6) don't be too hard on yourself." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- How the Fed Lost Its Faith in ‘Full Employment’ [NYTimes]: "Federal Reserve officials believed that the labor market was about as good as it could get. They were wrong." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin economics | a)
- Meta-Scams [Gwern.net]: "We are looking at a meta scam: the scam is that you think it’s a scam that you can scam, but you get scammed as you try to scam the scam" ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- "Check Your Amnesia, Dude: On the Vox Generation of Punditry" [Crookedtimber]: "Sure Trump sounds bad, but he also sounds similar to Reagan and Nixon and less scary than Barry Goldwater, and we survived all of those." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Everyone Sucks at Interviewing [Humbledmba]: "Rather than interview people, have them do a project with you." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia [Arstechnica]: The untold story of the rescue mission that could have been NASA's finest hour ...except it was very unlikely to succeed. ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- President Obama in Conversation With MIT’s Joi Ito and WIRED’s Scott Dadich [Wired]: "Obama talks about his approach to risks from AI, pandemics, and global warming." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- I created my own deepfake—it took two weeks and cost $552 [Arstechnica]: "Deepfake technology uses deep neural networks to convincingly replace one face with another in a video. The technology has obvious potential for abuse and is becoming ever more widely accessible. Many good articles have been written about the important social and political implications of this trend. This isn't one of those articles. Instead, in classic Ars Technica fashion, I'm going to take a close look at the technology itself: how does deepfake software work? How hard is it to use—and how good are the results?" ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Humans are Adorable [Reddit]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- What Google’s TPUs Mean for AI Timing and Safety [Conceptspacecartography]: "If your estimate of when there will be human-comparable or superintelligent AGI was based on the very high rate of progress in the past year, then this should make you expect AGI to arrive later, because it explains some of that progress with a one-time gain that can’t be repeated. If your timeline estimate was based on extrapolating Moore’s Law or the rate of progress excluding the past year, then this should make you expect AGI to arrive sooner." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Who Will Debunk The Debunkers? [538]: "There are many meta-myths about myths themselves that we also need to watch out for and be meta-sketpical. "It seems plausible that the tellers of these tales are getting blinkered by their own feelings of superiority — that the mere act of busting myths makes them more susceptible to spreading them." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Q: What are “actual pictures” of atoms actually pictures of? [Ask A Mathematician]: "Light can't be used to photograph an atom because the wavelength of light is longer than the size of the atom. Instead, a scanning electron microscope is "a needle with a point that is a single atom (literally, it is the pointiest thing possible) which it uses to measure subtle electrical variations (such as a stray atom sitting on what was otherwise a very flat, clean surface). The 'Tunneling Electron' bit of the name refers to the nature of the electrical interaction being used to detect the presence of atoms; when the tip is brought close to an atom electrons will quantum tunnel between them and the exchange of electrons is a detectable as a current. The 'Scanning' bit of the name refers to how this is used to generate a picture: by scanning back and forth across a surface over and over until you’ve bumped every atom with your needle several times. The pictures so generated aren’t photographs, they’re maps of what the STM’s needle experienced as it was moved over the surface. The STM 'sees' atoms using this needle in the same way you can 'see' the bottom of a muddy river with a pokin’ stick." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- "Say These 9 Words, and We’ll Tell You Where You Grew Up" [Rd]: "If said a certain way, these words and phrases are a dead giveaway to where you’re from." Fireflies vs. lightning bugs, garage sale vs. yard sale vs. rummage sale vs. tag sale, you guys vs. y'all,soda vs. pop vs. coke,garbage can vs. trash can,drinking fountain vs. water fountain vs. bubbler,tennis shoes vs. gym shoes vs. sneakers," ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- Cory Booker Just Went All-In Against Factory Farming and the Meat Industry [Mothe Rjones]: "As his presidential bid struggles to gain traction, Sen. Cory Booker (D.-N.J.) is out with a bold new bill, introduced Dec. 16, that proposes a serious crackdown on two powerful industries: meat and dairy." (Warren, Sanders, and Castro now support similar plans.)" ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Having Kids [Paulgraham]: "When people had babies, I congratulated them enthusiastically, because that seemed to be what one did. But I didn't feel it at all. 'Better you than me,' I was thinking. Now when people have babies I congratulate them enthusiastically and I mean it. Especially the first one. I feel like they just got the best gift in the world. What changed, of course, is that I had kids. Something I dreaded turned out to be wonderful." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Miscellaneous unsolicited (and possibly biased) career advice [Erikbern]: "Pick the fastest growing company you can find. Focus on human capital over financial capital early on. Seek out people you can learn from. Consider an industry where there aren't that many smart people. Change jobs when you're no longer learning. Do a lot of internships. Prioritize credentialism based on the cost-benefit. Read all the time. You probably won't learn something if you don't enjoy the process of learning it. Don't forget to also learn communication, sales, self-sufficiently, and statistics." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin career | a)
- My Personal Reactions to Confrontational Animal Activism [Reducing-suffering]: "Animal activists, and most reformers throughout history, have debated whether to make their case in a professional, moderate manner or whether to protest more confrontationally. This is a difficult issue, and given the persistence of the question, there probably aren't easy answers. In this piece, I share my personal reactions to aggressive activism, as one anecdotal data point to inform the broader discussion. While I personally am turned away by confrontation, the historical record may point in a different direction, so I maintain agnosticism about how activists can make the biggest difference." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin activism | a)
- "Headcount goals, feature factories, and when to hire those mythical 10x people" [Erikbern]: "We talked a lot about the difference between engineers in terms of productivity vs cost and how to get the most value of them. The good news is that there’s really only two things that it boils down to: Have a centralized recruiting process with a consistent high bar [and r]educe the task overhead to a minimum. If you don’t have those things, there’s no point trying to hire super senior people: and in particular you are probably better off hiring average engineers." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Cultural over/under-fitting and transfer learning. Or why the “Netflix Culture” won’t work in your company. [Towardsdatascience]: "It's hard to apply culture from other companies to your company because you rarely get the full story, other factors are different, and because of mere survivorship bias. Some generalizable lessons though: recruiting and hiring is the most important thing; regular 1-1s are important; different cultures can be successful but you do need a strong, clearly articulable culture; a good culture emphasizes psychological safety and allows for diversity of people and ways of doing things; don't write down your company culture until you had at least 20 employees; DRIs (Directly Responsible Individuals) and OKRs (Objectives + Key Results) are useful; and give thought to how processes will work." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- The Importance of One-on-Ones [Css-tricks]: "1:1's should be conducted in a space with the smallest amount of distractions possible. The purpose is to make the other person feel valuable and connected. It's important to actually make connections - find opportunities across employees. 1:1s are more for employees than managers, as while the manager can always speak directly to the employee, the inverse isn’t always true. You do need an agenda. 1:1's help reduce uncertainty. It can be good to help the employee prioritize, make action items, and clarify vision." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- The St. Petersburg “paradox” [BenKuhn]: "I suspect that finance companies ask this question to weed out the mathematician’s tendency to favor the elegant and legible over the intuitive and practical. If you ignore the intuitive ridiculousness (“what? nothing is infinity dollars!”), bite the bullet and say you would never take the gamble, you’ll leave a lot of money on the table—and conversely, if you’re willing to pay any price to take it from someone else, they’ll take you for a ride. So beware bad models, even the elegant ones!" ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Watchmen trilemma [Flightfromperfection]: "At the climax of Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan mediates the conflict between Rorschach & Veidt. In symbolic terms, the Transcendent occupies a middle position between Philosopher & Antiphilosopher. At first, Manhattan seems to side with Veidt. He kills Rorschach, keeping Veidt's secret plan secret (thus preserving its efficacy). But Dr. Manhattan isn't on Veidt's side. Sure, it's better for Veidt's plan to come off, but not on the grand scale that Veidt was imagining. The Philosopher-King's plan had become his life, his whole identity wrapped up in it. Who is he, if not the savior of the world? From the transcendent point of view, the world can't be saved. Matter will continue to combine & break apart, creating new forms & destroying them. If humanity were wiped out by nuclear holocaust, things would still keep happening. Matter can't be destroyed. This is a scary point of view. It's cold, detached, inhuman. Yet it's probably the most clear-seeing of the three." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- Not all deaths are equal: How many deaths make a natural disaster newsworthy? [Ourworldindata]: "The prominence of disaster coverage varies by the type of disaster, the number of deaths, and the location. "According to the researchers’ estimates, 45 times as many people would have to die in an African disaster for it to garner the same media attention as a European one. The two visualizations show the extent of this bias. ABC News’s slogan is “See the whole picture” and CNN’s is “Go there”, but good follow-up questions might be: what exactly, and where?" ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin development | a)
- Outrun Yourself [Medium]: "We’ve all been dealt different hands and therefore the amazingness of any particular accomplishment is different for all of us as well. If you set a new PR (personal record) for yourself, you should be celebrating, whether that was for a 15 minute mile or a 4:30 minute mile. If you just went further than you’ve ever gone before, no matter the distance, that’s amazing too! If you just got out there and ran today at all and that’s a win for you, celebrate it. I only hope that my accomplishments (or failures) never discourage you because my challenges are not your challenges and I want to celebrate your wins with you. Don’t worry about outrunning anyone but yourself." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Introduction to moral uncertainty [EA Forum]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- HN: the good parts [Danluu]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- "The Man Who Reads 1,000 Articles a Day" [Superorganizers.substack]: Read a lot. Try to find writing that would still be valuable a year later. Feeds are helpful. Ruthlessly triage the feeds. Put a lot of trust in headlines. Good writing comes from good writers. The best articles start well. You can consider building an AI to read even more articles. Writing preferences will vary a lot based on personal taste. ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Is it ethical to use Amazon? [Current Affairs]: "I have no good answers to the Amazon problem, because I hold two beliefs that contradict each other and I haven’t found a way to reconcile them: (1) what’s wrong is not the act of purchasing from Amazon, but what Amazon does to its employees, and since there would be nothing wrong with purchasing from Amazon if it was, say, a worker cooperative, the demand should be “democratize it” rather than “stop using it.” (2) You shouldn’t buy from companies with highly unethical business practices, such as staying in a hotel that fired striking workers, or buying slave-made goods. I wrestle with this constantly, because Amazon is very difficult to avoid[. ...] Nobody wants to be complicit in evil, but we’re all complicit in some evil, so what are our responsibilities as individuals? Are these even the right questions?" ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- "How to know and do what you actually want, not just what you think others want" [Deliberatehappiness]: "[I]t’s fine to try to make others like you. It’s just that it’s better to do it consciously. [...] If you think about pleasing people as one of your goals and pursue it on purpose, you can find paths that lead to a helluva lot more flourishing than bumbling about with your eyes closed and hoping for the best. The main method I’ve seen work for this is to do what you enjoy then find people who like and respect you for doing those things. [...] One tool I like is to imagine a scenario where nobody will ever know that you did it. [...] Do you still do it? A common example is reading the classics. If nobody ever knew you did it, would you really read Shakespeare, written in such a different English that each sentence takes forever to parse? Or would you watch an amazing drama on Netflix? Sure, Shakespeare makes timeless commentary on the human experience, but so does Game of Thrones" ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- "If you're a people-pleaser, try asking this question" [Deliberatehappiness]: "When I’m in a social situation, I ask myself this question, “How do I make this interaction awesome for them and me.” Not how do I make them happy. Not how do I enjoy this situation. How do we both enjoy it. This has fantastic results, because you aren’t giving too much of yourself away. [...] See how it transforms people-pleasing into creating a shared joy." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- You can ignore some of your goals if they are a byproduct of one of your other goals [Deliberatehappiness]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- How to be ambitious without feeling inadequate - opticontentment [Deliberatehappiness]: "Opticontentment is a term I coined because I couldn’t find a word for it in the English language. It’s a portmanteau of the words “optimizing” and “contentment” because it fuses the two concepts. It means to be optimizing, trying to improve and grow, while at the same time being content and happy with where you’re currently at. It could be characterised as replacing the sentence, “My life is good, but it could get better” with, “My life is good, and it can get even better”. What this looks like is a deep gratitude for what you’ve already done, for who you are, and wanting to do even more." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- How to actually change your thought patterns and reduce distorted beliefs [Deliberatehappiness]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Two questions that help defuse negative emotions [Deliberatehappiness]: "When you have an emotion, first ask if it’s valid, then ask if it’s proportionate." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- How to maintain long distance friendships instead of losing touch [Deliberatehappiness]: Regular Skypes that are scheduled in advance. IM or text a lot. Encourage spontaneous calls. ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- What is Productivity Guilt? (And How Can You Prevent It?) [Getpocket]: "Pushing yourself to be productive is good, being hard on yourself for not meeting every possible goal isn’t. You can't implement and simultaneously maintain all the advice, even if it is highly worthy of implementation. It's better to think incrementally and ask "How could I do things a little differently than last time for a little better results?" Try only working on 1-2 goals at a time. Stop comparing yourself to other people. Separate the nice-to-have from the essential." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- The Comment Policy is Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite [SlateStarCodex]: "If you make a comment here, it had better be either true and necessary, true and kind, or kind and necessary. Recognizing that nobody can be totally sure what is or isn’t true, if you want to say something that might not be true[...] Nobody can be kind all the time, but if you are going to be angry or sarcastic, what you say had better be both true and necessary. You had better be delivering a very well-deserved smackdown against someone who is uncontroversially and obviously wrong, in a way you can back up with universally agreed-upon statistics." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- The fake “like” factories – how we reverse engineered facebooks user IDs [Media.ccc.de]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- PGP Encrypted ProtonCalendar from ProtonMail [Protonmail]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Generalized Knights [Lemoing.ca]: "Knights in chess move in an L-shape: 2 squares in one direction and 1 square perpendicular. But what if it didn't have to be like that?" ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- What: A terminal tool to check what is taking up your bandwidth [Github]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- The ProtonCalendar Security Model [Protonmail]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- "Ask HN: Solo devs, how do you plan your development?" [News.ycombinator]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Show HN: libcodr7 – fundamental collections in the spirit of C [Github]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Fandom went mainstream in the 2010s — for better and worse [Vox]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin culture | a)
- Game of Thrones’ final season told flattering lies about wanting power [Vox]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin culture | a)
- "The rise and fall of Rudy Giuliani, explained " [Vox]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- What we know about the Hanukkah celebration stabbing in New York [Vox]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin news | a)
- "What we know about a shooting at a White Settlement, Texas, church" [Vox]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin news | a)
- "The controversy over Bret Stephens’s Jewish genius column, explained" [Vox]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’s co-writer thinks he told Rose Tico’s complete story in barely over a minute [Vox]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- "In 2016, the Ghostbusters reboot didn’t change movies. But the backlash was a bad omen." [Vox]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- "The decade, in 6 minutes" [Vox]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin news | a)
- Blue light may not be as disruptive to sleep patterns as originally thought [Manchester.ac.uk]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Scaling React Server Side Rendering [Arkwright.github.io]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Snapcast – Synchronous multi-room audio player [Github]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Changes to accessing and using Geolite2 databases [Blog.maxmind]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Why introductory chemistry is boring: a long-term historical perspective [Get21stnight]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin metascience | a)
- Using an /e/ phone as a desktop or laptop [Nexedi]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Show HN: MassCode – a code snippets manager for developers [Github]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Pedestrian routing that offers pleasant alternatives to the shortest route [Gislounge]: "Most of us are concerned about getting somewhere, usually as fast as possible, so we are accustomed to using Google Maps or similar tools we prefer for navigation to find the quickest route possible. However, we may not always want to find simply the quickest route. There are health, physical, enjoyable and even economic reasons as to why the fastest route is not optimal. Furthermore, along the route, there are other things we may prefer, such as finding places to socialize or even being surrounded by peace and quiet. New tools are beginning to make the task of finding such routes easier for us." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- New Material to Make Lithium Ion Batteries Self-Healing and Easily Recyclable [Goodnewsnetwork]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- "Arduino programmable air, pneumatics kit" [Blog.arduino.cc]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Show HN: Art Resources and Tutorials Website [Artres.xyz]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- ProtonMail takes aim at Google with an encrypted calendar [Venturebeat]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- The beta amyloid hypothesis has thwarted progress toward an Alzheimer’s cure [Statnews]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- Boeing 737 Max: Automated Crashes [video] [Media.ccc.de]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Meet Dash O’Pepper [Filipeherculano.dev]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- KafkaHQ [Github]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- "Piet, a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings" [Dangermouse.net]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- The Joys of Unix Keyboards [Donatstudios]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Choosing a License for GoatCounter [Arp242.net]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Light – Learning in Interactive Games with Humans and Text [Parl.ai]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Encoding integers in the EMV protocol (2010) [Lightbluetouchpaper]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- The Unpredictable Cactus [Lrb.co.uk]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- Show HN: Rewtro plays tiny videogames encoded in origami GameBoy cartridges [Github]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- The Central Limit Theorem and Its Misuse [Lambdaclass]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin math | a)
- Stop Trying to Focus: The Power of Macro-Mind Thinking [Consciouscompanymedia]: "We're told that focus is the key to productivity, but macro-mind thinking — or stepping back to see the bigger picture and give our brains a break — is just as crucial. [...] Make space for big-picture thinking: Some companies give their employees a half day once a week or once a month to pursue “moon shot” projects or just let their creative juices flow with no set agenda. [...] Go beyond mindfulness: Mindfulness has become all the rage at companies focused on promoting focus and wellbeing. [...] Do nothing: This is the advanced practice, the double-black diamond approach to developing the macro-mind. The momentum to be productive is so strong that most of us rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to do nothing." ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Trump’s use of homelessness as a political cudgel exposes his cynical disregard for blue states [Vox]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- The Decade of Swift [Swiftbysundell]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- "RIP Syd Mead (Blade Runner, TRON Designer)" [Sydmead]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin culture | a)
- Publish – A static site generator for Swift developers [Github]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- The Rise of the Architectural Cult [Inference-review]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- US atomic waste dump in Marshall Islands to be investigated [Bbc]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin news | a)
- Google Design’s Best of 2019 [Design.google]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Show HN: Ezovpn – OpenVPN configuration importer / generator in Golang [Github]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Apple ink supplier in Japan makes mark with iPhone 11 Pro colors [Asia.nikkei]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin news | a)
- Science does advance one funeral at a time [Chemistryworld]: "The study doesn’t show that superstars are bad or behave unethically, Azoulay stresses. Instead, he says, it suggests that once people reach the top, it’s difficult for them or their ideas to be dislodged. [...] Azoulay thinks researchers, policymakers, funders and publishers need to be more aware that this is happening. He calls for more policy experimentation to test whether fields should be more open to newcomers. ‘The people who are being blocked today for the right or wrong reasons may well be the people who will do the blocking tomorrow.’" ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin metascience | a)
- Parameter vs Synapse? [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin datascience | a)
- 2019 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- "Australia’s hellish heat wave and wildfires, explained" [Vox]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin news | a)
- Opinions of oxfam [Reddit]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- Politics Podcast: Biggest Political Moments Of 2019. Key Questions For 2020. [538]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin politicalscience | a)
- Please Take The 2020 SSC Survey! [SlateStarCodex]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin news | a)
- We need to revisit AI rewriting its source code [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Where ACE staff are giving in 2019 and why [EA Forum]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin giving | a)
- Brief summary of key disagreements in AI Risk [EA Forum]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- Where ACE Staff Are Giving in 2019 and Why [Animalcharityevaluators]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin giving | a)
- Out in the Great Northwest [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- The unexpected difficulty of comparing AlphaStar to humans [LessWrong]: "Artificial intelligence defeated a pair of professional Starcraft II players for the first time in December 2018. Although this was generally regarded as an impressive achievement, it quickly became clear that not everybody was satisfied with how the AI agent, called AlphaStar, interacted with the game, or how its creator, DeepMind, presented it. Many observers complained that, in spite of DeepMind’s claims that it performed at similar speeds to humans, AlphaStar was able to control the game with greater speed and accuracy than any human, and that this was the reason why it prevailed. Although I think this story is mostly correct, I think it is harder than it looks to compare AlphaStar’s interaction with the game to that of humans, and to determine to what extent this mattered for the outcome of the matches. Merely comparing raw numbers for actions taken per minute (the usual metric for a player’s speed) does not tell the whole story" ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Interview with Rui Pinto of Football Leaks [Spiegel.de]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- More on polio and randomized clinical trials [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin metascience | a)
- Chris Olah’s views on AGI safety [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Why is the mail so much better than the DMV? [LessWrong]: "Whether it's providing healthcare, building high speed rail, or Issuing Drivers Licenses, the typical American's experience with government services is one of incompetence, corruption and failure to innovate. There are lots of plausible explanations about why this might be. [...] Yet, there is one government service in the US on which every single person depends, which serves hundreds of millions of requests every day, and which does its job virtually flawlessly for less than its European counterparts. Every single difference mentioned above would apply just as much or more so to the USPS. [...] So, why is the mail so much better than every other government service in the US?" ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- "MIRI is only 35% of the way to its 2019 fundraising goal, with two days lef..." [Reddit]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- 2020's Prediction Thread [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- What Resources on Journal Analysis are Available? [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Critiquing What failure looks like [Alignmentforum]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Conversation on AI risk with Adam Gleave [EA Forum]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin career | a)
- Critiquing What failure looks like [LessWrong]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Allocation of discretionary funds from Q3 2019 [EA Forum]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- The best New Year's resolution I ever made [EA Forum]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Animal Ethics work in 2019 [Animal-ethics]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin animals | a)
- The 11 most-read Future Perfect articles of 2019 [Vox]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- What ever happened to PETRL (People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcem... [EA Forum]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- "Video introduction to MIRI, CFAR, and AI risk" [Reddit]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- 2019 in review: state of the blog [Flightfromperfection]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- Open Philanthropy Staff: Suggestions for Individual Donors (2019) [EA Forum]: NaN ('19 Dec 29Added Sun 2019-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin giving | a)
- "I Killed My Teenager’s Fancy College Dreams. You Should, Too." [Slate]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin -1 | a)
- I asked my students to turn in their cell phones and write about living without them. [Technologyreview]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- 5 Money Rules That Will Increase Your Net Worth [Getpocket]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- "In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks" [Wsj]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin career | a)
- Focus has become more valuable than intelligence (2018) [Alexand.ro]: "[E]ven if you are intelligent, there is a prerequisite every single time you wake up which will decide if your intelligence will be used or wasted that day. That prerequisite is focus." ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Why are my Go executable files so large? [Cockroachlabs]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- A Desperate Plea for a Free Software Alternative to Aspera (2018) [Ccdatalab]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Ffmpeg-Python: Python bindings for FFmpeg – with complex filtering support [Github]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019? [News.ycombinator]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin entrepreneurship | a)
- IncludeOS: a minimal unikernel operating system for C++ services [Includeos]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Blind software development at 450 words per minute (2017) [Vincit.fi]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art (2015) [Dinofarmgames]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Write Junior Code [Parsonsmatt]: "Keep things simpler than you might otherwise want them to be, so that less experienced people can maintain them." ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- French court rules Steam games must be able to be resold [Engadget]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- McDonald's holds communities together (2016) [The Guardian]: "For many of the poorest, for the homeless, and for people caught in an addiction, McDonald’s are an integral part of their lives. They have cheap and filling food, they have free Wi-Fi, outlets to charge phones, and clean bathrooms. McDonald’s is also generally gracious about letting people sit quietly for long periods – longer than other fast-food places." ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Ask HN: Any Pebble Alternatives? [News.ycombinator]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- The Eternal Novice Trap [Feoh]: "Do learn new programming languages and paradigms, but learn them from a place of confidence and mastery with your primary tool of choice. Don’t fall for the trap of perpetually chasing after the bright shiny thing that’s hot right now. Recognize that what’s new isn’t necessarily better. Take what will meaningfully help you advance your career and let the rest flow by. There’ll always be more tomorrow. Do keep having fun! You’ll learn more quickly and retain more if you’re finding enjoyment in what you do. Sometimes it means looking at things a little differently, but often that open mindedness can pay off." ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- The Future of Plagiarism [Plagiarismtoday]: "Currently, plagiarism is easier to perform, easier to detect and easier to call out than ever. Furthermore, with tighter content schedules and a never-ending demand for new content, plagiarism is more tempting than ever. This has the impact of making plagiarism, or at least the detection of plagiarism, much more common. Stories like Raval are increasingly regular but that increased frequency has made it so that plagiarism seems more trivial, just another scandal in an era of scandal-obsessed media. This makes plagiarism far more survivable than it once was." ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Coinbase Wallet to remove DApp browser to comply with Apple's policy [Old.reddit]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Old Man River City – A Community Dwelling Machine [Solutions.synearth.net]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin economics | a)
- Ruby Lazy Enumerators [Blog.saeloun]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Ask HN: Best solutions for keeping a personal log? [News.ycombinator]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- DIY ‘Meta Clock’ with 24 Analog Clocks [Mcuoneclipse]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Node-based a/v composition: programs as graphs and graphs as compositional tools [Github]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Encoding your WiFi access point password into a QR code [Feeding.cloud.geek.nz]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Nothing Says 'Hip' Like Ancient Wheat (2016) [Npr]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin economics | a)
- Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project as a blueprint for living online [Reallifemag]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- "Vaughan Oliver, Graphic Designer for Pixies, Cocteau Twins, and More, Dead at 62" [Pitchfork]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- Ruby 2.x Universal RCE Deserialization Gadget Chain (2018) [Elttam]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Why Canada's cannabis bubble burst [Bbc]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin economics | a)
- Show HN: A pure functional programming language targeting decentralized systems [Clio-lang]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Publishers Determined to Kill E-Books [Eclecticlight.co]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin economics | a)
- The StingRay Is Why the 4th Amendment Was Written [Fee]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Ask HN: Making a mobile app as a back-end developer? [News.ycombinator]: NaN ('19 Dec 28Added Sat 2019-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- The Ideological Turing Test [Econlib]: "Put me and five random liberal social science Ph.D.s in a chat room. Let liberal readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isn’t really a liberal. Then put Krugman and five random libertarian social science Ph.D.s in a chat room. Let libertarian readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isn’t really a libertarian. Simple as that." ('19 Dec 27Added Fri 2019-Dec-27 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- L.P.D.: Libertarian Police Department [Newyorker]: "&ldsquo;'Home Depot Presents the Police!®' I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. 'Nobody move unless you want to!' They didn’t." ('19 Dec 26Added Thu 2019-Dec-26 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- How to Actually Stick to Your Resolutions This Year [Youtube]: "(1) Remember that the motivation that comes from the new year is fleeting; (2) You will have the same limitations after 1 Jan than before; (3) No need to wait until Jan 1st to change - you can start now; (4) If you can't do your full goal today (e.g., practice piano for an hour) you can at least do some of it (e.g., practice piano for 15min); (5) set a resolution for a week-length time scale instead of a year-length time scale; (6) start small; (7) don't make your career/accomplishment goals more intense if you are still languishing on your health (e.g., sleep, exercise, nutrition); (8) track your progress; (9) if you fail, track why you failed and see how you can avoid it." ('19 Dec 25Added Wed 2019-Dec-25 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Marijuana: Much More Than You Wanted to Know [SlateStarCodex]: "There is not a sufficiently obvious order-of-magnitude difference between the costs and benefits of marijuana legalization for a evidence-based utilitarian analysis of costs and benefits to inform the debate. [...W]hether marijuana legalization is positive or negative on net depends almost entirely on small changes in the road traffic accident rate. This is something I’ve never heard anyone else mention, but which in retrospect should be obvious; the few debatable health effects and the couple of people given short jail sentences absolutely can’t compare to the potential for thousands more (or fewer) traffic accidents which leave people permanently dead. [...] We should probably stop caring about health effects of marijuana and about imprisonment for marijuana-related offenses, and concentrate all of our research and political energy on how marijuana affects driving." ('19 Dec 25Added Wed 2019-Dec-25 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- A Simple Guide to Better Coaching and Feedback in Your Company [Buffer]: "1-on-1 meetings at least every two weeks between the employee and manager. 70min long - 10min to share and celebrate achievements, 40min to discuss current top challenges, 10min for manager to share feedback, and 10min for employee to share feedback. The 1:1 is for the team member, not the CEO or team lead. It should be about listening and suggesting and emphasizing reflection, rather than commanding." ('19 Dec 25Added Wed 2019-Dec-25 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- "Calories in, calories out" [Possiblywrong.wordpress]: "How do we lose (or gain) weight? Is it really as simple as 'calories in, calories out' (i.e., eat less than you burn), or is what you eat more important than how much? Is '3500 calories equals one poun'” a useful rule of thumb, or just a myth? [...] Following is a description of my attempt to answer some of these questions, using a relatively simple mathematical model, in an experiment involving daily measurement of weight, caloric intake, and exercise over 75 days. The results suggest that you can not only measure, but predict future weight loss– or gain– with surprising accuracy. But they also raise some interesting open questions about how all this relates to the effectiveness of some currently popular diet programs." ('19 Dec 25Added Wed 2019-Dec-25 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Should You Do Intense Short-Term Projects or Build Long-Term Habits? [Scotthyoung]: "The two approaches are not mutually exclusive - you should aim to do both! "If it’s easier at the beginning, then habits make more sense. You want to be preparing yourself for the long-haul. If it’s easier at the end, then an intense approach makes pushing through that initial challenge more likely." Habits work well for easier goals, whereas intensity works well for harder goals. "If your habits don’t line up with the typical intensity required to reach the level of success you want, you won’t get there even if you’re perfectly consistent." Habits also work well for things you don't want to focus on, whereas intensity works well for your main focus." ('19 Dec 25Added Wed 2019-Dec-25 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Preventing Burnout: A Cautionary Tale [Tim.blog]: "I wish someone had held up a mirror to show me I was the problem, but that never happened. No one knew the full extent of my situation but me, and I was in denial. It’s worth taking a moment to ask yourself: Do I feel guilty or anxious when I’m not working? Have I stopped playing with my friends? Do all of my daily activities revolve around building a more successful career? Am I always sleeping fewer than eight hours per night? Am I consuming stimulants multiple times per day to hide my exhaustion? Am I sitting still and staring at screens for most of my waking hours? Do I interact with people primarily through screens? Am I indoors all day long, depriving myself of fresh air and sunlight? Do I depend on alcohol or drugs to cope with social situations outside of work? If you said ‘yes’ to most of those questions, you are not alone. When I was at my worst, I was doing all of these things on a daily basis. I was fueling my own anxiety and I couldn’t even see it. My perceived lack of productivity, lack of money, and the unknown future kept me in a constant state of panic.&rdquo" ('19 Dec 25Added Wed 2019-Dec-25 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- This Is What Happens to Your Bike After It's Stolen [Seattlemet]: "To the prepared thief, every bike rack is a buffet. You think a cable lock will keep your beloved wheels in your life. The thief knows a simple pair of aviation snips cuts through that cable like butter. You’re convinced a locker-style combination lock will outsmart a crook. He pops it in seconds with a shim—just slides it in between the body of the lock and its fishhook tip, and your bike is his. (A good bandit can make a shim in about five minutes with nothing more than a beer can and a pair of scissors.) U-locks? Routinely opened with a Bic pen jammed into the keyhole. Even with that rare unbreakable lock, a bike is no safer than its anchor; outside Guthrie Hall at the University of Washington sits a metal rack that bike thieves have sawed straight through. The components, meanwhile—the lights, seats, handlebars, derailleurs, and brakes that turn a frame into a ridable bike—can go for hundreds of dollars each on the black market. With no serial numbers, these parts, unlike frames, are untraceable." ('19 Dec 25Added Wed 2019-Dec-25 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- "Amazon's $23,698,655.93 book about flies" [Michaeleisen]: "On the day we discovered the million dollar prices, the copy offered by bordeebook was 1.270589 times the price of the copy offered by profnath. And now the bordeebook copy was 1.270589 times profnath again. So clearly at least one of the sellers was setting their price algorithmically in response to changes in the other’s price. I continued to watch carefully and the full pattern emerged." ('19 Dec 25Added Wed 2019-Dec-25 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- How a Password Changed My Life [Medium]: "So there it was... This input field with a pulsating cursor, waiting for me to type a password that I’ll have to re-enter for the next 30 days. Many times during the day. [...] I'm gonna use a password to change my life. [...] My password became the indicator. My password reminded me that I shouldn’t let myself be victim of my recent break up, and that I’m strong enough to do something about it. My password became: 'Forgive@h3r' [...] That simple action changed the way I looked at my ex wife. That constant reminder that I should forgive her, led me to accept the way things happened at the end of my marriage, and embrace a new way of dealing with the depression that I was drowning into. [...] One month later, my dear exchange server asked me again to renew my password. I thought about the next thing I had to get done. My password became Quit@smoking4ever. And guess what happened. I'm not kidding you. I quit smoking overnight." ('19 Dec 25Added Wed 2019-Dec-25 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- The Zero-Armed Bandit [Damninteresting]: "This bomb can never be dismantled or disarmed without causing an explosion. Not even by the creator. Only by proper instruction can it be moved to a safe place where it can be deliberately exploded, or where the third automatic timer can be allowed to detonate it. There are three automatic timers each set for three different explosion times. Only if you comply with the instructions in this letter will you be given instructions on how to disconnect the first two automatic timers and how to move the bomb to a place where it can be exploded safely." ('19 Dec 25Added Wed 2019-Dec-25 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- How to Remember Everything You Learn [Youtube]: "Watch out for the illusion of competence, where seeing information makes you feel like you know it, even when you don't. Grappling with information is what is required to help you remember it and bring it into long-term memory, otherwise it quickly disappears from short-term working memory. Avoid multitasking, distractions, and information overload. Practice recalling what you learn after you learn it. Also, try to explain the subject in simple terms to a hypothetical (or not hypothetical) person who doesn't yet understand it. Also try spaced repetition, making sure to re-learn the material after a certain amount of time." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- The Bernie vs. Warren Debate We Need [Nymag]: "Much of the time, the Democratic left is content to wage its 'Bernie vs. Warren' civil war in a parallel universe free of this context. Sanders supporters comb through the Warren campaign's every utterance on health care for intimations of agnosticism on single-payer, as though the chief obstacle to Medicare for All in 2021 will be the next Democratic president's lack of backbone rather than the fact that there are currently 14 votes for Bernie's bill in Chuck Schumer's caucus (and none of the Democrats who oppose single-payer had any trouble winning renomination in the 2018 primaries). Meanwhile, progressive intellectuals debate the relative merits of Warren's left-liberalism and Sanders's 'democratic socialism' as though the central question facing the next Democratic administration will be whether to implement the Meidner plan or settle for Denmark's model of social democracy." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- American Leftists Believed Corbyn's Inevitable Victory Would Be Their Model [Nymag]: "The British election results, like any election results, are the result of unique circumstances and multiple factors. They are also, however, a test of a widely articulated political theory that has important implications for American politics. That theory holds that Corbyn's populist left-wing platform is both necessary and sufficient in order to defeat the rising nationalist right. Corbyn's crushing defeat is a decisive refutation." I do think socialists need to contend with Corybn's large defeat and that this can't be dismissed easily, but I suppose centrists also need to contend with Hilary Clinton's defeat, and the American right needs to contend with how relatively left the UK Conservatives are" ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know [SlateStarCodex]: "Technological unemployment is not happening right now, at least not more so than previous eras. The official statistics are confusing, but they show no signs of increases in this phenomenon. On the other hand, there are signs of technological underemployment – robots taking middle-skill jobs and then pushing people into other jobs. [...] This sort of thing has been happening for centuries and in theory everyone should eventually adjust, but there are some signs that they aren't. This may have as much to do with changes to the educational, political, and economic system as with the nature of robots per se. Economists are genuinely divided on how this is going to end up, and whether this will just be a temporary blip while people develop new skills, or the new normal. Technology seems poised to disrupt lots of new industries very soon, and could replace humans entirely sometime within the next hundred years. This is a very depressing conclusion. If technology didn't cause problems, that would be great. If technology made lots of people unemployed, that would be hard to miss, and the government might eventually be willing to subsidize something like a universal basic income. But we won't get that. We'll just get people being pushed into worse and worse jobs, in a way that does not inspire widespread sympathy or collective action. The prospect of educational, social, or political intervention remains murky." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Is everything an MLM? [Annehelen.substack]: "[T]he overproduction of PhDs: too many people coming through grad school, and too few sustainable academic jobs. And as anyone in any field understands, when there's way more qualified applicants than jobs, the existing jobs can demand more of applicants (more qualifications, less money) while applicants lower their own expectations (for compensation, for benefits, for job security, for course load and service, for location). So why don't academic departments just decrease the number of PhD students they accept? Because those students have become an integral cog in the contemporary university." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin metascience | a)
- Grad school is worse for public health than STDs [BenKuhn]: "I've been low-key worried about this for a while, but it boiled over recently when Eve offhandedly mentioned a department survey that showed over half of her classmates struggling with depression or anxiety. Over half! These are some of the smartest people in their field, who I'm confident would thrive in any normally-supportive (or supportive-at-all) work environment. Instead, they're riddled with anxiety and depression because they've been convinced to tie up their entire identity in being one of the lucky 10% that lands a tenure-track research job, then hung out to dry by the gatekeepers they probably thought would help them. How the hell do people think this is reasonable?" ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin metascience | a)
- How would you prove you are a time-traveler from the past? [Gwern.net]: "SF/F fiction frequently considers the case of a time-traveler from the future to the past, who can prove himself by use of advanced knowledge and items from the future. In the reverse case, a time-traveler from the past to the future wishes to prove he is from the past and that time-travel is real. How can he do this when all past knowledge is already known or whose chain of custody being broken is more likely than time-travel being real? I suggest 8 methods: carbon-14 nuclear isotope dating of their body as isotopes cannot be removed; sequencing of their genome to check consistency with pedigree as human genomes cannot be synthesized or edited on a large scale; selection & mutation clocks, likewise; immune system signatures of extinct or rare diseases such as smallpox, and accumulated pollution such as heavy metals, difficult & dangerous to fake. While these proofs may not offer conclusive proof since any human system can be subverted with enough effort, they can provide enough evidence to launch research into time travel and a definitive finding." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Modern Day Zombies? The Effects of Smartphone Ownership at Denison [Onetwentyseven.blog]: "The results weigh in on the debate that people have regarding the positive and negative aspects of Smartphone usage. It is obvious that phones are deeply ingrained into our lives, but what is interesting is that the data shows that phone usage may not take away from time spent on other social activities. When it comes to homework, exercise, and going to class, spending time on ones' phone does not take away time spent on those activities. Additionally, for every hour of time spent on a Smartphone, time spent in meetings, eating (presumably with friends), and time spent with friends goes up. For all the worry about alienation and misanthropy that technology has been thought to fuel, the evidence here suggests the opposite - phone use is linked to closer links between people." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Deepen Boring Small Talk with the ABC Strategy [Advice.shinetext]: "Ask questions, build off the answer, and connect to their answer in a personal way." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Freaked Out? 3 Steps to Protect Your Phone [NYTimes]: "(Somewhat) protect your phone from intrusive location tracking by stopping location sharing with apps, stopping location sharing with Google, and disabling your phone's ad ID (yes this is a thing)." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Explain Your Extremists [Econlib]: "No matter how controversial your political views are, there are always people on 'your side' who hold a more extreme position than you do. How do you account for such people?" ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- "Justice Ginsburg: "I Am Very Much Alive" [Npr]: "There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced, with great glee, that I was going to be dead within six months...That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now dead." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- Free Distribution or Cost-Sharing? Evidence from a Randomized Malaria Prevention Experiment [Earth.columbia.edu]: Insecticide-treated bed nets help prevent malaria. Giving away these bed nets for free results in a higher uptake than asking people to share in the cost of subsidized nets. ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin giving | a)
- Why Russian Military Expenditure is Much Higher Than Commonly Understood (as is China's) [Waronthe Rocks]: "Based on the annual average dollar-to-ruble exchange rates, Russia is typically depicted as spending in the region of $60 billion per year on its military. [However,] Russian procurement dwarfs that of most European powers combined. [...] The reason for this apparent contradiction is that the use of market exchange rates grossly understates the real volume of Russian military expenditure (and that of other countries with smaller per-capita incomes, like China). Instead, any analysis of comparative military expenditure should be based on the use of purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates rather than market exchange rates. [...] As we demonstrate, despite some shortcomings, PPP is a much more methodologically robust and defensible method of comparing defense spending across countries[. ...] Using PPP, one finds that Russia's effective military expenditure actually ranged between $150 billion and $180 billion annually over the last five years. That figure is conservative; taking into account hidden or obfuscated military expenditure, Russia may well come in at around $200 billion. [...] The gap is even narrower when one digs into the differences in how this money is spent. At nearly 50 percent of federal budget spending on national defense, a large proportion of the Russian defense budget goes to procurement and research and development. By comparison, in other countries with large defense budgets, procurement spending tends to be much lower: in India, the United States, and the United Kingdom, spending is at about 20–25 percent. Unlike some other large military spenders - for example, Saudi Arabia and India - Russia also produces most of its weaponry itself and does not buy its equipment from countries with higher costs." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin nationalsecurity | a)
- What's Amazon's market share? 35% or 5%? [Ben-evans]: "Amazon is a big company, but what does that mean? How big is 'big'? What does 'dominant' or 'scale' or 'huge' mean when US retail is $6 trillion a year? Running the numbers, Amazon has about 35% of US ecommerce. But, it competes with physical retailers as well" ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- The Absurd Structure of High School [Gen.medium]: "The system's scheduling fails on every possible level. If the goal is productivity, the fractured nature of the tasks undermines efficient product. So much time is spent in transition that very little is accomplished before there is a demand to move on. If the goal is maximum content conveyed, then the system works marginally well, in that students are pretty much bombarded with detail throughout their school day. However, that breadth of content comes at the cost of depth of understanding. The fractured nature of the work, the short amount of time provided, and the speed of change all undermine learning beyond the superficial. It's shocking, really, that students learn as much as they do. [...] he solution, to me anyway, seems almost too easy. Students should have two long classes each day for six to eight weeks. They should come to school in the morning and intensely study a single subject-ancient history, a few Shakespeare plays, cell biology, a specific math concept, and so on. In the afternoon, another subject for a few more hours. When the term ends, they move on to another subject." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Productivity by Sam Altman [Blog.samaltman]: "It matters most what you work on. Have time in your schedule to regularly think about what to work on. Insofar as is possible, try to do what you like and to delegate things to people that they would like ...and insofar as it isn't possible, try to make it possible. Try to be around smart, productive, happy, and positive people. Make lots of lists, prioritize in a way that generates momentum, be relentless about getting the most important projects done, be ruthless about saying no to stuff, try to avoid meetings and conferences, block out uninterrupted time for yourself and your work, value your time and act accordingly, don't fall into the trap of productivity porn, get good sleep, exercise plenty, eat well, avoid sugar, keep junk food out of the house, ignore any and all of this advice if it doesn't work for you, and don't neglect your family and friends for the sake of productivity. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- How to be Successful by Sam Altman [Blog.samaltman]: "Aim to compound yourself exponentially. Spend a lot of time between projects thinking of the next one, but aim so that whatever you next makes your previous project look like a footnote. Success comes from "long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together." Once you've figured out your plan, be relentlessly focused on it. Work really hard and work smart as well. Have a lot of self-belief and self-confidence, but balance it out with a lot of self-awareness. Get good at sales and sell your plans. Think independently and be okay with failing many times before succeeding. Do things differently and make it easy to take risks. Build a strong network and team. Remember that people get really rich not by having high salaries but by owning things that rapidly increase in value. Make things people want at scale. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" [Paulgraham]: "One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more. There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour. [...] But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started. When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Warren and Bernie Twitter Rant [Twitter]: "OK I want to rant about Warren, Bernie, the primary election, and how the topic shifted from stuff I was passionate about to stuff that leaves me cold. [...T]he 2020 primary campaign's shift from industrial and labor reform to health care health care health care has made me pessimistic about the Democratic party's willingness and ability to change the things that really need changing in our economy." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Burnout: what is it and how to treat it? [EA Forum]: "What can you do as an Individual? Seek social support, sleep, seek clarity in your role and goals, shorten your commute, buy yourself out of work-life conflict, and keep a healthy personal runway. What can organizations do? Define clear roles and norms, provide clear feedback, provide achievable goals, facilitate social support, facilitate telecommuting and flexible work hours, facilitate sleep, provide offices (or at least cubicles), provide autonomy, find ways to measure productivity other than hours worked, and professionalize management. Vacations don't help. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- "Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People" [Hbr]: "To Maslach's point, a survey of 7,500 full-time employees by Gallup found the top five reasons for burnout are: (1) Unfair treatment at work, (2) Unmanageable workload, (3) Lack of role clarity, (4) Lack of communication and support from their manager, and (5) Unreasonable time pressure. The list above clearly demonstrates that the root causes of burnout do not really lie with the individual and that they can be averted - if only leadership started their prevention strategies much further upstream." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Biased Algorithms Are Easier to Fix Than Biased People [NYTimes]: "Humans are inscrutable in a way that algorithms are not. Our explanations for our behavior are shifting and constructed after the fact. To measure racial discrimination by people, we must create controlled circumstances in the real world where only race differs. For an algorithm, we can create equally controlled just by feeding it the right data and observing its behavior. Algorithms and humans also differ on what can be done about bias once it is found." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin datascience | a)
- Inherent Trade-Offs in the Fair Determination of Risk Scores [Arxiv]: "Recent discussion in the public sphere about algorithmic classification has involved tension between competing notions of what it means for a probabilistic classification to be fair to different groups. We formalize three fairness conditions that lie at the heart of these debates, and we prove that except in highly constrained special cases, there is no method that can satisfy these three conditions simultaneously. Moreover, even satisfying all three conditions approximately requires that the data lie in an approximate version of one of the constrained special cases identified by our theorem. These results suggest some of the ways in which key notions of fairness are incompatible with each other, and hence provide a framework for thinking about the trade-offs between them. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin datascience | a)
- A Meta-Analysis of Overfitting in Machine Learning [Papers.nips.cc]: "We conduct the first large meta-analysis of overfitting due to test set reuse in the machine learning community. Our analysis is based on over one hundred machine learning competitions hosted on the Kaggle platform over the course of several years. In each competition, numerous practitioners repeatedly evaluated their progress against a holdout set that forms the basis of a public ranking available throughout the competition. Performance on a separate test set used only once determined the final ranking. By systematically comparing the public ranking with the final ranking, we assess how much participants adapted to the holdout set over the course of a competition. Our study shows, somewhat surprisingly, little evidence of substantial overfitting. These findings speak to the robustness of the holdout method across different data domains, loss functions, model classes, and human analysts. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin datascience | a)
- What we can learn from five naturalistic field experiments that failed to shift commuter behaviour [Nature]: "Nudges, or small changes to the decision-making environment that are non-coercive and do not significantly change economic incentives but are nonetheless designed to make people change their behavior, work in a variety of domains, but not all. It helps if the task being promoted via nudge is something people have to do anyway (e.g., taxes), is unpleasant but health promoting (e.g., flu shot), has clear but delayed benefits (e.g., saving for retirement), is not a collective action problem, and is an infrequent (preferably even one-time, e.g., a capital purchase) and non-habitual behavior. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- "The Most Effective Memory Methods are Difficult, That's Why They Work" [Blog.supplysideliberal]: "If it isn't making you feel stupid, it isn't helping you learn. Since most people like to feel smart, they run away in terror from learning techniques that make them feel dumb. [...] What makes knowledge and understanding stick in the long run is studying in a way that guarantees that you fail and fail and fail. Testing your knowledge and understanding in ways that make you realize what you don't know is the rocky path to genuine learning. [...] There are three key activities that effectively sear what you want to learn into your long-term memory: Doing things in real life, or in a simulation as close to the real thing as possible. Flashcards done right. Building your own picture and story of the ideas." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Tale of the converted: how complex social problems have made me question the use of data in driving impact [Blogs.lse.ac.uk]: "Here's what I used to believe was the best way to drive impact: (1) Data is a powerful tool that is under-utilised in the public and social sector. (2) Powerful insights and knowledge sit in academic journals with rigorous research waiting to be applied by practitioners. (3) We need a better evidence base to understand how to allocate public and social dollars. (4) Measurement frameworks will help service providers better understand and improve their impact. (5) Outcomes should be rigorously measured and used to hold people to account. [...] As I gain more experience with social problems, however, I increasingly understand that my original beliefs about impact are flawed. [...I]n the face of complex problems our society faces, this assumption, while compelling in theory, has consistently proven itself untrue in practice. [...] (1) The increase in usage of data does not automatically lead to more impact. In fact, requiring data usage can exacerbate unhealthy power dynamics and make things worse. [...] (2) Powerful insights and knowledge sit in the minds of practitioners waiting to be enabled. [...] (3) We have invested loads into building countless evidence bases and I'm not sure anyone has ever calculated the return on those investments. [...] (4) Top-down reporting requirements restrict rather than support service providers. [...] (5) Outcomes are emergent properties of complex systems that we simply cannot force through more rigorous measuring. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin metascience | a)
- "The #1 bug predictor is not technical, it's organizational complexity" [Augustl]: The distance to decision makers and the number of developers working on a project is clearly and unambiguously the issue that is the best predictor of future problems with a code base. ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- "What do executives do, anyway?" [Apenwarr.ca]: "[T]he job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions. That's all. Not to decide. Not to break ties. Not to set strategy. Not to be the expert on every, or any topic. Just to sit in the room while the right people make good decisions in alignment with their values. And if they do, to endorse it. And if they don't, to send them back to try again." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Turn Discussions into Blog Posts [Reducing-suffering]: "If you come up with interesting insights or detailed arguments in the course of Facebook discussions, you might consider summarizing those ideas and saving them in a standalone article for others to read. This would be a more concise and shareable way to preserve your thoughts than just linking to a long discussion thread. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom [Pnas]: "Despite active learning being recognized as a superior method of instruction in the classroom, a major recent survey found that most college STEM instructors still choose traditional teaching methods. This article addresses the long-standing question of why students and faculty remain resistant to active learning. Comparing passive lectures with active learning using a randomized experimental approach and identical course materials, we find that students in the active classroom learn more, but they feel like they learn less. We show that this negative correlation is caused in part by the increased cognitive effort required during active learning. Faculty who adopt active learning are encouraged to intervene and address this misperception, and we describe a successful example of such an intervention." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Equal Parenting Advice for Dads [Jefftk]: "Pregnancy and birth are very asymmetric, and then breastfeeding continues the pattern: nursing isn't going to be equitable. [...] Then with parental leave it's very common for the mother to take more time off work than the father. [...] If you're the dad, what can you do? I see two main aspects: sharing the work, and sharing the parenting. From a work perspective, in as much as you want to be trying to make things fair you should be making up for the things you can't do by taking on more of the remaining work: non-feeding care, diapers, cooking, etc. [...] The other aspect is you want to be dividing the parenting, not just the work. This is because you really need to avoid a situation where the mother has a much better understanding of the baby than you do. For example, you can get into a cycle where you can't calm the baby as well, they spend more time with their mother, you get less experience and practice with them, and your relative abilities with the baby get farther and farther apart." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Why software projects take longer than you think: a statistical model [Erikbern]: "If my model is right (a big if) then here's what we can learn: People estimate the median completion time well, but not the mean. The mean turns out to be substantially worse than the median, due to the distribution being skewed (log-normally). When you add up the estimates for n tasks, things get even worse. Tasks with the most uncertainty (rather the biggest size) can often dominate the mean time it takes to complete all tasks." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Reasoning Transparency [Openphilanthropy]: "Open with a linked summary of key takeaways. Throughout a document, indicate which considerations are most important to your key takeaways. Throughout a document, indicate how confident you are in major claims, and what support you have for them." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- There's No Speed Limit [Sivers]: "I graduated from Berklee and taught there, too. I’ll bet I can teach you two years of theory and arranging in only a few lessons. I suspect you can graduate in two years if you understand there’s no speed limit. Come by my studio at 9:00 tomorrow for your first lesson, if you’re interested. No charge.&rquo;" ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Evaluating the performance of past climate model projections [Agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley]: "Climate models provide an important way to understand future changes in the Earth's climate. In this paper we undertake a thorough evaluation of the performance of various climate models published between the early 1970s and the late 2000s. Specifically, we look at how well models project global warming in the years after they were published by comparing them to observed temperature changes. Model projections rely on two things to accurately match observations: accurate modeling of climate physics, and accurate assumptions around future emissions of CO2 and other factors affecting the climate. The best physics‐based model will still be inaccurate if it is driven by future changes in emissions that differ from reality. To account for this, we look at how the relationship between temperature and atmospheric CO2 (and other climate drivers) differs between models and observations. We find that climate models published over the past five decades were generally quite accurate in predicting global warming in the years after publication, particularly when accounting for differences between modeled and actual changes in atmospheric CO2 and other climate drivers. This research should help resolve public confusion around the performance of past climate modeling efforts, and increases our confidence that models are accurately projecting global warming.&rquo;" ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Why I Doubted Facebook Could Build a Billion Dollar Business and What I Learned From Being Horribly Wrong [Andrewchen.co]: "The concrete lesson to be learned from this is: In the modern era, business models are a commodity. I never want to hear about people asking, 'But what’s their business model?' because in a world where you can grow a user base of 1 billion in a few years, displaying remnant ads and getting a $0.25 CPM will do. Or just throw some freemium model on it, and monetize 1% of them. If you can build the audience, you can build a big business. The more abstract lesson to learn is: Be humble, and keep an open mind towards weird new companies. After a few years in Silicon Valley, you can gather a lot of useful heuristics about what’s worked and what doesn’t work. That will help you most of the time, but when it comes to the exceptional cases, all bets are off. [...] Remember that you’re helping/investing/working for the company right in front you, not a mutual fund of all companies with that characteristic!" ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin entrepreneurship | a)
- Conflict vs. Mistake [SlateStarCodex]: "Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. The State is diseased. We’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure. Some of us have good ideas, others have bad ideas that wouldn’t help, or that would cause too many side effects. Conflict theorists treat politics as war. Different blocs with different interests are forever fighting to determine whether the State exists to enrich the Elites or to help the People." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Mistake Theory Socialism [Danwahl.github.io]: "I dislike it when people use terms to describe what they’re not instead of what they are, but after covering two rounds of political controversies surrounding Lori Lightfoot, I want a term to at least describe the kind of progressive I aspire not to be. The closest I can come up with is 'conflict theory socialist', which is probably in the Authoritarian Left quadrant of the traditional political compass, or on top of John Nerst’s tilted political compass. Lightfoot’s budget is the kind of incremental improvement that’s stereotypically eschewed by socialists, but it feels like more than just socialism that is driving her harshest critics, and conflict theory seems to explain the remainder of the variance. I think Lightfoot’s biggest mistake in this process was probably her initial, premature promise to reopen the clinics, which gave her political opponents fodder come budget time, but (if I’m right about conflict theory) had little chance of winning them over." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- "Razer CEO Berated And Threatened His Staff, Former Employees Say" [Kotaku]: "Former Razer employees said they were expected to sacrifice their relationships with their families in order to succeed at the company, too. 'I didn’t deny my family in obvious enough ways to satisfy Min,' said Alain Mazer in an interview with Kotaku. 'My Razer career ended the day I didn’t ask for his permission to be a good parent and partner. He demands that employees reserve that kind of devotion only for him and his family’s business interests.' One former employee said their son was admitted to the ER after a car crash. While he was still in the hospital, they said, their boss told them to get back to work. Another said he was asked to work on his honeymoon. When asked about this, a Razer representative told Kotaku that they are a 'family-friendly employer,' and have adopted policies aimed at supporting employees with families." ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- You are what you document [Ybrikman]: "Good documentation is necessary for ensuring people will actually use the code that you wrote, regardless of how good that code is. A good README is most important, and it should involve a short 'sales pitch', quick examples, and installation instructions. The second best thing, if you have time, is an interactive tutorial. After that foundation is laid, good code, literate documentation, commented code, and full API docs form the next level of documentation. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Best Cold Email [Twitter]: "Good cold emails clarify that the email is someone who is human and reaching out to you in particular and knows you well. It makes a clear offer early, has humor, answers obvious objections, and has an unambiguous next call to action. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Remote vs Co-located Work [Martinfowler]: "There isn't a simple dichotomy of remote versus co-located work, instead there are several patterns of distribution for teams each of which has different trade-offs and effective techniques suitable for them. While it's impossible to determine conclusive evidence, my sense is that most groups are more productive working in a co-located manner. But you can build a more productive team by using a distributed working model, because it gives you access to a wider talent pool. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Libertarian Social Justice Warrior: A Surprisingly Coherent Position [Thingofthings.wordpress]: "It looks like 'social justice warrior' philosophy could be very compatible with libertarian philosophy. I don't endorse all of this (or anything in particular), but it's interesting. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Unintuitive Things I've Learned About Management [Medium]: "You must like dealing with people to be great at management -- Imagine you spend a full day in back-to-back 1:1s talking to people. Does that sound awful or awesome? The manager's strength is proportional to the team, and motivating the team to find the answers is more of the goal than having all the answers yourself. Good managers need to remind the team *why* things are done more often than *how*, to create motivation. Sometimes good people don't work out on good teams, you usually will only regret moving on from a struggling person too late not too early. Respect for a manager is more important than approval. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Why Millions of Americans own the AR-15 [Vox]: "The AR-15 is reliable, easy-to-use hardware that can be customized to a lot of different purposes. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- The 10x developer is NOT a myth [Ybrikman]: "10x developers are star programmers just like how there are star athletes, star book authors, and star artists. They don't do 10x more work, but they make the right decisions about 10x more often. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Go Corporate or Go Home [Ribbonfarm]: "Startups lose their flat, flexible structure for rigid bureaucracies because it gives the company legibility, allowing people to understand how the company works and who they can talk to in order to solve certain problems. Corporate growth ends up surprisingly informed by graph theory. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- The Critical 7 Rules to Understand People [Scotthyoung]: "People are mostly focused on themselves, which means if someone hurts you it's likely unintentional, embarrassment is rarely warranted, and you're the one who has to initiate relationships. People often hide the intentions behind their actions, which means you have to focus on empathy as well as merely understanding people. Altruism exists but is often selfish altruism, such as economic transactions, familial bonds, status seeking, and reciprocity. People have poor memories and everyone is emotional. Also, people are lonely.&rquo;" ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- How to ACE Your YCombinator Interview [Hackernoon]: "Focus on quick, concise, rehersed answers; know the 3-5 most important parts of your business/team and make sure those come out, know the industry around your domain and prepare well, make sure the entire founding team speaks equally, have a demo ready but don't expect to show it. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin entrepreneurship | a)
- What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team [NYTimes]: "After considering many possible hypotheses and doing years of research, Google researchers found that the best teams are those with psychological safety, where people feel free to raise ideas without getting shot down and people aren't afraid to make mistakes. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Thoughts on Building Weatherproof Companies [Medium]: "Companies involve learning fast and soliciting constant, systemic, and unequivocal feedback. You have to hire from the outside for expertise you don't have yet. You need a clearly stated and clearly understood corporate culture. A board of directors with regular, uncancellable meetings featuring real data also seems useful. Same with 1-1s with the board of directors. You also need regular interactions with customers. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- A conversation with Professor David Chalmers about Consciousness [Openphilanthropy]: "To disprove nonhuman consciousness one would need to demonstrate a necessary condition for consciousness and point out that nonhumans do not have it. To prove nonhuman consciousness one would need to point out a sufficient condition for consciousness and show that a nonhuman does have it. The second task seems easier, but could end up proving too much. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin philosophy | a)
- Why the Syria Civil War Will Get Worse [Mobile.nytimes]: "Civil wars generally last a lot longer when both sides are backed by foreign powers, because the sides of the civil war never run out of resources and the foreign powers don't face popular will to end the war since they're removed from the situation. Syria is also worse because the underlying battle is multiparty rather than two-sided and has multiple foreign backers for each side, making a ceasefire much harder to negotiate. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin nationalsecurity | a)
- Optimal Team Size [Johndcook]: "Adding a person to a team can make the work go faster, if that work can be done in parallel and if that person does more than they take in added communication and support cost. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Science isn't Broken [538]: "Science isn't a magic process that converts everything into truth. Doing good science is hard. While science may be uncertain and unsettled, it is superior to a lot of other methods, and requires careful analysis and replication. " ('19 Dec 24Added Tue 2019-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin metascience | a)
- A Parody of Every TED Talk Ever [Nan]: Not only is it a good parody of TED but also a good review of presenting style. ('19 Dec 23Added Mon 2019-Dec-23 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Emotional Baggage [Nan]: A cautionary tale of how not to run a company. ('19 Dec 22Added Sun 2019-Dec-22 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Everything Is 100% off If You Don't Buy It [Nan]: " "I do, however, have a suggestion: Pause. Wait before that next purchase. Avoid the mall, the online shopping carts, the sale prices. You can't save money by spending money. Everything is 100% off if you don't buy it. Instead of consuming more, why not create something worthwhile." ('19 Dec 21Added Sat 2019-Dec-21 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- "Sorry, you can't speed read" [Nan]: " The fundamental limitation of reading speed is how quickly you can comprehend words into meaning, which cannot be substantially increased using speed reading tricks. Skimming (such as by only reading the first half of each paragraph), however, can be beneficial for quickly getting a decent understanding of something." ('19 Dec 20Added Fri 2019-Dec-20 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Melatonin - Much More Than You Wanted to Know [Nan]: " "To treat delayed phase sleep disorder (ie you go to bed too late and wake up too late, and you want it to be earlier): Take melatonin 9 hours after wake and 7 before sleep, eg 5 PM, Block blue light (eg with blue-blocker sunglasses or f.lux) after sunset, Expose yourself to bright blue light (sunlight if possible, dawn simulator or light boxes if not) early in the morning, Get early morning exercise […] To treat advanced phase sleep disorder (ie you go to bed too early and wake up too early, and you want it to be later): Take melatonin immediately after waking, Block blue light (eg with blue-blocker sunglasses or f.lux) early in the morning, Expose yourself to bright blue light (sunlight if possible, light boxes if not) in the evening, Get late evening exercise. […] These don't 'cure' the condition permanently; you have to keep doing them every day, or your circadian rhythm will snap back to its natural pattern. What is the correct dose for these indications? Here there is a lot more controversy than the hypnotic dose. Of the nine studies van Geijlswijk describes, seven have doses of 5 mg, which suggests this is something of a standard for this purpose. But the only study to compare different doses directly (Mundey et al 2005) found no difference between a 0.3 and 3.0 mg dose. The Cochrane Review on jet lag, which we'll see is the same process, similarly finds no difference between 0.5 and 5.0." ('19 Dec 19Added Thu 2019-Dec-19 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- How to Increase Taxes on the Rich (If You Must) [Nan]: " "Finally, I should note that the safety net described by either plan A or plan B is just a version of the negative income tax that Milton Friedman proposed in his book Capitalism and Freedom back in 1962. I remember reading about it as a student 40 years ago and thinking it was a good idea. And I was not alone in that judgment: In 1968, more than 1000 economists signed a letter endorsing such a plan, including luminaries like James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, Peter Diamond, and Martin Feldstein. Andrew Yang's version, which focuses on taxing consumption rather than income, is even better than Friedman's, because it wouldn't distort the incentive to save and invest." ('19 Dec 18Added Wed 2019-Dec-18 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Income Share Agreements [Nan]: " "In an ISA, a student borrows nothing but rather has his or her education supported by an investor, in return for a contract to pay a specified percentage of income for a fixed number of years after graduation. Rates and time vary with the discipline of the degree achieved and the amount of tuition assistance the student obtained. An ISA is dramatically more student-friendly than a loan. All the risk shifts from the student to the investing entity; if a career starts slowly, or not at all, the student's obligation drops or goes to zero. Think of an ISA as equity instead of debt, or as working one's way through college - after college. […] If you watch Shark Tank the entrepreneurs are always wary about debt because debt puts all the risk on them and requires fixed payments regardless. Yet when it comes to financing the venture of one's own life suddenly equity becomes akin to slavery and debt bondage becomes freedom! It's very peculiar. Another advantage of ISAs is that they provide feedback. Is the university willing to educate you for free in return for a share of future earnings? That's a good signal!" ('19 Dec 17Added Tue 2019-Dec-17 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- How to increase your odds of starting a career in charity entrepreneurship [Nan]: " "Most people's lives neither encourage nor support self-direction. Typical education models always tell you what to do, where to be, and how well you're doing. Same goes for the usual job, with a manager who will fire you if you don't do the things they tell you to do, to a certain standard, by a certain date. You may have some flexibility within that framework, but the scope for action is relatively narrow. Entrepreneurship is entirely different. You are staring at a blank canvas. The only external accountability you have is in the distant future." ('19 Dec 16Added Mon 2019-Dec-16 11 p.m. CSTin career | a)
- There Aren't As Many 100% Anti-Abortion People as You Might Think [Nan]: " "very few Americans (of either party) are completely opposed to abortion. For Democrats the share was just over six percent in 1972, but it's dropped in half by 2018. For Republicans the climb has been upward, with just under 5% being totally opposed to abortion in 1972 compared to 8.5% of Republicans in 2018. […T]he share of Republicans who wanted to place no restrictions on abortion was the same as the Democrats in the 1970's. Then, support for that position began to drop. However, the decline was much steeper for Republicans - 40% of Republican were totally pro-choice in the 1970's, but that fell to just under 15% by the mid-2000's, only to rebound about five percentage points recently. The Democrats have seen a slightly different pattern. From their high of 37% completely pro-choice in the early 1970's, they dropped to just above 20% in the mid-2000's. There was a big bounce back for Democrats, though. Now about 35% of Democrats could be called completely pro-choice. The gap between two parties on the 100% pro-choice group is now the largest it's ever been, with Democrats being twice as likely to always favor abortion than Republicans. One would have to think that an individual's view of abortion is based, in large part, on their religious tradition. The data largely confirms that, but there are some interesting results. Of the group of people who favor a woman's choice to an abortion in all six scenarios, just over a third are religiously unaffiliated. However, the group that shows up the second most is Catholics. Obviously, that's a function of the size of the Catholic population in the United States, but it also speaks to the fact that lots of Catholics are diametrically opposed to the Church's teaching on abortion. That comes even more into focus when considering that despite the fact that evangelicals made up nearly a quarter of the sample, they are just 12.7% of 100% pro-choice respondents. When looking at those who are 100% pro-life, it's basically evangelicals, Catholics, and then everyone else. Nearly half of all 100% pro-life people are evangelicals, while 30% are Catholics." ('19 Dec 15Added Sun 2019-Dec-15 11 p.m. CSTin politicalscience | a)
- Uber Self-Driving Crash [Nan]: " "A year and a half ago an Uber self-driving car hit and killed Elaine Herzberg. […] If it were a company I trusted more than Uber I would say 'at least two things going wrong, like not being able to identify a person pushing a bike and then not being cautious enough about unknown input' but with Uber I think they may be just aggressively pushing out immature tech." ('19 Dec 14Added Sat 2019-Dec-14 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- "If Republicans Ever Turn On Trump, It'll Happen All At Once" [Nan]: " "So now begins the reading of the tea leaves and the careful scrutiny of every Republican senator's statements (or silence). Will Republicans finally break with Trump? We may not know until it happens. But be forewarned - if it does happen, it will likely take us by surprise. After all, political science has shown us that big political changes often come suddenly, after long periods of stasis. Looking back, it seems like of course the Soviet Union was bound to collapse. But up until the moment it did - and remember, it fell all at once - almost nobody predicted it." ('19 Dec 13Added Fri 2019-Dec-13 11 p.m. CSTin activism | a)
- "Prof Cass Sunstein on how social change happens, and why it's so often abrupt & unpredictable" [Nan]: " "How can a society that so recently seemed to support the status quo bring about change in years, months, or even weeks? Sunstein, co-author of Nudge, Obama White House official, and by far the most cited legal scholar of the late 2000s, aims to unravel the mystery and figure out the implications in his new book How Change Happens. He pulls together three phenomena which social scientists have studied in recent decades: preference falsification, variable thresholds for action, and group polarisation. If Sunstein is to be believed, together these are a cocktail for social shifts that are chaotic and fundamentally unpredictable. In brief, people constantly misrepresent their true views, even to close friends and family. They themselves aren't quite sure how socially acceptable their feelings would have to become before they revealed them or joined a campaign for change. And a chance meeting between a few strangers can be the spark that radicalises a handful of people who then find a message that can spread their beliefs to millions. According to Sunstein, it's "much, much easier" to create social change when large numbers of people secretly or latently agree with you. But 'preference falsification' is so pervasive that it's no simple matter to figure out when they do." ('19 Dec 12Added Thu 2019-Dec-12 11 p.m. CSTin activism | a)
- Why Am I Right-Handed? [Nan]: " Personally, I'm left-handed. But the reason why is not just simple genetics… turns out it is a lot more complicated and basically still not understood." ('19 Dec 11Added Wed 2019-Dec-11 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- "You Must Try, and Then You Must Ask" [Nan]: " When you get stuck, work for fifteen more minutes - no more and no less - before asking for help." ('19 Dec 10Added Tue 2019-Dec-10 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Some Groups of People Who May Not 100% Deserve Our Eternal Scorn [Nan]: " "Look. Hamilton was a pretty good Broadway play. It wasn't the best thing that ever happened. It didn't single-handedly reinvent America. On the other hand, it's also not the source of all evil." ('19 Dec 09Added Mon 2019-Dec-09 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Is Elon Musk preparing for state failure? [Nan]: " "Solar panels, for example, are a necessity when the state can't deliver power reliably, as is now the case in California. Solar panels plus the Tesla give you mobility, even if Saudi Arabia goes up in smoke and world shipping lines are shut down. Starlink, Musk's plan for 12,000 or more cheap, high-speed internet satellites, will free the internet from reliance on any terrestrial government. Musk's latest venture, the truck, certainly fits the theme and even if the demonstration didn't go as well as planned isn't it interesting that the truck is advertised as bulletproof." ('19 Dec 08Added Sun 2019-Dec-08 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- The Woozle Effect [Nan]: "Also known as evidence by citation, or a woozle, occurs when frequent citation of previous publications that lack evidence misleads individuals, groups, and the public into thinking or believing there is evidence, and nonfacts become urban myths and factoids." ('19 Dec 07Added Sat 2019-Dec-07 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- I'll Quit Ice Cream Last [Nan]: " "Most people do not 'practice the fundamentals' in areas that come easily and natural to them. They only research and design training programs in areas where they're struggling. I believe this is a mistake. Someone with excellent money management skills will often not study and tune-up in that area, because it's already 'above the bar' for them - they're happy with that area. If they're struggling with diet, they'll try to make meal plans and nutrition logs and whatever - all good stuff, really - but keep falling off and failing. The person who naturally eats well and struggles with money does the opposite. They don't go deep into nutrition and eating, because they're happy there. Meanwhile, they keep trying to put together budgets, track spending, pay more attention to money - all good stuff, really - but keep falling off and failing. I recommend you do the opposite: learn fundamentals of self-management, tracking, learning, and improvement in an easy and naturally-skilled area for you first. Then, and only then, do you apply your newly mastered self-management skills to the most difficult area." ('19 Dec 06Added Fri 2019-Dec-06 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Orchestrating false beliefs about gender discrimination [Nan]: " "For instance, there is that study about classical orchestras, where blind auditions massively increased the chance of women to get hired. […] I have not once heard anything skeptical said about that study, and it is published in a fine journal. So one would think it is a solid result. […However], this study presents no statistically significant evidence that blind auditions increase the chances of female applicants. In my reading, the unadjusted results seem to weakly indicate the opposite, that male applicants have a slightly increased chance in blind auditions; but this advantage disappears with controls." ('19 Dec 05Added Thu 2019-Dec-05 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Book Review: Barrier to Bioweapons [Nan]: " It turns out that making bioweapons is really hard. It might become less hard in the future though, which is worrying." ('19 Dec 04Added Wed 2019-Dec-04 11 p.m. CSTin nationalsecurity | a)
- "10 lessons for Disney, Apple, and all the new streaming companies trying to take down Netflix" [Nan]: " "We don't know how the fight will turn out, but we do know some things about running subscription video services because we've been in that business ourselves. The most important thing to remember is that success in subscription video services requires two things: Getting a subscriber, and keeping a subscriber. The second is harder. Much harder. And since we are giving out free advice, here are 10 tips for the current and future contenders: 1. Spend today on the content library that will make financial sense five years from now. […, ] 2. The only arbiters of the quality of your content and service is the audience. […] Audiences like content that is "bad." They even like pretending they don't like certain content and will go out of their way to complain about it. […] You probably need more content than you think. If your audience isn't complaining about having too many series they want to watch, they'll pause their subscription and come back when you have them. […] At a certain point, the value of unwatched content is negative, not zero. […] You don't need sophisticated metrics to tell if your audience likes your content. All you need to know is, "Are they coming back?" The more complicated the analysis, the more likely it has been exaggerated. 3. The best way to build your streaming subscription service is to rebrand and cannibalize another business that already has lots of users and, ideally, money. […] 4. If you actually want to make money, subscription streaming shouldn't even be your real business. Instead, give it away as a free or low-cost perk that's part of a much higher-margin and less-competitive business, such as wireless service, smartphones, e-commerce subscriptions, or theme park passes. […] 6. Ultimately, you need hits. A single breakout can double your subscriber growth (though again, you'll need more hits to keep these subscribers), but a bunch of niche "hits" makes only for a niche service. Unfortunately, these hits are hard to produce and even harder to predict. So when you think you've got one, pay whatever it takes to get the rights, reshoot a pilot, or fix the creative. […] 9. To be successful, you have to solve a problem. This cannot be a problem you created. A few hardcore fans might chase Jim and Pam across the streaming landscape, but most will just watch something other than The Office. But if you say, "We are the home for all things Marvel," they'll happily choose you over sifting through Triple Frontier and The Ridiculous Six to find Thor: Ragnarok." ('19 Dec 03Added Tue 2019-Dec-03 11 p.m. CSTin entrepreneurship | a)
- Why and how to start a for-profit company serving emerging markets [Nan]: " "Wave's mission is to improve the world, not to make money. Despite that, we operate more like a tech company than a social enterprise. Our investors are venture capitalists trying to make a high return, and they hold us to the same standards of growth rate and unit economics as any developed-world startup. This might seem like a downside (surely it would be easier to directly optimize for impact rather than have pressure from investors to make money?), but for us it's actually increased our impact in two ways. First, the pressure to grow quickly forces us to make our product better and scale faster, so we help more people by a larger amount. Second, since we've done really well by for-profit investors' standards, we can raise much more money than a nonprofit or social enterprise. […] The "local context plus high standards" theory suggests a simple (though not easy!) strategy to build a high-quality business that helps the global poor: (1) Move to a developing country to understand your future users, (2) Learn the startup playbook (for instance, by doing Y Combinator), (3) Start a business whose users are in the place you live. The remainder of this post fleshes out this strategy." ('19 Dec 02Added Mon 2019-Dec-02 11 p.m. CSTin entrepreneurship | a)
- What is the Morning Writing Effect? [Nan]: " "Ericsson 1993 notes that many major writers or researchers prioritized writing by making it the first activity of their day, often getting up early in the morning. This is based largely on writers anecdotally reporting they write best first thing early in the morning, apparently even if they are not morning people, although there is some additional survey/software-logging evidence of morning writing being effective. I compile all the anecdotes of writers discussing their writing times I have come across thus far. Do they, and why?" It appears that while the morning affect does seem substantiated by a survey of anecdotal evidence, there isn't much theoretical basis for it and just pure "deep work" might be what matters most." ('19 Dec 01Added Sun 2019-Dec-01 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- They Voted Democratic. Now They Support Trump [Nan]: " "The results suggest that the party's winning formula in last year's midterms may not be so easy to replicate in a presidential election. The Democrats' relatively moderate House candidates succeeded in large part by flipping a crucial segment of voters who backed the president in 2016. […] Voters often think differently about state and national issues. Some said they had voted for their local Democrat in the midterms because the person had served well for a long time, or because the candidate's policies would directly help their community. But presidential politics were another story, they said. Many of the white working-class voters in the Rust Belt who supported the president in 2016 were traditionally Democratic voters who backed President Obama in 2012 and even continued to vote Democratic down-ballot in 2016. Democrats generally held on to these voters in 2018, but the reasons many of them voted for Mr. Trump, like his promises on immigration or the economy, could still be relevant." ('19 Nov 30Added Sat 2019-Nov-30 11 p.m. CSTin politicalscience | a)
- "I Have No Idea What "Hard Work" Means" [Nan]: " "Instead of saying 'I worked hard' (compared to whom?), how about saying: 'I worked.' The act of working itself, even if you just clock in most days, put in minimal effort, come home, and never smile at anyone, is still a massive imposition on your life. You should not have to claim some unusual level of diligence to feel entitled to a good standard of living. […] If there were some sort of way of quantifying 'hard work,' through which you could prove that your wealth was truly earned, is there any possible way one could show that they had 'earned' a billion dollars? Do billionaires work that many magnitudes more hours than waitresses? Is their work that many magnitudes more strenuous? Are they that many magnitudes more stressed? (Billionaires might believe so; that just shows they've never been waitresses.) Brandishing the concept of "hard work" in order to justify why some people live in miserable poverty and others have sports car collections is just nonsensical, an obvious distraction away from the question of why these disparities are so vast and unjust. Honestly, "hard work" is such a vague and slippery concept that we'd probably all be better off if we just threw it out. And once we stop playing this pointless game of comparing how hard we all work, we can start asking the real question of when we're going to start being compensated fairly for it." ('19 Nov 29Added Fri 2019-Nov-29 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- New Atheism - The Godlessness that Failed [Nan]: " "We woke up one morning and the atheist bloggers had all quietly became social justice bloggers. Nothing else had changed because nothing else had to; the underlying itch being scratched was the same. They just had to CTRL+F and replace a couple of keywords. Eventually, things came full circle. I started this essay with a memory of noticing that my favorite early-2000s-era website had two off-topic forums: one for religion vs. atheism, and one for everything else. Earlier this year, SSC's subreddit split in two: one for "culture war" discussions mostly about race and gender, the other for everything else. […] I've lost the exact quote, but a famous historian once said that we learn history to keep us from taking the present too seriously. This isn't to say the problems of the present aren't serious. Just that history helps us avoid getting too dazzled by current trends, or too swept away by any particular narrative. If this is true, we might do well to study the history of New Atheism a little more seriously." ('19 Nov 28Added Thu 2019-Nov-28 11 p.m. CSTin activism | a)
- The Radicalism of Equal Opportunity [Nan]: " "You will often hear a distinction drawn between two different kinds of equality: equality of 'opportunity' and equality of 'outcome.' The people who draw this distinction often say that they believe in the former but not the latter. Equality of 'opportunity' is desirable, but equality of 'outcome' is not. As they frame it, one of these is fairly basic while the other is radical and frightening. […] The people who distinguish opportunity and outcome often do so in order to discourage us from trying to redistribute wealth from rich to poor-what matters is not whether people end up highly unequal, but whether they have the same opportunities at the start. If life is a race, it's okay if there are 'winners' and 'losers' so long as the race is played fairly. […] But there are severe problems with this way of looking at things. For one, it makes no sense. It sounds nice, but when you start examining it closely, the boundaries between 'opportunity' and 'outcome' become very unclear. One generation's outcomes structure the next generation's opportunities. Let's say we start with a fair economic 'race,' but then a few people become much richer than others. Those people can send their children to private schools, they can pass on all of their connections and knowledge and wealth to their children. Even if Generation A has equal opportunities, Generation A's unequal outcomes mean that Generation B will have dramatic variations in opportunities. If you want to create equal opportunities, you'll have to constantly be meddling with outcomes." ('19 Nov 27Added Wed 2019-Nov-27 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- You Draw It: What Got Better or Worse During Obama's Presidency [Nan]: Draw your guesses on the charts below to see if you're as smart as you think you are. ('19 Nov 26Added Tue 2019-Nov-26 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- US Commutes Reveal New Economic Megaregions [Nan]: " "An ever increasing share of the world's population is living in what are known as megaregions-clusters of interconnected cities. […] Now, researchers have attempted to map the megaregions of the contiguous United States by studying the commutes of American workers." ('19 Nov 25Added Mon 2019-Nov-25 11 p.m. CSTin economics | a)
- Ground Morality in Party Politics [Nan]: We can use factor analysis to empirically demonstrate a left vs. right divide in politics. Could we use it to empirically demonstrate a good vs. bad divide in ethics? ('19 Nov 24Added Sun 2019-Nov-24 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- Tracking public opinion with biased polls [Nan]: " Polls with unrepresentative sample groups can be extrapolated to measure true popular opinion as long as enough pre-existing information is known about the distribution of how different sample groups answer the question (e.g., pre-existing presidential election surveys)." ('19 Nov 23Added Sat 2019-Nov-23 11 p.m. CSTin politicalscience | a)
- Wealth Advice that Should Be Obvious [Nan]: " Never gamble to earn money, never eat out solely for food, buy freedom instead of luxuries, don't buy stuff if you're in debt, don't buy stuff if you don't need it, sell stuff instead of paying to have it stored, put your bills on automatic, stock up when things are on sale." ('19 Nov 22Added Fri 2019-Nov-22 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Advice for Students on Earning to Give [Nan]: " Go to as prestigious as a college as possible, major in computer science and some other quantitative subject, get as many internships as possible, network extensively, and then pick a high-earning career in finance, software engineering, management consulting, or creating a start-up. Don't get a PhD." ('19 Nov 21Added Thu 2019-Nov-21 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- The Software Engineer's Guide to Negotiating a Raise [Nan]: " You should ask for a raise after doing extensive research on the value you provide to the company, the costs the company faces in replacing you, and how much of a raise you could get by finding a job elsewhere." ('19 Nov 20Added Wed 2019-Nov-20 11 p.m. CSTin career | a)
- Salary Negotiation [Nan]: " How to avoid the "what is your desired salary?" question (skillfully dodging the question by instead talking about the value you will bring and not giving up salary numbers), how to trade off across multiple axes (salary, vacation days, equity, etc) when doing a salary negotiation (valuing salary the most but negotiating on other things when salary is topped up), and how to get raises after being hired (emphasize the value and growth trajectory that you're on)." ('19 Nov 19Added Tue 2019-Nov-19 11 p.m. CSTin career | a)
- Philanthropic Focus vs. Abandonment [Nan]: " Focusing on the most cost-effective ways to improve lives is not unfair to those who have more cost-ineffective needs, since treating them would involve ignoring many more people." ('19 Nov 18Added Mon 2019-Nov-18 11 p.m. CSTin giving | a)
- How Technology Hijacks People's Minds - from a Magician and Google's Design Ethicist [Nan]: " Technology exploits us by creating a menu of choices that gives the illusion of choice while excluding the things not on the menu, creating thrilling anticipation of random notifications like a slot machine, giving us a strong fear of missing out, making us seek social approval, providing endless loops of content, making certain choices inconvenient, and disguising the true costs of actions." ('19 Nov 17Added Sun 2019-Nov-17 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Three Great Articles on Poverty and Why I Disagree with all of them [Nan]: " One can consider approaches to poverty as a quadrant with one axis going from competitive (poverty exists because the rich are actively holding the poor down) to cooperative (poverty exists because some people haven't effectively plugged into the system) and another axis goes from optimistic (the solutions to cure poverty are already known and we can just roll them out) to pessimistic (the solutions to curing poverty are very very hard). Very few people fall in the cooperative-pessimistic quadrant, but this looks the most correct based on this analysis of data." ('19 Nov 16Added Sat 2019-Nov-16 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Top 10 Replicated Findings in Behavioural Genetics [Nan]: " All psychological traits show significant and substantial genetic influence, no traits are 100% heritable, heritability is caused by many genes of small effect, phenotypic correlations between psychological traits show significant and substantial genetic mediation, the heritability of intelligence increases throughout development, age-to-age stability is mainly due to genetics, most measures of the "environment" show significant genetic influence, most associations between environmental measures and psychological traits are significantly mediated genetically, most environmental effects are not shared by children growing up in the same family, and abnormal is normal." ('19 Nov 15Added Fri 2019-Nov-15 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- Are You Killing Your Start-up Before It's Even Born? [Nan]: " The project cycle of doom progresses from new idea to expansion to development to dropped enthusiasm to giving up to a new idea. But nothing ever launches. Instead, you need to start small and launch as soon as possible, with deadlines - three-month plans and weekly goals." ('19 Nov 14Added Thu 2019-Nov-14 11 p.m. CSTin entrepreneurship | a)
- "Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors" [Nan]: " "as long as you feel good, sleeping anywhere between 5 and 8 hours a night seems basically fine for your health, regardless of whatever Big Sleep wants you to believe.All of the evidence we have about sleep and long-term health is in the form of those essentially meaningless correlational studies, but if you're going to use bad science to guide your sleep habits, at least use accurate bad science." ('19 Nov 13Added Wed 2019-Nov-13 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)