I’ve found “efficiency as the opposite of stability” a very powerful concept to think about - even though it’s fairly simple, it seems to be almost a fundamental law. Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better | Hacker News
📚 Finished reading Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss
📚 Finished reading Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss
Your developer won’t get hit by a bus. They’ll get hired by Netflix! Your developer won’t get hit by a bus. They’ll get hired by Netflix!
Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough Richard Feynman’s Perspective of Life | Hacker News
Each generation thinks it invented sex Robert A. Heinlein - Wikiquote
Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do”*… | (Roughly) Daily
Since you cannot go back in time to change the past, forgiveness is about giving up the hope of a different or better yesterday. It relates to forgiving actions that were taken, that gave you the feelings of loss of control over your happiness. It’s about acknowledging those things that another did or said that caused pain and making the decision that you are not going to let that hurt or control you anymore. Forgiveness can be very empowering. It can give you the chance to be free of another person’s emotional control. It has nothing to do with the other person. As was said before, it is something that is for you and you alone.” Why forgiving someone else is about you | Hacker News
I call it “performative productivity” since it’s actually a performance. We Don’t Need to Work So Much (2015) | Hacker News
Wonder if we have a working system already
Despite the authors best attempts, the truth peeks out in the article: merit is often a necessary, but not sufficient cause for success. Not sufficient, particularly, for extraordinary success. A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you | Hacker News
What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day. Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive? | Hacker News
Very few people tend to look at the mind as a system, and also seem to ignore that depression, anxiety, panic disorders, etc. happen for a reason. The reason why modern humanity have increased risk of these symptoms is because they know, given their perhaps wrongly learned models of the world or otherwise, that even when they achieve their so-called life goals, that they wouldn’t achieve philosophical nor psychological satisfaction that they seek. Their mind has predicted the conclusion of their efforts, and the conclusion lies far below what they seek. Thus the mind desperately attempts to re-understand, re-configure, and re-model the world to achieve its goals. Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders | Hacker News
Are employees paid a proportional amount to the value they bring to their organization? I would say no. I do not believe every talented European is 40% as capable as the average developer in the US. I do not believe that the same software engineer that made $10k in India, suddenly brings 10x as much value due to a 1 year masters, once they move to the US. Ask HN: Should a remote employee’s salary be tied to their physical location? | Hacker News
New repository: aquilax/renamed - Renamed - use your favorite text editor to mass rename files
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. Ask HN: Which book helped you understand the world? | Hacker News
When people are born, they all start good, but even though they all start out about the same, you ought to see them after they have had time to become different from one another by picking up habits here and there!“. Translation Dr. Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith Ask HN: Which book helped you understand the world? | Hacker News
Geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck in it. Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay Geography is only physics slowed down and with a… - Quotes from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Books
When in challenging or sad situations it’s only reasonable to be grumpy, or pessimistic or what have you. Negative emotions or feelings are part of our natural range and appropriate depending on the cirumstances. Forced positivy to me always has something ghoulish, Truman-show like. It pays to be grumpy and bad-tempered (2016) | Hacker News
The benefits of being attractive are exorbitant. Beauty might be the single greatest physical advantage you can have in lif The Greatest Privilege We Never Talk About: Beauty | by Saeid Fard | Jul, 2020 | Medium
Basically all current social media ends up optimizing for creating outrage, spawning mobs, less thoughtful discussion and more vitriolic arguments, etc. PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN | Hacker News
Being right in a relationship doesn’t count for much. Even if you are objectively correct, relationships are about helping the other person live their life. All partners in a relationship compensate for the other’s shortcomings. That is one of the benefits of a relationship. Beware of Being “Right” | Hacker News
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it… . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth. The machine learning community has a toxicity problem | Hacker News
This is one of the major life-lessons I’ve taken away from card games, summarized by Captain Jean Luc Picard: ““It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.” Recruiting Is Poker – Not Chess | Hacker News
Have we forgotten what a “degree” actually means? When you receive a diploma, it just means some institution is willing to attest that you have achieved some sort of qualification. A 28-year-old with no degree becomes a must read on the economy | Hacker News
Diversity at all costs: except diversity of opinion. Politically-correct witch-hunt is killing free speech | Hacker News
Part of the wisdom of meditation lies in the following: There is baggage we all carry, the self, this belief we’re the center of it all, the author of (and subservient to) our own thoughts. How do I stop doing what makes me unhappy, if that’s “who I am”? But, in reality, I can abandon “who I am” and find new processes of living and new ways of thinking about the world. A researcher on how to live a happy life | Hacker News
When I read this I see a a niche, super premium hardware company that managed to acquire tens of thousands of customers by word of mouth. Not only that, their customers are all in-effect self employed or small businesses with huge average revenue per employee. They manage global supply chains, intense competition, all while taking on and managing huge legal/compliance risk. How is is that supposedly “dumb,” criminals can do this, and yet many of us are stretching our intellectual capacities to learn new technologies and maths, developing our nth stupid app, trying to achieve a fraction of the customer traction and revenue that street thugs manage to do every day. Are these people much smarter than average, or does it mean that if you sell something people actually want, literally nothing else matters about your intelligence, education, character, background, or anything at all. When I read these drug stories, it just reinforces for me that growth solves everything. You can succeed with a crew of violent, drug addicted idiots whose only reliable characteristic is short term thinking, and who spend half their time in prison if you have product market fit. What I’m beginning to think is that the “smarter,” people are in a company, the less anyone will want their product. It’s like the success of a venture is inversely proportional to the number of ostensible geniuses it employs. reply How Police Secretly Took over a Global Phone Network for Organized Crime | Hacker News
The social status of computer scientists is zero. Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017) | Hacker News
the Stainless Steel law: “the better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero.” The Iron Law Of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules · Gwern.net
The Iron law: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero” The Iron Law Of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules · Gwern.net
All infra teams eventually become platforms. All product teams eventually become experiences. When viewed negatively this is called scope creep. I don’t know what it’s called when viewed positively but I expect the word “holistic” to be used unironically. The Rise of Platform Engineering | Hacker News
I believe trauma instills scientific-type knowledge that is factually false but locally adaptive. False beliefs need more protection to be maintained than true beliefs, so the belief both calcifies, making it unresponsive to new information, and lays a bunch of emotional landmines around itself to punish you for getting too close to it. This cascades into punishing you for learning at all, because you might learn something that corrects your false-but-useful model. Emotional Blocks as Obstacles to Learning | Hacker News
You waste years not being able to waste hours Crossing the ocean of my ignorance
nothing in psychology makes sense except in the light of individual-differences May 2020 news · Gwern.net
Doing technically brilliant work may be enough for your personal gratification, but you should never think it’s enough. If you lock yourself in a room and do the most marvellous work but don’t tell anyone, then no one will know, no one will benefit, and the work will be lost. You may as well not have bothered. For the world to benefit from your work, and therefore for you to benefit fully from your work, you have to make it known. Sell Yourself Sell Your Work
Scrum is a way to take a below average or poor developer and turn them into an average developer.It’s also great at taking great developers and turning them into average developers. Leave scrum to rugby, I like getting stuff done | Hacker News
Upgraded ubuntu to focal
The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. — Claude Shannon, 1948 A brief introduction to the beauty of Information Theory
7 helpful tips on how to be miserable: 1. Stay still. 2. Screw with your sleep. 3. Maximize your screentime. 4. Use your screen to stoke your negative emotions. 5. Set vapid goals. 6. Pursue happiness directly. 7. Follow your instincts. this isn’t happiness™ (7 helpful tips on how to be miserable, Brandon…), Peteski
Cities are meant to stop traffic. That is their point. That is why they are there. That is why traders put outposts there, merchants put shops there, hoteliers erected inns there. That is why factories locate there, why warehouses, assembly plants and distribution centers are established there. That is why people settle and cultural institutions grow there. No one wants to operate in a place that people are just passing through; everyone wants to settle where people will stop, and rest, and look around, and talk, and buy, and share. Cities Are Meant to Stop Traffic
The 4-Second Workout. Intense bursts of exercise throughout the day may have surprising metabolic benefits. The 4-Second Workout - The New York Times
It’s bad form to mention money-laundering. Instead, you talk about asset-management structures and tax beneficial schemes. — John Sweeney “Money laundering is a very sophisticated crime and we must be equally sophisticated”*… | (Roughly) Daily
New repository: aquilax/flash-cardon - Flash Cardon - browser extension to help with learning new languages by reading web pages
Cows make milk. They milk themselves. Other cows check the milk (for free). Cows - get this - PAY THE FARMER to take the milk away. Then the farmer (you won’t believe this, honestly) sells the milk back to the cows. Sometimes the farmer lets the cow drink a tiny bit of its own milk. The farmer calls it ‘longstanding commitment to Open Access’. What Is a Sustainable Path to Open Access? | Hacker News
If powerful forces consistently push us toward premature exploitation, we should almost always be biased towards exploring more. The Embarrassing Problem of Premature Exploitation - LessWrong 2.0
The world is an incredibly complex place and everything is changing all the time… trying to plan your career is an exercise in futility that will only serve to frustrate you, and to blind you to the really significant opportunities that life will throw your way. The Embarrassing Problem of Premature Exploitation - LessWrong 2.0
Hence venture capitalist Marc Andreesen’s first rule of career planning: don’t. The Embarrassing Problem of Premature Exploitation - LessWrong 2.0
Babies love putting things in their mouths: dirt, insects, bits of grass, their own poo. They have no sense of fear or self-preservation, and come up with endlessly creative ways to place themselves in mortal peril. Once they learn to talk, their constant experimentation with the world transcends the physical to the philosophical. They want to know everything. They are bottomless pits of curiosity, with very little in the way of attention span or self-discipline. Your typical two-year-old can only concentrate on a task for six minutes at a time. Young children are not self-aware enough to feel much in the way of shame, or embarrassment. Nothing is off-limits. The Embarrassing Problem of Premature Exploitation - LessWrong 2.0
Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better. The Technium: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice