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Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself
For the past four years, I’ve worked as a software developer at Google. On February 1st, I quit. It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present.
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Productivity
I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compound growth gets...
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Questions
Some questions that I find interesting. I've omitted some that are related to Stripe. ( Pointers to interesting readings on these topics are always welcome, as are pointers to responses.)
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Some terrible personal news
Cindy Cutts, my wife and best friend, passed away earlier this week. While I was traveling for work recently, Cindy went to visit her family in Omaha, Nebraska. On Sunday, while enjoying time with …
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Aaron, 5 years later
I was in the back left seat of a minivan driving from New York City to Atlantic City. We were a little ways down the NJ turnpike. I was playing Zoo Keeper Battle on my newly gifted tablet. My stomach was filled with a pastrami sandwich .
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Dumber phone
Less is exponentially more – Rob Pike Smart phones are useful, but they are also incredibly addictive, and that addiction is at the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s effort to grab an ever-increasing percentage of our minds. If a substance or behavior controls us, it becomes our master, and that just won’t do. For the…
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A Career Cold Start Algorithm
Starting a new job can be stressful so I've developed an algorithm that has helped me get up to speed quickly.
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Why I Ripped the Same CD 300 Times
I collect music by buying physical CDs, digitizing them with Exact Audio Copy , and scanning the artwork. This is sometimes challenging if the CD was self-published in a limited run in a foreign country ten years ago. It is very challenging if the CDs have an innate defect that renders some tracks unreadable.
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Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
We can admit our knowledge gaps without devaluing our expertise.
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Dear Spotify, please let me unlink my Facebook account
Please let me unlink my Facebook account
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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
My dad emigrated from Colombia to North America when he was 18 looking looking for a better life. For my brother and I that meant a lot of standing outside in the cold. My dad’s preferred method of improving his lot was improving lots, and my brother and I were “voluntarily” recruited to help working on the buildings…
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How to Study Mathematics (2017)
This essay describes a number of strategies for studying college level mathematics. It has sections entitled
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Grow the Puzzle Around You
In 2005, I cofounded Y Combinator, the first "accelerator." Today there are hundreds of them all over the world, but in 2005 what we were doing was so unusual that most people in Silicon Valley...
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I’m a very slow thinker (2016)
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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I put all my personal data on eBay
And almost made lots of money
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Useful Mental Models (2016)
These are some mental models I find useful. They’re rooted in decades of experience of thousands of experts – a modern equivalent of folk wisdom. Mental models are useful to quickly and correctly reason about seemingly intractable problems. They require quite a bit of intuition to properly internalize, but once you’ve…
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Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a classic text that's had a strong influence on countle...
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The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
The Benjamin Franklin method for programming books: read a code sample, close the book, and rewrite it from memory to truly learn it.
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What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)
In early 2016 I eventually decided it was my turn to take part in this project. I decided my job was going to be presenting the potential and the beauty inside these sketches. I selected those that I found most interesting and genuine and diverse, then rendered them as if they were real. I became the executor of these…
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I don’t understand Graph Theory
Graph theory represents one of the most important and interesting areas in computer science. But at the same time it’s one of the most…
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The hotel bathroom puzzle
In his wonderful book The Evolution of Useful Things, the author and civil engineer Henry Petroski shares one of the most famous case studies in the history of design: Before it was destroyed by fi…
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We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio
When I started my ham life as KK6VSI in August of 2015, I wish I could have had the information I'm about to lay out here. Of course, most of the equipment didn't yet exist. So another way of looking at it is that my entry into amateur radio was perfectly timed for my generation's Golden Age of Ham Radio.
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Unicode Dicks
One of the things that has always slightly amused and puzzled me is that unicode lacks a "cock" glyph. I mean, it seems to have characters a...
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Today Is My Wife’s First Birthday Since She Died
Some advice about love & death followed by a meandering eulogy.