Lukas Murdock
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Links I really don't want to forget.

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July 2021

  1. How to Operate

    How to Start a Startup: Lecture 14

  2. Wilson Miner - Seeing through the net

  3. Wilson Miner - Steal This Talk

  4. Wilson Miner - When We Build

  5. Build a Team that Ships

    Naval

  6. Why People Feel Like Victims

  7. How Social Media Destroyed my Generation

  8. The future of work is written

    Increment

  9. Sparktoro introduces a Marketing Architect

  10. Your competitors don’t matter

  11. The Alexander Piano

    “Why did you build such a long piano?”

  12. Present Bias

    a comic by Doist. Why it's so hard to give a damn about our Future Selves.

  13. Best practices for code comments

  14. The Pepsi Universe

  15. Give it five minutes

  16. Stoic notes

    A learning a day

  17. Three Cheers for Socialism

    Christian Love & Political Practice

  18. Wrong ideas about work

  19. Reversals in psychology

    A list of exaggerated psychological phenomena

  20. Emotional Education

    Alain de Botton.

  21. Dear Diary

    Thomas J Bevan. Knowing you are going to write about your day- especially if you embrace the idea of capturing it, mundanity and all- trains you to begin to pay attention.

  22. The strategic use of language to change thinking

    Category Pirates.

  23. On The Experience of Being Poor-ish, For People Who Aren't

    Feeling Broke vs. Being Broke: “How many times have they turned off your water?”

  24. Forgive me forgive me forgive me

    Letters of note.

  25. Cathedral Thinking

  26. 3 questions to improve your interface design

    Who are the users and what is their goal? Will the users know what to do here? Will the users know they’re making the right progress toward their goal?

  27. Who do you want your customers to become?

    HBR. 2012.

  28. PAGNI: Security Edition

    Probably Are Gonna Need It: Security Edition

  29. Dear young designer

    by Tobias van Schneider

  30. Customer Development

    Seth Godin. Being clear about ‘who’s it for?’ and ‘what’s it for?’ is the actual hard work of developing customers.

  31. Content Writing Guide

    Animalz.

  32. Agencies

    Trends.vc

  33. Mandate Levels

    Nine 'Mandate levels' of work, from very specific, to very general. Grades slack in the leadership reigns.

  34. System vs Goal

    In the absence of an accompanying goal, a system is meaningless.

  35. The Most Precious Resource is Agency

  36. How to Work Hard

    Paul Graham.

  37. Haruki Murakami’s Daily Routine

    Up at 4:00 a.m., 5-6 hours of writing, then a 10K run.

  38. Fun Laws, Rules and Principles You Really Ought to Know

    Oxford Royale Academy. Clarke’s Third Law, Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, Murphy’s Law, Cunningham’s Law, Godwin’s Law, Campbell’s Law, Occam’s Razor, The Pareto Principle, Sturgeon’s Law, The Peter Principle, Conquest’s Laws of Politics.

  39. WPA Posters

    The Work Projects Administration (WPA) Poster Collection consists of 907 posters produced from 1936 to 1943 by various branches of the WPA.

  40. The Murder of Wilbur Wright

    How many of our greatest minds have we lost?

  41. On voice in writing

    Thomas J Bevan.

  42. Interruption as Assault

    Interruption is assault.

  43. Summary of The Evolving Self

    By Ivaylo Durmonski

  44. Casualties of Perfection

    You waste years by not being able to waste hours. Build in slack.

  45. Product Validation Frameworks are Mostly Useless Without Taste

    CommonCog, Commonplace

  46. Average colors of the world

  47. Notes on Nationalism

    By George Orwell

  48. Foxes and Hedgehogs

    Altos VC

June 2021

  1. Foxes and Hedgehogs

    Altos VC

  2. Product Validation Frameworks are Mostly Useless Without Taste

    CommonCog

  3. The Particle/Wave Duality Theory of Knowledge

    swyx. Books, courses, and wikis are prime examples of discrete learning. Email Newsletters offer modes of continuous learning.

  4. Yes, there are stupid questions

    When we reframe a question—when we change our method of questioning—we also change the outcome.

  5. On Refusing To Look Things Up

    Learn, above all, to trust your own experience and let your real world experience be your teacher.

  6. Index of Bongard Problems

    The problem is to find, or to formulate, convincingly, the common factor between two different sets.

  7. I See You

    When you see me you bring me into existence. We can only get better when we truly begin to see each other. We can only learn and grow when we acknowledge each other. We can only make a difference if we know our existence matters.

  8. Expectations vs. Forecasts

    There is no reason to forecast unless you’re going to take specific actions tied to that forecast. If you want to take fewer actions without being willfully blind to the future, just have expectations.

  9. Harder Than It Looks, Not As Fun as It Seems

    Everything is sales also means that everyone is trying to craft an image of who they are. When you are keenly aware of your own struggles but blind to others’, it’s easy to assume you’re missing some skill or secret that others have.

  10. Notes on Storyworthy

    Ribbonfarm.

  11. Notes on Effective Engineer

    Effective Engineers produce results.

  12. Building Bridges

  13. Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life

  14. Please don’t just say hello in chat.

  15. Syd Mead 1 Thumbnail Sketching and Line Drawing

    The Gnomon Workshop.

  16. The Rise of Opaque Intelligence

    Any sufficiently advanced logic is indistinguishable from stupidity.

  17. The Meaning of Life

    Derek Sivers.

  18. Things I Believe

    a collection of the things JanStette believe about software development

  19. The Tyranny of Numbers

    Thomas J Bevan.

  20. Made of love

    The Sephist. I don’t view any particular project as a way to build something that grows fast or sells for lots of money. I just want to build many, small, well-made things that bear the marks of my love, that serve as evidence that I cared about the quality of what came from my own hands. And in the end, I want to be able to look back on the whole thing and find it valuable because it is good, because of the hours I spent laboring over the particulars of my words and the pixels of my designs.

  21. The Thinking Ladder

    Tim Urban, Wait But Why.

  22. How To Tell A Story Using The Story Scaffold

    Context (backstory), Catalyst (event), Complication (obstacle), Change (transformation), Consequence (resolution).

  23. The Document Culture of Amazon

  24. History of the Web

    Matthew Gerstman.

  25. Obviously Awesome

    CommonCog.

  26. Non-machinable surcharge

    The question shouldn’t be, “does it scale?” Instead, it might be, “is it worth it?”

  27. Sprezzatura

    Being able to do your craft without a lot of visible effort.

  28. Cohort based courses

    Wes Kao.

  29. Build Alignment

    Budi Tanrim. First: Who are we trying to serve? Second: What are we trying to enable them? Third: Whatever our solution will be, how would it be different from the market’s existing solution?

  30. Base Rate

    xkcd.

  31. Good execution vs. Bad execution

    Julie Zhuo. In 10 Tweets.

  32. How to Talk to Human Beings

    If you ever need to deal with children aged 2 to 99, stop reading right now and go buy How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.

  33. A Random Walk Through Git

    I’ve yet to take this walk, but here for posterity.

  34. Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs

    Philip Tetlock at Long Now. Ignore Confident Forecasters.

  35. Don’t be a hedgehog (thought leader)

    Create an extended product roadmap and put those items at least a year off into the future.

  36. Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

    Why is everyone in such a rush?

  37. Always be quitting

    Document: knowledge, long-term plans, meetings. Train. Trust. Don’t make yourself the point of contact. Delegate.

  38. iOS 15, Humane

    How Apple could help us reclaim our attention

  39. The Atlassian Product Delivery Framework

  40. Three People To Call When You Need Help with Positioning

    Dave Kellogg.

  41. Good Synthesis is the Start of Good Sensemaking

    Commoncog. Adapting to uncertainty with sensemaking patterns and frameworks.

  42. You Don’t Need Permission

    Talking is not the same as doing. You don’t need to wait for permission to do.

  43. A Project of One’s Own

    Paul Graham.

  44. 40 for 40

    Chris Coyier’s list.

  45. The only things that matter when you die

    Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you.

  46. Obviously Awesome

    Summary by CommonCog.

  47. Almanac Guide to Async Communication

  48. Front-End Testing is For Everyone

May 2021

  1. The Revenge of the Intuitive

    Brian Eno. Turn off the options, and turn up the intimacy. I recently spent three days working with what is possibly the most advanced recording console in the world, and I have to report that it was a horribly unmusical experience.

  2. it never feels like the right time

    ava. Expecting things to feel right is a trap because it means your actions are dependent on some arbitrary set of conditions you’ve decided is necessary in your mind.

  3. How to commit to the right opportunities

    You will outgrow most of the opportunities presented to you faster than you can benefit long term from them. Hell yes, or no.

  4. Love Letter to an Encyclopedia

    Everything Studies.

  5. Play your own game

    Figure out what game you’re playing, then play it–only it.

  6. Productive Uncertainty

    Productive, novel, and complex uncertainty.

  7. Honored and cultivated

    Be intentional about what you honor, choose cultures/communities that honor what you want to cultivate.

  8. We Know What You Did During Lockdown

    A short film on how much data private companies are able to gather about you.

  9. What Are You Doing With Your Life? The Tail End

    Kurzgesagt.

  10. On Being An Autodidact

    Thomas Bevan. The bulwark against being a mere node for noise is to foster curiosity. Is to read based on whim and not outcome. Is to be one of the very, very, very few who actually read primary sources or attempt to find the spring from which the vast rivers of certain thoughts originates (whether good or bad).

  11. Fast.

    Patrick Collison. Examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together.

  12. Be a clear thinker

    Identify the real goal, decompose vague concepts, frame the right questions, seek more data or experience, listen to multiple perspectives, assess upsides and downsides, examine your biases, act like an owner.

  13. There's a Hole at the Bottom of Math

    Veritasium

  14. Working under or above the API

  15. Jobs below the API

    Increasingly, the only paying work left for humans will be the one of building the software.

  16. Geekcode

  17. The “Marketing is Evil” Problem.

    Rand Fishkin. Find what change you seek to make and where you fit vs alternatives. Find the right audience, find what resonates with them, find their sources of influence, and amplify the right message to the right people in the right places.

  18. The Wall In The Head

    Thomas J Bevan. You accept this like fate. In fact fatalism is, I would say, the primary symptom of someone having a wall planted firmly in their head.

  19. Choices

    Etymology Nerd. When you make a choice, you cut out all the other possible choices.

  20. NFTs: crypto grifters try to scam artists, again

    The scam is to sell NFTs to artists as a get-rich-quick scheme, to make life-changing money. There’s a gusher of money out there! You just create a token! And any number of crypto grifters would be delighted to assist you. For a small consideration.

  21. The Reverse Interview

    Reforge. How To Choose Your Next Company

  22. Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer

    Negotiate.

  23. The return of fancy tools

    I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.

  24. I’m exhausted all over but particularly the face

    An epistolary fist-bump to all the loners, introverts, and reclusive souls who would much rather relax in their own company than mentally exhaust themselves in an effort to enjoy the company of others.

  25. The Mapping of The Creator Economy

  26. the hierarchy of helpfulness

    Management. Identify a problem, figure out what caused it, research how to fix it, and fixed it. Just wanted to keep you in the loop.

  27. commitment / accountability

    Don’t browse, commit.

  28. In Praise of Idleness [1932]

    By Bertand Russell.

  29. Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men

    You claim to be a brilliant salesman, and yet you failed in the first essential. You never sold yourself to the people with whom and through whom you had to work. You say they were jealous, but a man of your intelligence ought to know that the answer to jealousy is modesty, hard work -- and results. They would have jumped on your band wagon fast enough if you had made them see the advantage of it. But after waiting around for the band wagon to start, they concluded that it wasn't going to start, and it never has. Business and life are built upon successful mediocrity; and victory comes to companies, not through the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get the most out of ordinary folks.

  30. What’s going on here, with this human?

    Management. Interviewing. There are three parts to expanding your ability to see people more clearly: seeing your own reflection in the window, seeing the elephants in the room, and seeing the water.

  31. What Is an Entertainment Company in 2021 and Why Does the Answer Matter?

    Matthew Ball. Create/tell stories, Build love for those stories, Monetize that love.

  32. Efficiency is the Enemy

    If you ever find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, sinking into stasis despite wanting to change, or frustrated when you can’t respond to new opportunities, you need more slack in your life.

  33. 99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice

    Kevin Kelly.

  34. Tiny Wins

    Big benefits of little changes in product.

  35. Hacker Scripts

    Based on a true story.

  36. Friendcatchers

    Win Friends Online While You Sleep

  37. 35 Principles for 35 Years

    SWYX.

  38. The Paradox of Genius: Why Long-Term Thinking Wins

    Be obsessed with what will endure 10 or 50 years from now.

  39. Why I’m so good at coding.

    TechLead. The validation of your work is what makes you pro. Have a story (context) for your work–your work is a product.

  40. Code blocks, but better

    Improving the user experience of code blocks.

  41. Live a life worth living

    Letters of note. Our purpose in this life is to experience everything we possibly can, to understand as much of the human condition as we can squeeze into one lifetime, however long or short that may be.

  42. Invest in your brain, your body, and your community.

    Not much else matters at the end of the day.

  43. The Ian Knot

    the World's Fastest Shoelace Knot

  44. Reversible and Irreversible Decisions

    Is this a reversible or irreversible decision?

  45. I could build this during the weekend

    It's easy to oversimplify problems and try new, leaner technologies that optimize for our use cases.

  46. Crazy New Ideas | Hacker News

    Related to below.

  47. Crazy New Ideas

    Paul Graham.

  48. The problem of Excess Genius

    A thread. Preceding military victory, high rates of social intercourse, and education (the role tutors in particular)

  49. The Death of The Middle

    We’re getting more interested in either exactly what we want, or whatever’s most frictionless. Aggregate or specialize. In other words, give people everything they want or the one thing they need.

  50. “A CULT OF IGNORANCE” BY ISAAC ASIMOV, 1980

    It’s hard to quarrel with that ancient justification of the free press: “America’s right to know.” It seems almost cruel to ask, ingenuously, ”America’s right to know what, please? Science? Mathematics? Economics? Foreign languages?” None of those things, of course. In fact, one might well suppose that the popular feeling is that Americans are a lot better off without any of that tripe. There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

  51. A New Understanding of Effort

    Scott Young. Effort Depends on Alternatives, Willpower Depends on Reward.

  52. Who Will Amplify This? And Why?

    Rand Fishkin. Marketing.

  53. High quality Mac icons from inside your Mac

    A bunch of macOS’s icons, from System Preferences panes to menu bar icons to, yes, pretty much every Mac model Apple has ever made in the last twenty years or so.

  54. The 5 Ps of Product Management

    Product Management. Purpose, Problem, Pattern, Prose, Priority.

  55. Make Boring Plans

    Novel Technology Deserves Boring Plans.

  56. Choose Boring Technology

    Embrace Boredom. Just Ship.

  57. How HashiCorp Works

    You can never truly escape risk, just change how you accept it.

  58. Stock Market Returns Are Anything But Average

    You can never truly escape risk, just change how you accept it.

  59. Slow thinker

    Everything is timed. We become reluctant to stop and think.

  60. I’m not languishing, I’m dormant

    I am waiting to be activated.

  61. The Quack Attack is Back

    Drone. Mall.

  62. Where Did the Other Dollar Go, Jeff?

    It’s an error to add measurements that have different units. Two measurements that have the same unit attached (dollars, in this case) may still sum to a value that represents nothing meaningful.

  63. Buying a PC with Dell

    A Journey Into Hell

  64. Privacy | App Tracking Transparency | Apple

    App Tracking Transparency lets you control which apps are allowed to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites.

  65. How Sure Are Climate Scientists?

    Degrees of Uncertainty.

  66. The 'Capitalism is Broken' Economy

    We should ask ourselves, our communities, and our government: if a business can’t pay a living wage, should it be a business? If it’s too expensive for businesses to provide healthcare for their workers, maybe we need to decouple it from employment? If childcare is a market failure, but we need childcare for the economy to work, how can the government build that infrastructure?

  67. Beauty In A World Of Brutalism

    Embracing the Ordinary.

  68. From Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman

    There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for the fun of it. It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

  69. Competition vs. activation

    If you want to grow, you’ll need to get someone to not only decide that you’re worth their time and money, you’ll need to motivate them to act now instead of later.

  70. I bought a sauna

    Which one doesn't matter. I barely know. I don't even care. And this is how I'm buying things from now on.

  71. Making friends in adulthood

    AOM podcast. We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends.

  72. Asynchronous Working In 2021

    Send people a loom video asking them to try out the tool instead of finding time on your calendar.

  73. Blogumentation

    Writing Blog Posts as a Method of Documentation.

  74. 'It looks good to me'

    Of course, it does. But to ship the experience that matters for people. Your personal opinion is not enough. Your decision should focus on the people you serve.

  75. Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages

    If you’re tired of screaming The Middle Ages weren’t dark and bad!

  76. Two rules for projects that I think are very promising for 40+ lifestyles

    No new top-level projects (TLPs). Ten-year commitments to projects or no deal.

  77. The True Meaning of Technical Debt

    Hacker News post.

April 2021

  1. ooooops I guess we’re* full-stack developers now

    Chris Coyier. *by “we’re” i mean front-end developers

  2. Types of Meetings That Should Always Be Async

    Doist. Announcements, status updates, brainstorms, kickoffs, moving work forward, reviews, meetings not everyone can attend.

  3. Slow-Reading is the New Deep Learning

    Speed-reading is for skimmers. Slow-reading is for scholars.

  4. Languishing

    The neglected middle child of mental health can dull your motivation and focus — and it may be the dominant emotion of 2021.

  5. Software designers, not engineers An interview from alternative universe

    When solving problems that are not inherently ill-defined, you often find better soluti­ons by treating them as such.

  6. How does Micro.blog even work?

    Manton Reece.

  7. The Self Educating Child

    MMM. We will learn from our mistakes and develop ourselves along the way, and make the most of it. Which is really a good plan for life itself.

  8. Design is like riding a bike

    Design requires you to practice. Falling a few times is part of the practice.

  9. APIs All the Way Down

    Packy McCormick. The Magic of API-First Business Models

  10. On Going To The Beach

    Thomas J Bevan. If you can’t lie on a blanket on the sand on a warm spring day and feel the sun on your skin and listen to the tide as it moves, if you can’t do that and smile a half smile and have absolutely no thoughts in your head whatsoever, then you have problems.

  11. Signs of happy marriage that lasts

    What it takes for a marriage to stay happy over time. Friends — and have friends. Think like a team. Focus on the positive. Manage stress. Manage conflict. Enjoy spending time together. Share a world view.

  12. Beware of tight feedback loops

    After achieving proficiency in a field, tight feedback loops are useless.

  13. long feedback loops

    Mastery requires an ability to stick it out through long feedback loops.

  14. Peter Drucker On Marketing

    Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.

  15. Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses.

    Instead of starting from “how do we hire top talent?”, start from “what are our weaknesses?”

  16. Amazon 2020 Letter to Shareholders

    The world wants you to be typical–in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don't let it happen.

  17. Everyone is rational

    Or it could be that we all like to tell ourselves we’re doing the right thing, but ultimately, all we can do is make choices based on how we see the world.

  18. We Were Made For These Times

    An excerpt from Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

  19. A different approach to frontend architecture

    Presentation, application, domain, infrastructure.

  20. The Art of Traditional Japanese Printmaking

    The printing process as demonstrated by master printmaker Keiji Shinohara.

  21. Questions Every Manager Should Ask

    Management. Trello.

  22. The first 18 months of a startup

    A thread.

  23. Keep Your Identity Small

    Paul Graham. You can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants.

  24. they let us testify at the EU Parliament!

    And you better believe we named names and called out Google.

  25. Tsugite

    Interactive Design and Fabrication of Wood Joints.

  26. Private Choices Have Public Consequences

    They never once believed that anything is ever about more than their own sour selves, and a jealous world’s conspiracy against their comfort.

  27. Sustainable Change Agency

    John Cutler. Bring the lightest amount of structure to your efforts.

  28. Specializing in Problems We Don't Understand

    LessWrong. Problems we do understand mainly require relatively-specialized knowledge and techniques adapted to solving particular problems. But problems we don’t understand mainly require general-purpose skills of empiricism, noticing patterns and bottlenecks, model-building, and design principles.

  29. When Choosing Marketing Channels, Visualize the Curve

    Rand Fishkin. Marketing channels curve.

  30. “Do you have time to jump on a call?”

    9/10 times this is communication laziness. 10/10 times this destroys your schedule.

  31. What a scheduled phone call does to an entire day.

    Context switching.

  32. “You’re not that good”

    Seth Godin. When we begin, we’re not that good. Once we start to build skills and offer something of value, some will persist in believing we’re not that good. It’s possible that in fact, we’re not that good yet, and there aren’t enough people who want what we’ve got. And then we get better.

  33. The No-Nonsense Guide to Simplifying Every Aspect of Your Life

    TAOM. Podcast. Gary Collins shares lessons from his book “The Simple Life Guide to Decluttering Your Life.”

  34. The top 0.1% of ideas I’ve stumbled upon on the internet.

    A thread by George Mack.

  35. Best new year's resolution? A 'stop doing' list

    Jim Collins. What are you deeply passionate about? What activities do you feel just “made to do”? What can you make a living at?

  36. People systematically overlook subtractive changes

    People systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations.

  37. 15 Technologies I Thought My Son Would Never Use

    Technology doesn’t always turn out the way we’d expect.

  38. World Building

    Alex Danco. Everyone’s job is world-building, even if they don’t realize it.

  39. Horizontal History

    Wait But Why. Looking at history from a new direction.

  40. Embrace the Grind

    If you’re willing to embrace the grind, you can pull off the impossible.

  41. Rationalism before the Sequences

    A story about what it was like to be a rationalist decades before the Sequences and the formation of the modern rationalist community.

  42. Managing Work on a Fully Remote Team

    Doist. How we balance individual autonomy with accountability to make progress on our company's ambitious goals

  43. The Healing Power of JavaScript

    For some of us—isolates, happy in the dark—code is therapy, an escape and a path to hope in a troubled world.

  44. One Customer Feedback Email Changed Our Startup’s Trajectory

    Rand Fishkin. Remind Your Audience You Exist. Uncover Points of Friction, Solve Them, Then Tell People You’ve Solved ‘Em.

  45. The 2021 Early-Retirement Update

    An update of last five or six years of Living a Fi into a single post

  46. Seth Godin: Enrollment

    It’s almost impossible to manage someone to enrollment, but we can lead them there. Enrollment is a combination of what we do and what we’ve been surrounded by. Appropriate difficulty followed by learning. Peer support and peer pressure. Expectations understood and perhaps met. Small steps that lead to an appetite for effort and outcomes.

  47. Books that suck you in and books that spin you out

    Some books have a centripetal force— they suck you in from other books. Some books have a centrifugal force — they spin you out to other books.

  48. Asymmetric Opportunities and the Cult of Optionality

    Asymmetric opportunities are overhyped and poorly understood.

  49. Becoming a manager in 2021

    1:1s, coaching, sponsoring, feedback, vibes.

  50. The 30-foot rule

    Being distinctive is a choice, and it’s not an easy one. Because it requires you to stand for something and to serve a specific audience, not everyone.

  51. Friendship

    Jason Kottke.

  52. Alex Garcia 7 Lessons

    A thread.

  53. The Consumer Authentication Strength Maturity Model (CASMM) v5

    Visualize a user's current internet hygiene level, and see how to improve it.

  54. Intention vs. Drift

    There are two ways to create. Either we intentionally make progress toward goals, or we drift & see what happens. For best results, I think we need both.

  55. Kill math.

    The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.

  56. Show up and practice

    Do it. Show up and practice. Face the hard part.

  57. Let me learn: Provide tutorials in more formats

    When our teachings are only provided in one media, in one language, in one form, it is inherently inaccessible to some subset of our students.

  58. Japanese typography, sinograms

    The first of a series about Japanese typography.

  59. Metric Paper

    CPG Grey.

  60. Why I'm unreachable and you should be too

    Most things are a distraction.

  61. Derek Sivers: I can’t answer questions.

    Answering people’s questions was taking up all of my time. So I quit.

  62. The Shortness of Time

    FS. Time is invisible, so it’s easy to spend. It’s only near the end of our life that most of us will realize the value of time. Make sure you’re not too busy to pay attention to life.

  63. Beware of the Bubble

    MMM. Real Investment Doesn’t Make Exciting News Headlines.

  64. Your Addiction to Outrage is Ruining Your Life

    Outrage is the latest drug of society. It’s more acceptable than alcohol and it’s more addictive than anything you can swallow, smoke or inject, because while heroin or methamphetamine are clearly harmful, anger feels so damn righteous.

  65. Toward A Bayesian Theory Of Willpower

    Scott Alexander. What is willpower?

  66. Nine things a (technical) program manager does

    Ben Balter. 1. Communication, coordination, and facilitation; 2. track work to be done; 3. manage risk; 4. report up and across; 5. relationship management; 6. resolve conflict; 7. drive consensus; 8. boundaryless engagement; 9. doing what needs to be done.

  67. Bret Victor collection of Quotes

  68. Steve Jobs in 1991

  69. Steve Jobs in 1991

    Improving group productivity.

  70. Creator Demand Curve

    The creator demand curve shows how many fans are willing to pay for your content at a particular price.

  71. Don’t Be Nice. Be Kind.

    Stop being nice and instead work to be kind.

  72. Computers and Creativity

    To foster optimal human innovation, digital creative tools need to be interoperable, moldable, efficient, and community-driven.

  73. Outgrowing software

    At a certain point, everyone has grown up with this stuff, everything is a software company, and the important questions are somewhere else.

  74. against narratives

    Engaging more with narratives than actual life. Living without emotional ties to the past or future.

  75. Product Development as Iterated Taste

    Commonplace. It took 18 months of PR/FAQ iterations before Amazon’s software engineers wrote the first line of code for AWS. Spending time up front to think through all the details of a product, and to determine—without committing precious software development resources—which products not to build, preserves your company’s resources to build products that will yield the highest impact for customers and your business. Product development processes are simply ways of iterating cheaply through an idea space, with sufficient feedback, in the hopes of checking enough boxes for success.

  76. How to Network Online Like a Human

    Doist. Get clear on why, decide who, get clear on the value you provide and get comfortable communicating it.

March 2021

  1. On Photography And Soul Theft

    Photographs externalise the internal.

  2. Alan Watts on Love, Freedom, and Fear

    You cannot think simultaneously about listening to the waves and whether you are enjoying listening to the waves.

  3. Commenting vs. making

  4. effort

    If someone’s much better than you at something, they probably try much harder. You probably underestimate how much harder they try.

  5. The Product Strategy Stack

    Company mission, company strategy, product strategy, product roadmap, product goals.

  6. Things your manager might not know

    Management. Julia Evans.

  7. Font Follows Feeling

    A brief type classification

  8. It's time to build: A New World's Fair

    We must look to the past to build the future.

  9. A Realistic Guide to Time Management

    Doist. Managing your time well isn’t just about getting more done.

  10. Inspiration is Overrated

    It’s the boring, invisible chugging away of your background processes that make progress.

  11. Peep Laja on the Everything is Marketing Podcast

    Conversion Optimization, Data vs Intuition, and Why Brand Is The Ultimate Moat

  12. One Step Closer to a World Without Email

  13. Kierkegaard on how “if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right”

    Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.

  14. Happiness

    Naval.

  15. The fallacy of “what gets measured gets managed”

    Management. Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

  16. Everything you’ve wanted to know about marketing ROI

    Figuring out what your marketing ROI should be is difficult. But without knowing your ROI, it makes it hard to make a case in the boardroom as to why you should be trusted with money.

  17. Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality

  18. You Can Advertise On Websites That Are, Ya Know, About Things.

    Chris Coyier.

  19. A Drone’s Eye View of a Bowling Alley

  20. “Well, it seems great to me”

    If your music, your graphic design, your website–whatever your work is–isn’t resonating with the market, it might be because you forgot to make it for them.

  21. What is a Minimum Viable Product, Anyway? MVP Analogy.

    KellBlog. Minimum means the least you can do to test your hypothesis. Viable means the product actually does the thing it’s supposed to do, even in some very basic way.

  22. Front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end web development

  23. Convince your team to learn fast and try not to make a mess

    Management. How to overcome objections when trying to adopt change in an organization.

  24. Yeet. Delete. Repeat.

    Ship fast, learn fast — and do it all without burying ourselves in technical debt.

  25. Skipping research, being trendy, being generic, being bland or cliche, being too abstract, being too complex, relying on color or effects, too many options, not responsive, no guidelines.

  26. How to Move Your Team Toward Async-First Communication

    Advice for team leaders and team members who want to bring more calm, focused productivity to the workplace.

  27. Set future performance reviews up for success now

    Management. Laura Hogan.

  28. Looking Closely is Everything

    A sophisticated observer operates like a scientist, drawing direct and clear lines between what’s on the page and what is known and true.

  29. The Pudding Cup

    The best visual and data-driven stories of 2020.

  30. Utility Maximization = Description Length Minimization

    LessWrong. To optimize a system is to reduce the number of bits required to represent the system state using a particular encoding.

  31. The Paradox of Content Marketing to Beginners vs. Experts

    Rand Fishkin. Know the distribution of your audience’s beginners, and experts.

February 2021

  1. How to make your ideas concise, credible & compelling

    As you travel higher up inside an organization the decisions get more important, but attention spans get shorter and so the information gets more compressed. You need to be concise, credible & compelling.

  2. Executive presence

    You need the ability to present ideas to the c-suite, create a compelling business case for multi-million dollar investments and work cross-functionally to gather buy-in from stakeholders.

  3. Leading Your First Marketing Team

    Crossing the Canyon: Building strategy across all channels, guiding others to be good at theirs, collaborating across departments, conducting the orchestra.

  4. How to make career decisions

    If our skills are great, but the environment is wrong (or vice versa), then we aren’t set up for success.

  5. If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics

    It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s easier to lie without them. Sometimes pulling numbers out of your arse and using them to make a decision is better than pulling a decision out of your arse.

  6. Good strategy needs a good story

    Human stories, data stories, competitive stories.

  7. The Business of Art

    By The Oatmeal.

  8. When Did Generic Grocery Brands Get So Good Looking?

    Designed to make a shopper feel less like they’re budget shopping, and more like they’re treating themselves to something nice.

  9. Ahead of Their Times

    Chris Crawford.

  10. How to Think Like a Renaissance Man

    The Art of Manliness Podcast with guest Scott Newstok.

  11. Status as a Service (StaaS)

    People are status-seeking monkeys, monkeys who seek out the most efficient path to maximizing social capital.

  12. How To: Be A Good Employee, Be A Great Boss

    Management.

  13. 2012 re:Invent Day 2: Fireside Chat with Jeff Bezos & Werner Vogels

    To watch later.

  14. SotW: Be Specific

    Eliezer Yudkowsky. Recognize when your words or thoughts are too abstract. Render your thoughts more specific and concrete.

  15. All Stories Are Wrong, but Some Are Useful

    Stories, not people, rule our world. We’re always telling ourselves a story about how the world works. Stories are a vehicle for change. Learn about them.

  16. Who is Scott Alexander and what is he about?

    A beginner's guide to Slate Star Codex (now Astral Codex Ten).

  17. You and Your Research (Live)

    Richard Hamming Live.

  18. You and Your Research

    Richard Hamming. On Paul Graham.

  19. You and Your Research

    Richard Hamming.

  20. The Animation That Changed Cinema

    A 30-minute video that celebrates the animations & animators that changed cinema.

  21. The Word “Hacker”

    Paul Graham. Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on the FBI's list.

  22. Marketing Exists to Make Sales Easier

    Kellblog. Define your mission statement as “help” and remember that “help is defined in the mind of the recipient.”

  23. It’s About Time

    Seth Godin. Taking Time.

  24. “Strategy vs Execution” is not a helpful distinction

    Instead of thinking of strategy and execution as separate, think of it as a feedback loop that tells us whether our strategy works or not.

  25. Never Skip Retros

    Management. Start doing retrospectives.

  26. Use ideas as tools not truths

    Let the fanatics care about what is true while you focus on what is useful.

  27. How to Make Wealth

    Paul Graham. You need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage.

  28. Performance reviews should be unsurprising, fair, and motivating

    Lara Hogan. Management.

  29. Hubspot Content Marketing and the hustle

    Diversify your content offerings, create consistently, and build an audience.

  30. How to Write For the Way Your Coworkers Actually Read

    Frontload what’s important, chunk information for retention, make it skimmable, write plainly and more.

  31. Prestige in US Today

    They don’t that much care about your grades, what you’ve learned, or what you did in your jobs or extracurriculars, as long as they were prestigious. A “serious” person always picks max prestige. Always.

  32. Experts Versus Elites

    Elites are selected primarily for their prestige and status, which has many contributions, including money, looks, fame, charm, wit, positions of power, etc.

  33. Be The Hero of Your Own Movie

    Joe Rogan.

  34. Six Ways To Think Long-Term

    Roman Kznaric. Deep-time humility. Legacy mindset. Intergenerational justice. Cathedral thinking. Holistic forecasting. Transcendent goal.

  35. The Impact of Chief Diversity Officers on Diverse Faculty Hiring

    We are unable to find significant statistical evidence that preexisting growth in diversity for underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups is affected by the hiring of an executive level diversity officer for new tenure and non-tenure track hires, faculty hired with tenure, or for university administrator hires.

  36. The man who produced Steve Jobs’ keynotes for 20 years

    A panel conversation with Wayne Goodrich.

  37. The 1997 Amazon Shareholder letter.

    Jeff Bezos.

  38. Litter and Nihilism

    Thomas J Bevan. Throwaway culture and small, antisocial acts.

  39. The Meta-Creator Ceiling

    Don't play games you don't want to win.

  40. Productize Yourself

    Figure out what you're uniquely good at, and apply as much leverage as possible.

  41. The Perfect PokéRap by Brian David Gilbert

    Unraveled LIVE at PAX East 2019

  42. Marketing software, for people who would rather be building it

    Patrick McKenzie MicroConf 2013 transcript.

  43. How to Engineer Marketing Success

    Patrick McKenzie (Patio11) – MicroConf 2012.

  44. Careers in Marketing

    Matthew Barby on important decisions he’s made over the past few years.

  45. “I’m just doing my job”

    But what if you weren’t? What if you replaced “doing” with “improving” or “reinventing” or “transforming”?

  46. Greg Isenberg guide to startups

    A thread.

  47. Seeking the Productive Life

    The personal infrastructure of Stephen Wolfram.

  48. David Foster Wallace unedited interview (2003)

    To watch later

  49. Apple and the Metaverse

    Matthew Ball. An essay on platforms, power, prosperity, principles, and profits.

  50. Four Refoundings

    The ideal time for a refounding is when a company looks unbeatable from the outside and vulnerable from the inside. That makes it an uncomfortable choice, but a necessary one.

  51. Becoming A Category Creator

    Category designers move the world from the way it is, to the way they think it should be. Evangelize your category. Not your brand.

  52. Get the most from your limited free time

    Scott H. Young. The Paradox of Effort.

  53. 3:45 PM

    CalArts student Alisha Liu’s second-year film about a lovely day in the park interrupted by an existential case of the Sunday scaries.

  54. How to secure your financial future

    Lochhead on Marketing. Build A Financial Egg Nest. Don’t Buy Shit You Can’t Afford.

  55. You are what you subscribe to

    Lochhead on Marketing. Choose what you consume.

  56. Coined concepts

    Anchoring ideas to sticky catchphrases and influence your place in discourse.

  57. How to be a tech influencer

    Content creation is an effective way to create prestige. Be more influential by channeling your energy into long-lived and semi-private communities.

  58. A forty year career

    Lethain. Focus on a small handful of things that build together, with each making the others more impactful as they compound over time. Pace, people, prestige, profit and learning.

  59. Ads Don’t Work That Way

    Cultural imprinting, not emotional inception.

  60. The High Price of Mistrust

    FS blog. When we can’t trust each other, nothing works.

  61. Ideas That Changed My Life

    Morgan Housel/Collaborative Fund.

  62. The days are long but the decades are short

    Advice from Sam Altman as he turns 30. Life is not a dress rehearsal—this is probably it. Make it count.

  63. the Quality vs Consistency Debate

    SWYX, Shawn Wang. Default to consistency, and cut scope.

  64. Greg Isenberg on 10 simple questions that changed his life

    A thread. Can you really control that? Did you start today with a victory? What are you optimizing for? Are you being optimistic? Are you reacting or responding? Can you disagree politely? Are you thinking in decades or years? Are you earning trust? Do you understand the rules? Why don't you get straight to the point? Why do you take things so personally? Are you seeking the truth or do you want to just validate your beliefs? Are you learning fast or are you learning well? Are you building something authentic?

  65. A primer on investing for designers and developers

    Start now. Invest automatically every month. Don't overthink it.

  66. Politics and the English language | The Orwell Foundation

    The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language.

January 2021

  1. Gradations

    Delight as the hard-edged world melts into a full-rainbow spectrum of reality

  2. Toolkits over checklists

    Toolkits enable results-based work.

  3. Design to solve a perception, not a problem

    Take a step back and ask “Why is it a problem?”

  4. Ten Ideas That Have Shaped My Life

    By Scott H. Young

  5. Why do so many brands change their logos and look like everyone else?

    You could slap any logo on any product and hardly anyone would notice a difference.

  6. The Ivy Lee Method

    At the end of each work day, write down only the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow.

  7. Tom Hirst on Marketing for freelancers

    A thread.

  8. The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class

    Alex Danco's Newsletter, Season 3, Episode 2. You climb the Labour ladder by working hard and climb the Elite ladder by acquiring leverage.

  9. The Ideology Is Not The Movement

    From Let’s get together to do X. To, X? What X? A rallying flag that connects people, gives them a shared foundation to build culture off of, and walls the group off from other people.

  10. Strategy Turns

    What got you here won't get you there. You shouldn't use a playbook that you haven't earned yet.

  11. Money: The Unit of Caring

    The whole reason why we have money is to realize the tremendous gains possible from each of us doing what we do best.

  12. Tough love for managers who need to give feedback

    Five reminders for the managers (and executives) who need to step up how they deliver feedback to their reports.

  13. Semantic satiation

    When repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning.

  14. How to build an audience using a content flywheel

    How people build massive attention & audiences.

  15. Still alive

    Scott returns in Astralcodexten.

  16. 90% of everything is crap

    Discovering Sturgeon’s law. Don’t be so quick to accept that something is not for you. Keep looking.

  17. Visual design lessons from Dmitry Novikoff based on Big Sur Icons

    Cinematic Backgrounds, Bevels and Highlights, Highlights and Shadows, Non-linear Gradients, Rhythm between elements, Structure of icons, Icon Perception.

  18. Be secretly wrong

    Being wrong is how you learn. Before you're publicly right, consider being secretly wrong.

  19. The Secret Passion of Steve Jobs

    Art experts and longtime friends share how Jobs extensive collection of shin-hanga Japanese woodblock prints could have shaped his ideals with their simple, clean aesthetics and attention to detail. NHK WORLD-JAPAN

  20. Falling behind

    Falling behind isn’t really something that can actually be caught up - it’s not falling behind at all, it’s missing out entirely.

  21. Delicious Visual Map of History

    By Tim Urban at Wait But Why.

  22. Arguments and outcomes

    Status roles, Affiliation, Convenience cause people to change their actions.

  23. Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign

    The desire to redesign is aesthetic-driven, while the desire to realign is purpose-driven.

  24. The Marketing Magic of MSCHF

    By Coffeezilla

  25. How to be a sponsor when you're a developer

    Lara Hogan on how to be a sponsor.

  26. Notes on writing for yourself

    Discipline, synthesis, writing, learning mindset, meditation.

  27. Hipsters On Food Stamps, Part 1

    The economy doesn't care about intelligence, at all, it doesn't care what you know, merely what you can produce for it.

  28. Opportunities Don’t Visit Caves

    Start participating.

  29. Embrace The Ordinary

    This is not a popular message. Largely because it is hard to sell people consumer goods off the back of it. Don’t try to escape, embrace. Don’t dream, wake up. Don’t project or reflect or regret. Just try to take in this ordinary day in your ordinary life and enjoy it for what it is.

  30. 100 Tips For A Better Life

    From ideopunk, cross-posted on LessWrong.

  31. Steve Jobs on Apple’s Vision

    What we're doing is we're building tools that amplify human ability.

  32. Validation is a mirage

    Truth is, you don’t know, you won’t know, you’ll never know until you know and reflect back on something real. And the best way to find out, is to believe in it, make it, and put it out there.

  33. Launching a new local service business overnight with Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM)

    Normally if you want to use direct mail to advertise, you need a list of customers and their addresses. But EDDM (which is a relatively new offering from USPS) allows you to target specific neighborhoods for CHEAP.

  34. Harsh truths that will make you a better person

    Cracked. The world only cares about what it can get from you.

  35. Draw the box smaller

    If you’ve got big ideas and can’t seem to get people to buy in, it might not be your idea. Change how you communicate about it.

  36. The opportunity you’ve been waiting for

    Smart companies hire people who are passionate about what they do and determined to work there.

  37. Tim Urban on validation

    Remember that almost all creative journeys start lonely, supported only by a burning internal belief.

  38. Aaron Swartz’s How to: Be more productive

    It almost seems like common sense. But society’s conception of work has pushed us in the opposite direction. If we want to be more productive, all we need to do is turn around.

  39. Natural technique doesn’t exist

    If there are people who are playing at a different level than you who are embracing an approach that feels unnatural to you, you may have found the technique that you’ve been missing.

  40. Optimal Overhead

    Make sure you are at least no less productive with overhead than you were without it.

  41. Social exploration: When people deviate from options explored by others

    People are more likely to explore unknown options when they learn about known options from other people’s experiences.

  42. Compress to impress

    Encode important strategies in very concise and memorable forms.

  43. Shooting and Storming Of The US Capitol In Washington DC

    View Discretion Is Advised

  44. Homesteading Mental Models

    Never get tired of repeating your best ideas.

  45. How to instantly show your value

  46. Boilerplate advice

    If this feels revelatory to you, you may have a bigger problem of insufficient real mentors in your life.

  47. Why top entrepreneurs invest in executive coaching

    Leaders cannot see what’s right in front of them (the best ones admit it).

  48. Why isn‘t there a line at the library?

    We can refuse to be brainwashed into accepting the status quo, and we can commit to finding the others, engaging with them and leveling up.

  49. A reminder from Beeple

    Fuck all of your excuses. Sit the fuck down and do your work.

  50. Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago

    Remember Aaron Swartz.

  51. Whose Life Are You Living?

    Are you letting life happen to you?

  52. No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees

    Gumroad Founder & CEO on how they work.

  53. Microsimulation of Traffic Flow

    See what happens when you merely lower politeness.

  54. 10 Powerful Life Skills for the New Decade

    Take compounding seriously, develop taste, sequence things well, see what others see, make and execute decisions quickly, spot a convex or concave world, tell stories, dive into the source, be specific, see systems.

  55. Getting Rich: from Zero to Hero in One Blog Post

    A rant from Mr. Money Mustache.

  56. What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

    Beware of the curse of knowledge, focus on the fundamentals, simplicity, seek first to understand, beware of lock-in, and be honest and acknowledge when you don’t fit the role.

  57. How to present to executives

    Send an early draft to an executive attending the meeting and ask them what to change. If you listen to and apply that feedback, you'll figure out the other pieces as you go.

  58. Steve Jobs: We don’t ship junk

    Steve Jobs responds to a question from Molly Wood of CNET and Buzz Out Loud Podcast. Steve's answer defines Apple's product strategy.

  59. Time of Our Lives: Songs from EVERY YEAR (1970-2020) DJ Earworm

    A trip through time with one song representing each year from 1970 to 2020.

  60. Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

    Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager's schedule, they're in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.

  61. What Should You Do with Your Life? Directions and Advice

    Alexey Guzey asks a lot of people about their life plans. At least half of them say that they have no idea where to move and are just coasting along, not sure what to do next. Therefore, this post.

  62. Things you’re allowed to do

    A list of things you’re allowed to do that you thought you couldn’t, or didn’t even know you could.

  63. Great minds might not think alike

    Fostering mutual understanding is really important for social cohesion and for truth-seeking. Doing this between two people who have similar thought patterns is relatively easy. Helping Republicans understand Democrats, economic elites understand middle-Americans, Shors understand Constances — that is hard. For that, you might just need a translator.

  64. Meditation Tips for a Lifetime of Practice

    Whether you’re brand new to meditation, or you’re interested in kick-starting your existing practice, I hope this post will have something helpful for you.

  65. How James Clear runs his business

    “2020 was my 10th year as an entrepreneur. Here are some ‘rules’ I try to follow after a decade of stumbling around building my company.”

  66. Studio Ghibli scene photos

    Over 1,000 photos from Studio Ghibli films.

  67. 100 Ways To Live Better

    Meta, mind, body, stuff, place, the soul, career, and relationships.

  68. “Science” as Curiosity-Stopper

    It’s not a real explanation, so much as a curiosity-stopper. You don’t actually know anything more than you knew before I said the magic word. But you turn away, satisfied that nothing unusual is going on. Because someone else knows, it devalues the knowledge in your eyes. You become less curious.

  69. The Anti-Calculator

    This is calculating thought, always seeking what it thinks is a solution to a problem. Even the present itself is viewed merely as a trampoline toward a better result.

  70. The Zen of Archery - you hit the target when you stop trying to hit the target

    All content is content about the content of content. It is all the equivalent of a behind the scenes DVD extra for a film that doesn’t exist because the crew were all busy making the DVD extra instead.

December 2020

  1. Reasons You Aren't Updating Your Personal Site

    Tips and strategies to painlessly manage a personal website.

  2. The Ultimate 80s Medley

    Van Halen, A-Ha, Tears for Fears, Depeche Mode, etc.

  3. Your Job is to Make Art

    Seth Godin at ConvertKit Craft & Commerce 2017

  4. You Will Never Do Anything Remarkable

  5. Signaling as a Service

    You are engaging in a constant battle for attention and status.

  6. When None Dare Urge Restraint

    Everyone everywhere would be saying how awful, how terrible this event was; and that no one would dare to be the voice of restraint, of proportionate response. Once restraint becomes unspeakable, no matter where the discourse starts out, the level of fury and folly can only rise with time.

  7. Stranger Than History

    “I wonder if one could describe in enough detail a fictional story of an alternative reality, a reality that our ancestors could not distinguish from the truth, in order to make it very clear how surprising the truth turned out to be.”

  8. The Virtue of Narrowness

    What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world.

  9. Original Seeing

    She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.

  10. Do We Believe Everything We're Told?

    Be more careful when you expose yourselves to unreliable information, especially if you’re doing something else at the time. Be careful when you glance at that newspaper in the supermarket.

  11. Dark Side Epistemology

    If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy. The dangerous thing is to have a false belief that you believe should be protected as a belief—a belief-in-belief, whether or not accompanied by actual belief.

  12. 100 Tips for a Better Life

    100 Tips for a Better Life — from LessWrong.

  13. The Least Convenient Possible World

    Always have a plan for what you would do in the least convenient possible world.

  14. Correspondence Bias

    The tendency to draw inferences about a person’s unique and enduring dispositions from behaviors that can be entirely explained by the situations in which they occur.

  15. The Gap Between Having Good Taste and Doing Good Work

    All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there exists a gap between our work and our ambitions.

  16. Paid communities use strategic friction to build high-signal environments. Members are invested and engaged.

  17. The Big Here and Long Now

    Brian Eno on the Long Now.

  18. The medical test paradox: Can redesigning Bayes rule help?

    3blue1brown video about Likelihood Ratios, also sometimes called Bayes Factors.

  19. The Fallacy of Gray

    Everything is shades of gray, but there are shades of gray so light as to be very nearly white, and shades of gray so dark as to be very nearly black. Or even if not, we can still compare shades, and say “it is darker” or “it is lighter.”

  20. Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning

    Pace layers provide many-leveled corrective, stabilizing feedback throughout the system. It is in the contradictions between these layers that civilization finds its surest health. I propose six significant levels of pace and size in a robust and adaptable civilization.

  21. Pursuits of curiosity

    In modern conversation, curiosity is forced to take a bit of a back seat. Make places consciously designed to arouse curiosity.

  22. The Case Against Education

    Zvi. As in: I See No Education Here.

  23. Notes on The Case Against Education

    Education works by resorting to signaling.

  24. Creator hierarchy of needs

    Publish, grow, monotize.

  25. The Data-Driven Life

    What happens when technology can analyze every quotidian thing that happened to you today.

  26. Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement

    A post by Gwern. A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.

  27. Who Americans spend their time with, by age

    In adolescence we spend the most time with our parents, siblings, and friends; as we enter adulthood we spend more time with our co-workers, partners, and children; and in our later years we spend an increasing amount of time alone.

  28. Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement

    A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.

  29. “Science” as Curiosity-Stopper

    Just because someone else knows, it devalues the knowledge in your eyes. You become less curious. Consider the consequences if you permit “Someone else knows the answer” to function as a curiosity-stopper.

  30. Explain, worship, or ignore?

    Select your option wisely.

  31. Read the sequences

    Rationality: From AI to Zombies.

  32. How to kill the university

    We need a better way to build and grow this super-community of communities.

  33. Gwern Tea Reviews

    Teas with reviews and future purchases; focused primarily on oolongs and greens. Plus experiments on water.

  34. Hiroshi Yoshimura-Green (1986)

    Lovely Japanese minimal ambient album.

  35. Brick by brick — Will Smith

    You don't say “I'm gonna make this build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that's ever been built,” you don't start there. You say I’m gonna lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid—there will not be one brick on the face of the earth that’s gonna be laid better than this brick. And you do that every single day.

  36. How to build great products

    Categorize features into three buckets: gamechangers, showstoppers, and distractions.

  37. Happiness by Steve Cutts

    The story of a rodent’s unrelenting quest for happiness and fulfillment.

  38. Mark Osborne’s MORE

    A stop-motion mixed-media short film that tells the story of an old, tired inventor as he struggles through joyless life in a drab and passionless society.

  39. Follow Your Curiosity. Read Your Ass Off.

    What’s important is the methodology: read your fucking ass off.

  40. A place to write

    The patterns matter. Streaks work. All part of your practice.

  41. Mimicry vs Reflexivity

    Reflexivity builds a positive feedback loop between perception and reality, and Mimicry breaks it.

  42. Everybody Wants Thought Leadership Content. But How Do You Do It, Exactly?

    What earned secrets do you have that you can pour into thought leadership content?

  43. 202 Nietzsche on Truth and Lie (1991)

    Saving for later

  44. Earnestness

    Can you imagine a more important change than one in the relationship between intellectual curiosity and money?

  45. The Art of Traditional Japanese Wood Joinery

    Examples of traditional wood joineries which are still used today.

  46. The Good Life Handbook by Epictetus

    A book summary of The Good Life Handbook by Epictetus.

  47. The Future of Agencies

    Part of the Agency Acceleration Series hosted by SharpSpring, Seth Godin presents about his thoughts on the future of agencies.

  48. How to Create Ridiculously Good Content

    Part of the Agency Acceleration Series hosted by SharpSpring, Ann Handley presents how agencies can create ridiculously good content.

  49. Positioning Your Agency

    Part of the Agency Acceleration Series hosted by SharpSpring, David C. Baker presents a 15-minute session about how to position your agency

  50. Networks and Power

    A talk by Niall Ferguson on overcoming the tyranny of the now.

  51. Three Cheers for Solutionism?

    America’s COVID-19 experience also illustrates the need for indirect ways of modifying the structure of our problem even if we find ourselves constrained in attacking it more directly.

  52. Why not seo and…?

    SEO works best when it’s combined with other kinds of marketing.

  53. This is real. That’s not.

    You are not magically exempt from the possibility of ending up on the street.

  54. Up and down the ladder of abstraction

    A technique for thinking explicitly about these levels so you can move among them consciously and confidently.

  55. How to achieve ultimate blog success in one easy step

    Always Be Jabbing. Always Be Shipping. Always Be Firing. Pick a schedule you can live with, and stick to it.

  56. How to read a book

    How you can learn the most from a book — or any other piece of writing — when you're reading for information, rather than for pleasure.

  57. Don’t call yourself a programmer

    And other career advice from Patio11.

  58. Becoming a Better Ancestor

    A talk by Roman Krznaric on overcoming the tyranny of the now.

  59. Seeing Whole Systems

    A talk by Nicky Case on how to finesse complexity.

  60. Why Correct Isn’t Useful

    The difference between should and how.

  61. Pain is not the unit of Effort

    If it hurts, you're probably doing it wrong.

November 2020

  1. How Are You Doing?

    A tough time can make it difficult to determine just how tough a time you’re having.

  2. Hire people who give a shit.

    A simple formula for success.

  3. Introduction to Git and Github

    I’ll understand one day.

  4. Blogging vs. blog setups

    A webcomic about computers and uncertainty.

  5. How to Think for Yourself

    Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else?

  6. Digital Tools I Wish Existed

    The core issue is an extraordinarily high level of friction in the process of finding, organizing, and sharing digital content.

  7. All our selves in one basket

    How society limits both individual and community self-expression both online and offline.

  8. We’re Optimizing Ourselves to Death

    we will remain the burnout generation.

  9. Technical debt as a lack of understanding

    Knowledge needs reorganizing to reflect the current understanding.

  10. In Praise of the Gods

    What the rationalistic world forgot.

  11. The Big Lessons From History

    The same story, again and again.

  12. Simple explanations

    How do you write simple explanations without sounding condescending?

  13. I attempted to cross an entire country in a straight line. Part 1

    What would happen if you tried to walk in a completely straight line across an entire country?

  14. Raising Baby Grey, a Gender-Neutral Child

    Meet a Bronx couple who are raising their child Grey in a gender-neutral way until they make a decision for themselves.

  15. How to Be at Home (2020)

    If you are, at first, really fucking anxious, just wait. It’ll get worse, and then you’ll get the hang of it. Maybe.

  16. One Thing Leads to Another

    A short film about collecting, cycling caps, art and design, personal connections and why it’s worth doing something for a long time, even if the benefits are not clear at first.

  17. FrontPage: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

    Microsoft FrontPage has its thorns, but don't discount the fact that those thorns are attached to a rose.

  18. I Lived Through A Stupid Coup. America Is Having One Now.

    Indi Samarajiva on living through a stupid political coup in Sri Lanka and a warning to Americans.

  19. A digital tool checklist

    Fast, ownable, good design, portable, skills learned should outlive the tool.

  20. A hypothesis is a liability

    Let your fantasies run wild. There could be gorillas hiding in there.

  21. Being Glue

    Glue work demonstrates and builds strong technical leadership skills.

  22. There's nothing ”WEIRD” about conspiracy theories

    Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.

  23. Lessons about the Creator Economy

    Consistency, community, collaboration, diverse monetization, come for the tool—stay for the network.

  24. Low Effort, High Impact Content

    meta, surveys, collate, round-ups, refreshes, spin-off.

  25. Vangelis

    Blade Runner Soundtrack Remastered 2017.

  26. Networking for Nerds

    Project, know your ask, make it easy.

  27. News in the age of abundance

    The news is like cereal.

  28. Help at scale with digital products. While divorcing your time and money.

  29. Barriers change groups, make members more engaged as they aim to justify their investments.

  30. Your blog is not a publication

    Quality and depth, not volume and breadth. Library, not publication.

  31. Find your rat people

    The people that get what you do, appreciate it, and love you for it.

  32. tribalism

    An exploration of the mechanisms that drive tribalism — and that offer a way out of it.

  33. The incoming

    Just for an hour, to turn it off. All of it. To sit alone and create the new thing, the thing worth seeking out, the thing that will cause a positive change.

  34. Patrick McKenzie and David Perell

    WoW leadership, writing online.

  35. The Five Minute Museum

    Thousands of pieces from small museums brought tos life to tell the story of human efforts.

  36. Adam Savage’s 10 Commandments of Making

    10 tips for makers of all ages and advice Adam would've given to himself if he was just starting out.

  37. UX copy sells

    When you write, you’re selling something: A story. A belief system. A product.

  38. Woodblock Printing Process - A Japan Journey

    The step-by-step process of making a woodblock prints.

  39. Executive is not a real job, but if it were here would be its description

    Convince smart people to work with you, allocate scarce resources, craft vision, break ties, curate culture, be held accountable.

  40. How Does Do Science? │ Figuring out what's true

    How we can learn about the world, how to test hypothesis, and the basics of science. What is science?

  41. The student

    Getting teachers, students, and reality on the same page.

  42. Expecting Short Inferential Distances

    A clear argument has to lay out an inferential pathway, starting from what the audience already knows or accepts. If you don’t recurse far enough, you’re just talking to yourself.

  43. Election Day 2020: René Girard, Part 2

    Understanding the 2020 Election through Girard’s worldview on mimetic desire, differentiation, and scapegoating.

  44. How to Identify Destructive Leadership Patterns

    People leave managers, not companies.

  45. And a pony at your birthday party

    Many of the interactions we have that are ostensibly for us are actually for other people. Once we can see who it’s for, it’s a lot easier to do it well.

  46. Idea of Progress

    A Bibliographical Essay by Robert Nisbet

  47. When Money Is Abundant, Knowledge Is The Real Wealth

    Past a certain point, money and power are no longer the limiting factors to get what we want.

  48. Trillions of Questions, No Easy Answers: A (home) movie about how Google Search works

    A (home) movie about how Google Search works.

  49. Noticing and authorization

    Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important?

  50. Good things come to those who write

    Attention is the most valuable resource.

October 2020

  1. The slippery excuse

    Things are fragile, easily killed, and need only gentle encouragement to continue growing.

  2. The Sequences

    A series of posts on human rationality and irrationality in cognitive science.

  3. The Treacherous Path to Rationality

    A post about the hard path towards explicit reason.

  4. Unexpected, Useless, and Urgent

    Thinking about inbox management, RSS feeds, and email overload.

  5. Seth Godin: writing every day

    Seth Godin on David Perell’s podcast.

  6. Facebook is censoring me and most of you too.

    Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk on People, Not Algorithms.

  7. Six Lessons from Six Months at Shopify

    Familiarize yourself with their operating philosophy, teams ship what they’re empowered to ship, have someone understand every piece, create environments talent never leaves, software market runs on other software, compress learning.

  8. This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)

    David Foster Wallace's remarkable 2005 commencement speech, this is water, is a timeless trove of wisdom for living a meaningful life.

  9. The Content Value Hierarchy (CVH)

    The four levels of content value.

  10. Should You Reverse Any Advice You Hear?

    Every piece of social commentary is most likely to go to the people who need it least. Advice reversal might at least be worth considering.

  11. Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses.

    Misperceiving an expanding stupidity or expanding stupidity is real and this explains it.

  12. Beware the Casual Polymath

    We live in times of great disaggregation, and yet, seem to learn increasingly from generalists.

  13. The Only Way to Grow Huge

    Have people recommend the product or service to other people.

  14. Where do marketers turn for advice and inspiration?

    Blogs aren’t dead, but marketers are discovering information in new ways.

  15. How to read the news

    The medium is no longer the message. The path it took to find you is the message.

  16. From Consumer to Creator

    Why you should start creating something, now.

  17. A manifesto for small teams doing important work

    It works because it’s personal.

  18. Consumers Book

    A book about the people who put stuff inside their head.

  19. A Quarter Century of Hype

    25 Years of the Gartner Hype Cycle.

  20. The Death Of Lunch

    We must re-learn the art of the proper lunch.

  21. Be a creator, not just a consumer

    Why you should write.

  22. How To Be Successful

    13 thoughts by Sam Altman about how to achieve outlier success.

  23. The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world?

    You can’t suddenly change the moral value of things by calling them different names.

  24. 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong

    Whatever the theory you can always be wrong.

  25. Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell

    A summary of reactionary thought.

  26. An Unexpected Ass Kicking

    With a computer you can make things. You can code, you can make things and create things that have never before existed and do things that have never been done before.

  27. All In All, Another Brick In The Motte

    The motte and bailey doctrine.

  28. Ethnic Tension And Meaningless Arguments

    “I’m pro-[topic]” doesn’t necessarily imply that you believe any empirical truths about [topic], or believe any moral principles about [topic], or even support any [topic] policies. It means you’re waving a little flag and cheering.

  29. Casey Neistat - Thoughts on how I approach filmmaking

    Expressing creativity using the most basic, accessible methods is the hardest thing to do and the purest. The very best steak houses serve their filet on a plate with nothing else. Shi*ty franchises cover theirs in sauce and other stuff to distract you from the fact that you’re eating dog food.

  30. Proving Too Much

    Proving Too Much is when you challenge an argument because, while proving its intended conclusion, it also proves obviously false conclusions. Because you don’t need an argument that can’t be disproven, only an argument that can’t be disproven in the amount of time your opponent has available.

  31. All Debates Are Bravery Debates

    There are some people who need to hear each side of the issue. And it’s really hard to target advice at exactly the people who need it.

  32. On Being Bipolar

    Living with a mental illness means always trying to be one of the “good” sick. When you are the bad sick, you become a cautionary tale.

  33. A Few Rules

    20 solid rules.

  34. 15 Spiky point of view examples

    Is your point of view spiky enough?

  35. Spiky point of view

    A spiky point of view is a perspective others can disagree with. It’s a belief you feel strongly about and are willing to advocate for. It’s your thesis about topics in your realm of expertise.

  36. The first 1960 presidential debate

    Kennedy vs. Nixon in the first debate ever to be televised.

  37. How to be professionally visible and valued as a remote worker

    Visibility doesn't just refer to things that meet the eye. Discover how to feel seen and valued within your team as a remote worker.

September 2020

  1. The Stairstep Approach to Bootstrapping

    Repeat one-time sales until you own your time. Then go after recurring.

  2. When feedback works

    In all other situations, attempts at giving feedback end up achieving nothing.

  3. Book summary of Zero to One

    Notes on startups, or how to build the future.

  4. Free Child

    A Yes Theory Short Film.

  5. The moral panic that ensued when bicycles gained popularity

    A wonderous Twitter thread.

  6. James Burke – Internet Knowledge

    Is the internet redefining knowledge?

  7. The polymath playbook

    A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

  8. The work of a word

    As a word is slapped onto a greater variety of things, it loses power.

  9. Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued

    Let’s un-suck your negotiation. Never give a number first, listen and repeat, and more great advice.

  10. Just how many people do we need doing that job, anyway?

    Imagine if people were working at doing literally anything else, and preferably something they truly enjoyed at that.

  11. Pricing low-touch SaaS

    How to approach pricing and packaging a new SaaS app, by example.

  12. Meeting everyone on a new team

    Whenever you have a team of fewer than 150 people, meet with them one-on-one.

  13. When can we talk about our systems?

    Changing the system changes everything.

  14. Patrick Collison Advice

    The advice he'd give past him.

  15. Be a Great Product Leader

    A strong product leader acts as a force multiplier that can help a cross-functional team of great technologies and designers do their best work.

  16. Principles for Great Product Managers

    Inspired by Principles by Ray Dalio.

  17. Dancing with belief

    Sometimes, it’s easier for people to amend their belief with one more layer of insulation than it is to acknowledge how the world is likely to work.

  18. respecting beliefs | why we should do no such thing

    No authority is beyond ridicule.

  19. We don’t sell saddles here

    A memo from Stewart Butterfield, The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behavior.

  20. Time to get back to magic

    We’d be better off saying, “I need to get back to making magic.”

  21. Designing a culture of reinvention

    Culture is the behaviors that get you promoted or get you let go.

  22. Logic | Philosophy Tube

    Start with the conclusion, work your way back, separate the inferences from the rhetoric, and figure out the unstated assumptions.

  23. Pre-tests of your agency’s positioning

    Tests to apply before you make an initial positioning decision about your agency's work.

  24. The lost tools of learning

    The sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

  25. Memo to the modern COO

    Stop seeking deniability before you seek impact.

  26. RSA Shorts - The Attention Economy

    The Royal Society of Arts commission, based on a lecture of James Williams.

  27. The Attention Economy with James Williams

    Freedom of attention in the times of digital distraction.

  28. Kierkegaard's horror of doubt

    A state of doubt – disorienting and horrifying as it could sometimes be – is the cornerstone of a sound philosophical practice.

  29. How to make friends as an adult

    Be bold, take the initiative, and you’ll be surprised how many people are pleased to connect.

  30. The liking gap in conversations

    People systematically underestimate how much people like them and enjoy their company.

  31. The paradox of articulation

    To speak, it is necessary to know one’s thought. But how can we know this thought as a reality made explicit and fixed in concepts except precisely by speaking it?

  32. To all the jobs I had before

    What I’ve learned from all those jobs I had before.

  33. Tools should not only be for experts – they should turn us into them

    Tools should never make people feel “too stupid” to use them or wonder why some features are even there.

  34. Hire slowly, grow slowly

    Slow team growth can be your competitive advantage.

  35. In Defence of the Humanities

    Scholars in the humanities are the bearers of the memory of civilisation, and their role in our society is indispensable.

  36. Six Ways to Think Long-term

    The tug of war for time.

  37. Work on what matters.

    How do you work on what really matters?

  38. Are you a marketer?

    Are you hoping to make things better? Then you’re a marketer.

  39. The lies our culture tells us about what matters

    David Brooks on a better way to live.

  40. Don't Play Yourself

    Selling on value instead of price.

  41. The Best Self-Help Books of the 21st Century

    Bold claims, add to reading list.

  42. Limitless Is A Bonkers Franchise

    America is obsessed with work.

  43. We have the expertise but no clients. How to reach them?

    ASK HN: Hacker news discussion.

  44. Positioning Agency Brands

    Position for profit and why a narrow positioning is the most lucrative and by far the easiest to sell.

  45. Contagious

    Put dynamics in place that reinforce the ideas you’d like to see spread.

  46. It’s not the bottom, it’s the foundation

    People actually want to do a good job.

  47. The two sides of stress: distress and eustress

    Stress can be detrimental (distress) or beneficial (eustress).

  48. “Because” vs. “and”

    It’s not the line that’s causing the stress. It’s your interpretation of the line.

  49. Polls vs the Street

    Why do I never seem to meet these people on the street?

  50. Curators Are the New Creators

    The Business Model of Good Taste

  51. Why haven't we celebrated any major achievements lately?

    What will happen for future achievements?

  52. The Startling Convexity of Expertise

    Strong opinions, weakly held, are a cheap call option on information.

  53. The Magic Email

    A simple email template that you can use to raise deals from the dead.

  54. Build a portfolio that appeals to employers.

    Josh Comeau’s free book on effective portfolios.

  55. Self-directed, project-based learning

    Learning opens the door to the future we’d like to live in.

  56. Steve Jobs Lost Interview 1990

    “I should probably get going.”

  57. Rick Steves’ The Story of Fascism

    How fascism rose and then fell in Europe.

  58. Unlimited information is transforming society

    We’re just starting to understand the implications.

  59. The Graphing Calculator story

    The story of a software writer who refuses to go away.

  60. Notes on “The Anthropology of Childhood”

    Title says it all.

  61. This video will make you angry

    I watched this when it first came out in 2015.

  62. Chief Seattle's letter to all

    I came across this through The Power of Myth.

  63. Learning gears

    The three gears of learning in public.

  64. How to create luck

    Your entire worldview changes when you realize you can create luck.

  65. How to negotiate and persuade

    24 pro-tips for negotiating product decisions.

  66. Why your present self doesn’t give a damn about your future self

    How to accomplish your long-term goals.

  67. Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

    You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you don't have to.

  68. Proctoring apps subject students to unnecessary surveillance

    These apps violate student privacy, negatively impact some populations, and will likely never fully stop creative students from outsmarting the system.

  69. Soft skills are permanent skills

    These permanent (soft) skills are what separates humans from machines.

  70. Expiring vs. Permanent Skills

    Expiring skills tend to get more attention. But permanent skills compound over time, which gives them quiet importance.

  71. Bayes Theorem: A Framework for Critical Thinking

    Learn why we think the way we do, and how we can do better.

  72. Polluted water popsicles

    Three art students collected polluted water from all over Taiwan and turned them into popsicles.

  73. Subscription or no subscription? That is not the question.

    Is there only one business model for software, and, well, for anything now?

August 2020

  1. From education to learning

    An institution can educate you. Learning can’t be done to you.

  2. Violent communication

    If “violent” means acting in ways that result in hurt or harm, then much of how we communicate could indeed be called “violent communication.”

  3. Ma

    The Japanese concept of Ma is something that relates to all aspects of life.

  4. On linear commerce

    A great product needs an organic and impassioned audience. Captive audiences will need products and services tailored to their tastes.

  5. Situational gravity

    People are very good at stories. That’s our core technology. Everything else in the world, though, has no interest in them.

  6. How to on-board yourself when you join a new team

    If you wait to have information handed to you on a silver platter, it won’t happen.

  7. Outreach Tips

    Outreach tips (that are better than anything you'll find searching Google).

  8. The job struggle answer

    Only you have that data. And, the best thing you can do is believe in yourself to make that call.

  9. Show pricing on website

    If you won’t show your pricing, at least do this.

  10. A user guide to working with you

    It creates clarity on how you work—what you value, how you look at problems, what your blind spots or areas of growth are, and how to build trust with you.

  11. Growth without goals

    Long term “success” probably just comes from an emphasis on process and mindset in the present.

  12. Why is it that the average adult doesn’t write more?

  13. Why do we interface?

    The past, present, & future of interfaces.

  14. How to get freelance clients and keep them

    A thread by Tom Hirst.

  15. Things i don’t know as of 2018 — Dan Abramov

    There is often an unrealistic expectation that an experienced engineer knows every technology in their field.

  16. The liquid self

    Social media doesn’t need to be what it has come to be.

  17. The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom

    Context with Brad Harris

  18. Eyes light up (ELU)

    You already know when people are excited to hear a story.

  19. Don’t delegate using email

    When it comes to delegation, don’t be seduced by the promise of a temporary fix to the momentary crisis of having something new to wrangle.

  20. Ethical marketing

    Ethical marketing in the GDPR, CCPA and no third-party cookies world.

  21. Can a utility brand be an emotional brand?

    An emotional tech product is a lifestyle product. It doesn’t necessarily solve a problem. It’s there for entertainment. It’s not a product that people need, it’s a product they choose.

  22. Tools for keeping focused

    Find tools, and ways of using my tools, that help you stay more focused.

  23. Surrendering control

    It's good to be half-baked.

  24. Thiel on progress and stagnation

    An organised presentation of Peter Thiel’s views on progress and stagnation

  25. The rise of magical thinking

    A video that attempts to explain the rise of QAnon, conspiracy theories, and magical thinking in America.

  26. Summarizing books

    How to distill ideas to accelerate your learning.

  27. The law of shitty clickthroughs

    First it works, and then it doesn’t.

  28. Selling your time

    When you sell your time, you’re giving away your ability to be a thoughtful, productivity-improving professional.

  29. Ugly opportunity

    It’s going to happen, and it’s best to expect it optimistically.

  30. How to ask good questions

    Some things to help you ask better questions and get the answers you want.

  31. 3 career perspectives

    You never know if a good day is a good day in the moment.

  32. The full stack startup

    The old approach startups took was to sell or license their new technology to incumbents. The new, “full stack” approach is to build a complete, end-to-end product or service that bypasses incumbents and other competitors.

  33. Loneliness is a big problem

    We're alone by default instead of together by default.

  34. The endless doomscroller

    A lens on our software-enabled collective descent into despair.

  35. Magical thinking vs. evidence seeking

    A video about Trump, QAnon, and the return of magic.

  36. Whatever scares you, go do it

    Fear is just a form of excitement, and you know you should do what excites you.

  37. Goals shape the present, not the future

    Judge a goal by how well it changes your actions in the present moment.

  38. Unlearning

    When the old map is wrong, we can’t just draw a new line on it.

  39. How to Read a Book by Charles Van Doren & Mortimer J. Adler

    Actionable book summary by Ivaylo Durmonski.

  40. Common hiring manager mistakes

    If you’re just starting to think about hiring, focus on your hiring funnel first, but if you’re finding hiring to be a challenge, think through whether you’re running into one of these problems.

  41. It’s not a problem, it’s an experience

    That’s all it is: an experience, a feeling. Nothing to panic about.

  42. In one study, the effects of physical attractiveness on judges were so influential, they fined unattractive criminals 304.88% higher than attractive criminals.

  43. The ux of lego interface panels

    Welcome to the world of LEGO UX design.

  44. The value of spare capacity

    The size of a tree depends not only on the seed, but how big is the pot you plant it in. Growth in life requires space, so why do we busy ourselves instead?

  45. The worst tool for the job

    Using the best tool for a job may slow things down. It may be “best” in a sense you don't need. The actual best tool might be relatively crude.

  46. Introduction to screen readers using voiceover

    Learn how to get started with VoiceOver, Apple’s built-in screen reader, to read and navigate web pages in this tutorial by Ethan Marcotte.

  47. Reveal culture

    Because you can tell someone to do something, but you can’t reveal someone to do something.

  48. Showing up even when you’re not feeling it

    Some days, you’re just not feeling it.

  49. Joel Spolsky on Pricing

    The more you learn about pricing, the less you seem to know.

  50. Thinking for oneself

    Wisdom is earned, not given. When other people give us the answer, it belongs to them and not us. While we might achieve the outcome we desire, it comes from dependence, not insight.

  51. Where to find the hours to make it happen

    The hours don’t suddenly appear. You have to steal them from comfort.

  52. Pain vs discomfort

    Is this painful, or just loud?

  53. Goodbye Serenity by Charles Simic

    I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement… It hasn’t happened to me yet.

  54. Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

    Tim Robinson on Universal Basic Income.

  55. Google Earth Timelapse

    A global, zoomable video that lets you see how the Earth has changed over the past 34 years.

  56. Akimbo S7 EP10

    Seth Godin live at Catalyst 2010.

  57. Some CSS comics

    Learn about CSS features with comics by Julia Evans.

  58. Overcoming content budget pushback

    Running into budget pushback for your content marketing strategy? Listen to find out how to get buy-in by addressing ROI.

  59. Nudge marketing: from theory to practice

    Nudges are powerful influences in our everyday lives. Here's how to take nudge marketing from theory to practice.

  60. How to find those hard-to-reach audiences

    How to use SparkToro.

  61. Lessons from Pricing Creativity

    Peter Kang’s Lessons from Pricing Creativity by Blair Enns.

  62. Catastrotivity

    exurb1a on being an artist.

  63. exurb1a on compassion

    We’re clearly not going to solve the problems in the centuries ahead with compassion alone. But we could sure end the world without it.

  64. Scenius, or communal genius

    Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius

July 2020

  1. Watch this movie and think only about staging

    Think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are.

  2. Debiasing

    How to reduce cognitive biases in yourself and in others.

  3. Are you present-focused or future-focused?

    Everyone knows about being introverted versus extroverted, but there’s another axis that makes a much bigger difference. It’s present-focused versus future-focused.

  4. The non-urgent advance

    Not a retreat, but a chance to advance.

  5. The four quadrants of conformism

    Aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded.

  6. Temporal discounting

    The battle between present and future self.

  7. Unbundling Excel

    10 years after unbundling Craigslist.

  8. Unbundling Craigslist

    Vacation rentals link gave rise to AirBnB and HomeAway, Etsy dominated the arts and crafts for sale.

  9. The waves never stop coming

    And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you'll come out.

  10. Today you, tomorrow me.

    On being kind to strangers.

  11. The story of u/SpontaneousH

    Documented spiral of how little it takes to turn into a heroin addict.

  12. The art of pricing freelance projects

    By making pricing a topic of priority, you can use it to help better portray your true value to people.

  13. Directives — part 1

    Directives from Derek Sivers.

  14. Stripe: building a developer cult

    What makes Stripe a favorite of developers, the advantages of building a cult, and the how the little things add up for developers

  15. Why the world needs deep generalists, not specialists

    Anyone with internet access and a sincere desire to learn can access abundant information with the click of a button.

  16. The 4 only scalable customer-acquisition channels

    Unscalable channels have their place in customer-acquisition but if you want to build growth loops, you need scale.

  17. Entropy theory

    How chaos shapes industries and creates opportunities.

  18. Looking for a new law

    Richard Feynman on the process of looking for a new law.

  19. Start a blog

    How to start a blog that changes your life by Nat Eliason.

  20. The Freud Moment

    There’s a fair amount of insight into our current moment that you can acquire by reading old books. Human psychology hasn’t changed that much.

  21. The Wet Codebase

    Sometimes there is some context that is assumed and that context actually changes but you don't realize that. And so the next generation needs to understand what exactly was traded off and why.

  22. Commercial vulnerability

    If they can find someone or something cheaper than you, they’re going to work overtime to do so.

  23. Diamond Dallas Page

    Inspiring video from 2014.

  24. Be your own mentor

    No one is coming to save you.

  25. How do you brand yourself as a freelancer?

    7 simple tips on sales.

  26. Don't sell the design.

    Don't sell the design. Sell the business impact.

  27. Every actionable book is actually two books inside

    Actionable books are books that contain techniques or approaches you may apply to your life. Here's how to read them.

  28. Professionals, hacks, and amateurs

    The differences have little to do with skill, and a lot to do with resolve and intent.

  29. Louis Rossmann: A message to the kid who called yesterday

    This is why it’s worth it.

  30. Thread on why Steve Jobs was successful

    It was because Steve used his own products and constantly—CONSTANTLY—demanded they be better. In every little way.

  31. Steve Jobs Masterclass

    A decade ago, Steve Jobs sat down at the D8 conference for an interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. What followed was a masterclass in both company and product management.

  32. White space

    We can use it to identify what we value and what we don’t. What we need to use, enjoy to use and look at, and what we don’t.

  33. Theory of change

    The difference between effective and ineffective people is their skill at developing a theory of change. Rest in peace Aaron.

  34. Video games are the future of education

    The potential energy of human creativity is vast. We just need to give people tools, and creation will follow.

  35. How to understand things

    Read slowly, think slowly, really spend time pondering the thing.

  36. Do not remain nameless to yourself

    The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to.

  37. A digital garden, not a blog

    The phrase “digital garden” a metaphor for thinking about writing and creating that focuses less on the resulting “showpiece” and more on the process, care, and craft it takes to get there.

  38. Writing less damned code

    Code that don't exist is infinitely performant and extremely easy to maintain and document. A talk by Heydon Pickering.

  39. Sixty orbits

    What happens if we start celebrating our birthdays differently?

  40. Job interviews don’t work

    Better hiring leads to better work environments, less turnover, and more innovation and productivity. When you understand the limitations and pitfalls of the job interview, you improve your chances of hiring the best possible person for your needs.

  41. Limiting beliefs

    Your belief system could be the reason why you can't tackle that project or make a big career move. Learn how to overcome common limiting beliefs.

  42. Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham H. Maslow

    Actionable Book Summary by Ivaylo Durmonski.

  43. Good intentions make bad roadmaps

    Typical roadmaps are glorified to-do lists. They hide uncertainty and focus on output. Avoid these mistakes and make your roadmaps leaner.

  44. Why marketing is eating the world

    If you want to win in the US software market, ironically, the best thing you can for your company is to really ramp up your performance marketing knowledge.

  45. Managing Expectation

    Be proactive.

  46. Make me think

    We need to know things better if we want to be better.

  47. Derek Sivers on The Personal MBA

    Derek Sivers’ notes on The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman.

  48. It might not be for you

    A meaningful specific can’t possibly please everyone. That’s the deal.

  49. Individualism is not independence

    In america, individualism and independence are willfully conflated.

  50. Five Ways To Prioritize Better

    Those people you admire, the ones who make you wonder how on earth they accomplish so much? Those people might work more hours than you or be more talented or more passionate. Or they might not.

  51. How to improve your abstract thinking

    A short summation on how to improve your abstract thinking abilities by HN users.

  52. Solitude and leadership

    A few excerpts that resonated from the speech of the week – “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz.

  53. Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

    It sucks for everyone when a candidate is surprised with an unexpected interview.

  54. Brand marketing vs. performance marketing

    Most people want the long-term brand equity, but aren’t willing to live with the worse click-throughs or lower revenues.

  55. Why we’re blind to probability

    The idea that something can be likely and not happen, or unlikely and still happen, is one of the world’s most important tricks.

  56. SEO statistics for 2020

    Ahrefs provides a list of the most up-to-date SEO statistics.

  57. Craft is culture

    Two Truths and a Take, Season 2 Episode 23. Craft is culture. If you care about craft, you've done the hard part.

  58. Why software is more profitable than content

    Content products talk to humans, while software products talk to computers. That’s why the value of content decays faster than the value of software. And it’s also why software is the better business.

  59. How many moons?

    We assume that our neighborhood is like every neighborhood, that our situation and experience is universal.

  60. Running like a dog

    Dogs run. But they don't “go for a run.”

  61. Lest we forget the horrors

    A catalog of trump’s worst cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes.

  62. The cognitive style of powerpoint

    PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector for low-resolution materials. And that's about it.

  63. Model, document, and share

    One of the trickiest, and most common, leadership scenarios is leading without authority.

  64. From gut to plan: the thoughtful execution framework

    Annina Koskinen presents a framework she's developed to help her teams at Spotify reach their goals and ship with impact.

  65. Why do people buy workshop tactics when it’s availible for free?

    What is the reason people buy Workshop Tactics? On the Workshop Tactics website, you’ll find 56 free product team workshop exercises. However, they aren’t unique. You’ll find them scattered around the internet and in various books. So if they are free, why do people buy the £89.99 card deck?

June 2020

  1. Successes and failures of startup content marketing

    Content Marketer Dominic Kent runs through some real life examples of what has and hasn’t worked in content marketing - based on his own experience.

  2. Growing and learning

    I AM GROWING AND LEARNING

  3. The danger of a single story

    Read the full transcript of the speech “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

  4. 1968 Demo — The mother of all demos

    Experience the “Mother of All Demos” presented by Doug Engelbart and team at the FJCC December 9th, 1968.

  5. Peep Laja’s Advice to his 30-year-old self

    30 bits of advice from Peep Laja, founder of CXL.

  6. Why A-players make assertions

    Assertions are the realm of professionals who navigate ambiguity and rigorous thinking.

  7. Solving online events

    Every time we get a new tool, we start by forcing it to fit the old way of working, and then one day we realise that it lets us do the work differently, and indeed change what the work is.

  8. 2020 Logo Trend Report

    This report is an observation on the logo industry and isn’t meant as a guide for best practices.

  9. Starting many things

    By all means, find something that you can dedicate your life to, but make sure that you’re not just falling into place.

  10. How to take smart notes

    10 principles to revolutionize your note-taking and writing.

  11. The ladders of wealth creation

    A step-by-step roadmap to building wealth.

  12. United States v. Forty Barrels & Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola

    A federal suit under which the government unsuccessfully attempted to force The Coca-Cola Company to remove caffeine from its product.

  13. Differentiation Strategy

    Marketing is a game of attention. You must differentiate your company to get it, yet hardly anyone does. Here's how to do it.

  14. The WorldWideWeb Project

    A historical short presentation by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN February 1991

  15. Why everyone always hates redesigns, even when they’re good

    The strange psychology that shapes your reactions.

  16. Remembering training wheels

    Risk, doing, falling, learning, progress. They all go together.

  17. Consider a gap year

    The discomfort people feel when they consider a gap year is precisely why we ought to spend more time considering it.

  18. Notes from The Knowledge Project by Danny Miranda.

May 2020

  1. Meeting spec (doing the minimum)

    Committed professionals don’t ask, “how little can I get away with?” They view the work as a chance to make a difference instead.

  2. The six levels of interaction with a system

    Non-use, Use, Monitor, Maintain, Repair, (Re)build.

  3. Idea generation

    Any time you can think of something that is possible this year and wasn’t possible last year, you should pay attention.

  4. Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences

    Instead of “default to humility” (assume that when you don’t understand a passage, the passage is true and you’re just missing something) the ideal mental action in a world full of bots is “default to null” (if you don’t understand a passage, assume you’re in the same epistemic state as if you’d never read it at all.)

  5. Aggregation Theory

    The profound changes caused by the Internet are only just beginning; aggregation theory is the means.

  6. Top 10 Articles by David Perell

    David Perell’s top 10 articles.

  7. Sell your by-products

    Remember, when you make something you make something else.

  8. Productizing A Freelancing / Consulting Business

    How consultancies can get recurring revenue, deepen client relationships, and improve project outcomes by using some tactics from software companies.

  9. What the hell is going on

    In the past decade, the information environment has inverted from information scarcity to information abundance, and the effects are evident in every corner of society.

  10. The three sides of risk

    Tail-end consequences – the low-probability, high-impact events – are all that matter. Once you experience it, you’ll never think otherwise.

  11. Conjuring Scenius

    It’s time to build together. Why now is the time for communal genius, and how to create it.

  12. The Medium Post is the Message

    Two Truths and a Take, Season 2 Episode 18

  13. Directives

    A brief guide on what to do from the best in the world.

  14. A small business isn’t simply a little version of a big business

    Figure out what people need and bring it to them.

  15. Tiny websites are great

    Why building your own tiny website is a really great project that you should do.

  16. Why bother?

    Why bother building a digital garden?

  17. Sell yourself, sell your work

    If you've done great work without telling anyone you may as well not have bothered.

  18. How To Write Great Microcopy

    40 pro tips for writing microcopy.

  19. Craft Beer, Rebranded

    Evolution, revolution & creating a brand that sells more beer.

  20. The most important and staying beer branding and packaging trends from the last decade.

  21. Two Words

    The best way to sell to, brand, persuade, or inspire people is to condense your idea down to Two Words.

  22. Alexander and the morning dip

    A story from Alexander III’s (“the Great”) childhood.

  23. A short history of color theory

    A chapter from Programming Design Systems—a free digital book that teaches a practical introduction to the new foundations of graphic design.

  24. Clusters

    We’re all connected, but the future is local.

  25. And when does it get boring?

    No one becomes a baseball fan because they read the baseball textbook and did well on the baseball test.

  26. You’re at a crossroad. Now what?

    Instead of killing your brain with thoughts – try it. Make it. Create it. Walk it.

  27. The Canvas Strategy

    Find canvases for other people to paint on.

  28. How to Sell a B2B Product

    Six lessons in selling B2B Products

  29. More Information as a Competitive Advantage

    More information is a competitive advantage, but it’s not enough.

  30. Two ways to predict the future

    Or, shotcallers versus worldbuilders.

April 2020

  1. 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

    Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, turns 68 and shares 68 bits of unsolicited advice.

  2. The Changing World Order

    An online series by Ray Dalio that studies the rise and fall of past leading empires that puts today’s economic, political, and policy situation into perspective of the big picture.

  3. How I Built Resilience: Live With Guy and Simon Sinek

    A conversation with Simon Sinek, whose books about business offer guidance to founders that is especially timely right now.

  4. Wealth Shown to Scale

    Inequality in the United States is out of control.

  5. Minding Our Stories

    Humans love stories, which makes stories a powerful medium of communication, and like all powerful things, they can be used for both good and ill.

  6. Dear client: We need to talk

    An open-letter to future clients. Let’s change the way clients see us.

  7. It’s Time to Build

    Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building?

  8. The Risk of Discovery

    Newton made three bets. One of them worked. But they were all risky.

  9. Being and Time

    About an interesting book you probably shouldn't read.

  10. Integrating Career and Family

    Square’s Restaurant Product Lead on integrating career and family.

  11. 100 Things a Designer Should Know

    Some are practical, some are poetic; all pay homage to the wonderful complexity of designing things for our fellow human beings.

  12. 250 Things an Architect Should Know

    By Michael Sorkin

  13. I Don’t Care What Google or Apple or Whoever Did

    Accessibility or usability issues are often met with “But Google does this,” or “But Apple does this.” They get it wrong just as often as the rest of us.

  14. Taste for Makers

    Mathematicians call good work "beautiful," and so, either now or in the past, have scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters. Is it just a coincidence that they used the same word, or is there some overlap in what they meant? If there is an overlap, can we use one field’s discoveries about beauty to help us in another?

  15. The History of the URL

    On the 11th of January 1982 twenty-two computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email).

March 2020

  1. The Core Ideas of Self-Improvement

    What are the core concepts you need to understand if you want to improve your life?

  2. The conversation

    A short manifesto about the future of online interaction.

  3. How to get rich without getting lucky

    Naval How to Create Wealth: https://nav.al/rich

  4. 15 Customer Service Skills & How to Improve Each One

    Nobody’s born with good customer service skills. But, anyone can master them. Here are step-by-step instructions to improve you or your team’s support

February 2020

  1. How To Digest Books Above Your “Level”

    It’s not enough that you read a lot. To do great things, you have to read to lead.

  2. Progress, Postmodernism and the Tech Backlash

    Two Truths and a Take, Season 2 Episode 5.

  3. Stop Stealing Dreams

    Dedicated to every teacher who cares enough to change the system, and to every student brave enough to stand up and speak up.

  4. The school where children make the rules and learn what they want to learn

    The Summerhill School in England helped to pioneer the ‘free school’ philosophy, in which lessons are never mandatory and nearly every aspect of student life can be put to a vote. Centered on the belief that "if the emotions are free, the intellect looks after itself."

  5. Costco Capitalism

    How Costco can sell things for the lowest prices and step on the least amount of toes.

  6. A day at the park

    The only way a question can prove itself unworthy is by attracting a better question.

  7. You're the only one who has heard all of it

    Tell us what we need to know. Not because you need to hear yourself repeat it, but because you believe we need to hear it.

  8. Web Design: The First 100 Years

    However much we insist that it will get swept away by a new generation of better technology, it stubbornly refuses to go. Our industry has deep roots in the past that we should celebrate and acknowledge.

  9. You’re probably using the wrong dictionary

    Your destination is the dictionary.

  10. Educated Fools

    Why democratic leaders still misunderstand the politics of social class.

  11. How important is work?

    How important should work be in your life? What kind of relationship should you have with your career? If you don’t feel like you have that, what should you do about it?

January 2020

  1. Inversion

    The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You.

  2. Things I believe

    A collection of things @JanStette believes about software development.

  3. Simple Made Easy

    Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicity's virtues over easiness', showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path.

  4. Information Overload is a Fake Problem

    The explosion of stuff to learn hasn't been matched with the explosion of stuff online. The latter has indeed increased exponentially, but useful knowledge hasn't.

  5. Words Are Hard

    An Essay on Communicating With Non-Programmers

  6. The Internet of Beefs

    We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.

  7. The Risks of Imitating Designs

    Even great companies make mistakes. Don’t risk your UX by assuming it’s safe to follow a design pattern just because it’s used by a successful company.

  8. The Basecamp Guide to Internal Communication

    The how, where, why, and when we communicate. It's all in here.

December 2019

  1. The Story of Us — Full Series

    A Wait But Why series that covers approximately everything. Turns out “Us” is a big topic.

  2. Color Theory and Contrast Ratios

    Color, at its core, is a relative and personal experience.

  3. Army leadership and the profession

    Leadership is influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation while operating to accomplish the mission and improve the organization.

  4. Don't Learn to Code

    Avoid thinking of writing code as the goal and learn to solve problems.

  5. Mental models for designers

    Curious about product design at Dropbox? Here’s a look at tools they use for solving problems, making decisions, and communicating ideas.

  6. Thinking about color

    Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment - Claude Monet

  7. Statement of Resistance

    A Powerful Statement of Resistance from a College Student on Trial in Moscow

  8. Attachment Science

    Romantic expectations are often ridiculous and unhelpful, enter attachment science.

  9. Productivity Shame

    5 strategies to end the cycle of "never enough"

  10. Typography Books for Designers

    A Review of the Best Typography Books for Designers.

  11. Accessibility drives aesthetics

    You don’t need to sacrifice aesthetics in order to be accessible.

  12. No, Absolutely Not

    What you need to build a great website is restraint.

November 2019

  1. Söhne design information

    Söhne is the memory of Akzidenz-Grotesk framed through the reality of Helvetica.

  2. The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

    Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.

  3. Stab a Book, the Book Won't Die

    On the resilience of books in the face of apps, attention monsters, and an ad-driven online economy.

  4. Earth and Sun

    About space and how our planet moves through it.

  5. Examples of Nudge Theory

    Examples of indirect suggestions to influence the behavior and decision making.

  6. Three Big Things

    The Most Important Forces Shaping the World.

  7. Shape up

    Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters.

  8. Cargo Cult Science by Richard Feynman

    Some remarks on science, pseudoscience, and learning how to not fool yourself. Caltech’s 1974 commencement address.

  9. A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design

    Hands do two things. They are two utterly amazing things, and you rely on them every moment of the day, and most Future Interaction Concepts completely ignore both of them.