Hasnain says:

I read this last night and was hoping things will de escalate.

Still hoping things de-escalate and war can be avoided.

Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2019-02-25T15:48:21+0000

Hasnain says:

This is something that I've also noticed is becoming more prevalent across America, and especially so in the bay area.

While it starts with the oft-repeated Keynes quote about people living luxurious lives and not having to work, it goes into depth about *why* americans feel the need to over-work, discussing society, religion, politics and law.

Choice quote:

"On a deeper level, Americans have forgotten an old-fashioned goal of working: It’s about buying free time. The vast majority of workers are happier when they spend more hours with family, friends, and partners, according to research conducted by Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. In one study, she concluded that the happiest young workers were those who said around the time of their college graduation that they preferred careers that gave them time away from the office to focus on their relationships and their hobbies."

Hasnain says:

This is a mini biography combined with a massive list of productivity hacks, both for the work environment as well as for personal life.

While I don't agree with every single thing in there (optimizing things so you can take work calls during your drive seems overkill); this is very worth reading. If just for looking at this approach and how to gather that much analytics on oneself.

Hasnain says:

This is an excerpt from a book - but it stands out vividly with a number of examples highlighting how a lot of tools and processes here have been targeted at men - and continue to discomfort, and even actively harm, women.

Goes into some classic examples (like air conditioning/temperatures in the office) to a lot of new ones that I wasn't aware of before.

Hasnain says:

Trigger warnings galore. You have been warned.

This is extremely rage inducing

Hasnain says:

Gates' thoughts here are very inspiring.

"Some people think it is corny, but I like the tradition. These days, at the end of each year, I still enjoy taking stock of my work and personal life. What was I excited about? What could I have done better?"

Came for the updates on the foundation and their Alzheimer's/Polio research; stayed for the thought provoking conclusion about the challenges that lie ahead in technology research.

Hasnain says:

This was a very interesting technical read.

While it’s poised as a technical post / blog advertisement about Dgraph, it contains a lot of great tidbits - from trivia about how Google’s indexing works, to implementation challenges faced when distributing graph queries, to how others have approached this problem.

Recommended if you want to nerd out

Hasnain says:

I read this the other day and nodded so hard.

It's about an interesting dilemma: popular culture talks a lot about being able to trade money for precious time, and how that can bring about happiness; but this talks about a study that seems to show the opposite.

The authors argue that once the mindset is in place to value a specific unit of time at a certain dollar value, every piece of free time instantly becomes about maximizing the utility of that slot - and this leads to an ever spiraling cycle.

When sometimes all you need is to just sit at home and do nothing.

Hasnain says:

This was a page turner that went into the navy crashes in 2017 that lead to the loss of life.

It’s a human interest story and an accounting of the chain of command - and a description of how people took action in the incredibly stressful moments of a tragedy.

Looking forward to part 2 so I can learn more about the Navy leadership and how they dropped the ball here. The ending was harrowing.

Hasnain says:

In this post, the author talks about their failures in launching a "successful" company as it never met the crazy growth goals forced upon them due to taking large sums of VC funding.

They went through lots of trials and tribulations - and yet, $178M of transactions later, the company is still alive and well, making a great product that helps creators everywhere.

Quoting:

"I consider myself “successful” now. Not exactly in the way I intended, though I think it counts. Where did my binary focus on building a billion-dollar company come from in the first place?

I think I inherited it from a society that worships wealth. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Bill Gates was my all-time hero and was also the world’s richest person.

Since I can remember, I equated “successful” solely with net worth. If I heard someone say “that person’s really successful,” I didn’t assume they were improving the well-being of the people around them, but that they had found a way to make a lot of money.

Wealth can be a measure of success, as seems to be in the case of someone like Bill Gates, who has invested heavily in philanthropy. But it’s not the only way to measure success, nor is it the best one."

Hasnain says:

I read this the other day and it’s great. I don’t have a project for this year that this is applicable to directly but even just setting weekly goals has made a big difference.

Last year I tried an ambitious goal of one commit a day and it was interesting how much progress gets done. On off days just doing code cleanups made it easier to forward moving work later on.

Consistency trumps everything, as highlighted in the article. Once you set the machinery of your subconscious into motion; it does wonders.

Hasnain says:

This is an interesting piece. While it starts off as a discussion about an iconic movie (which I really liked and everyone should see!); it goes into a nice discussion of corporate culture and how new age corporations have been trying to buck the trend.

It then talks about how successful and unsuccessful various attempts have been; for example the change from cubicles to open offices and the changes in work life balance.

Hasnain says:

This was a very interesting read which discussed both privacy and ad targeting.

It talks about how the tracking ecosystem works; how a lot of it can be done better with heuristics and less ML (which is opaque and not as useful - though there are killer applications for ML like image processing).

it also goes into what *good* recommendations look like; and how they're often good without being personalized. And ends on a nice tangent about Netflix and their $1M prize for recommendation algorithms; and how that was not needed by the end.

Hasnain says:

The article talks about this plant in Australia which is known for a famously painful sting - which also causes long lasting, horrible allergic reactions afterwards.

This has even lead one person to shoot themselves rather than suffer the pain.

One more reason to stay away from Australia, I guess?