Links: 12-21-2019

  • The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
    Quote: "I’ve always liked Hamming’s famous double-barrelled question: what are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on one of them? It’s a great way to shake yourself up. But it may be overfitting a bit. It might be at least as useful to ask yourself: if you could take a year off to work on something that probably wouldn’t be important but would be really interesting, what would it be?"
    (categories: ideas innovation time focus )

  • Microbrowsers are Everywhere ◆ 24 ways
    First I’ve heard the name… but immediately recognized the role they play.
    (categories: browser microbrowser html )

  • Better presentations through storytelling and STAR moments
    Quote: "Every talk should start with an AIM: Audience, Intent, Message. Who are the audience for the talk? What do you intend to achieve by giving the presentation? With those two things in mind, you can construct the message—the actual content of the talk. Try to include at least one STAR moment—Something They’ll Always Remember. This can be a gimmick, a repeated theme, a well-selected video or audio clip. Something to help the talk stand out. The human brain is incredibly attuned to stories. If you can find an excuse to tell a story, no matter how thin that excuse is, take it."
    (categories: presentations story speaking )

  • Bookshelf · Patrick Collison
    holy shit what a reading list.
    (categories: books reading )

  • A Failed SaaS Postmortem · Matt Layman
    Quote: "Where I was horribly wrong was in thinking that Ember and Semantic were the only pieces of new technology that I needed. The list was so much longer and included: Datadog for infrastructure monitoring. DigitalOcean for virtual machine hosting. Django REST Framework for APIs. Drip for marketing email campaigns. Jekyll for the marketing site. JSON API as a communication protocol. Let’s Encrypt for TLS certificates. Mailgun for transactional emails. Mixpanel for behavior analysis. Rollbar for error tracking. Segment for data aggregation. Stripe for recurring payments. wal-e for database backups. webpack for JavaScript asset bundling"
    (categories: innovation-tokens technology )

Links: 12-13-2019

Links: 12-8-2019

  • MIT-STS-AI-snakeoil.pdf
    Quote: "AI is already at or beyond human accuracy in all the tasks on this slide and is continuing to get better rapidly. The fundamental reason for progress is that there is no uncertainty or ambiguity in these tasks — given two images of faces, there’s ground truth about whether or not they represent the same person. So, given enough data and compute, AI will learn the patterns that distinguish one face from another."
    (categories: ai algorithm algorithms machinelearning )