thushan

This piece is beautiful.

I hope it gives you the tingles, and color on the people doing the hard work. Michael Lewis knows how to spot colorful characters and frame a thesis of a bigger idea around them. But there's lots of people like this in government, finding ways to nudges to be a "more perfect" version of our country — often exhaustingly facing headwinds to do so.

I'm an acquired YC founder (S11 → Launchpad Toys → Google → Led early LLM efforts there), now serving in federal government at the U.S. Digital Service. It's the White House's technology arm where we bring people from technology and industry for 2 year "tours of duty" and help to modernize our systems and make our digital experiences better (Fixing Healthcare.gov, and recently shipping IRS Direct File are some of success stories).

Your country could use you.

We need experienced technologists across eng/product/design/business – people like YC founders and HN readers here.

Consider taking a look: USDS.gov

From the lens of a Product Manager working in ML / Large Language Models...

The Alignment Problem

By Brian Christian

How do we tell the computer to do all the things we want it to do, all the things we don't want it to do, and all the things we didn't realize we want it to do or not do? How do we capture the rich implied and inferred nature of humanness? That's the Alignment Problem. The book dives into this broadly – but also gives an excellent non-technical survey of the evolution of machine learning.

—

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

By Scott McCloud

This is magnitudes more than a dive into the perhaps easy to dismiss artform. This book is about storytelling and why great stories resonate. It's one of the best pieces of media, on media, period.

—

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

By Will Larsen

When I my company was acquired by a very-big-Giant, my personal antibodies reacted negatively to the how the big G's way of thinking and doing – I was harmfully autoimmune. To some extent I had to accept things, to another extent I needed a different perspective. This book helped me transition and it's one I push on all of our leads. While we as PMs don't manage people directly we architect the whole system – and this book is an insightful (I buy it for all the team's leads) lens on how big teams where personal alignment and corporate alignment problems need to be negotiated.

—

Exhalation Stories

By Ted Chiang (also recommend Stories of Your Life)

The author has an absolute magic way of taking a kernel of an idea and spinning not only a whole world, but a whole new way of looking at the world – all in the span of a short story. You can't get any closer to home than "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" where the protagonist rears an artificial intelligence from "pet" to a human-like mind.

—

The Pragmatic Programmer

By David Thomas and Andrew Hunt

PMs need to get things done. Even if we don't code, we need to think deeply on how it's built to ensure it achieves our goals now, and what we project them to be in the future. As the title suggests, a pragmatic take on building code-driven systems.

—

Design of Everyday Things

By Don Norman

The OG design-thinking before IDEO corporatized it.

—

Principles

By Ray Dalio

"Principles are ways of successfully dealing with reality to get what you want out of life." This book influenced me to distill how we take action and prioritize and how we decide as a team. I'll admit some of the set up of the book irked me, but the distilled world view that form the Principles in the second half of the book generally resonates; the world works a certain way, find those patterns, use it to your advantage (and for good).

—

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

By Edward Tufte

You could jump into any of Tufte's books, on any page, and come away with new ways of looking/thinking/telling stories about data. ML problems are data problems – let's think well beyond raw dumps and tables.

What about it did he find appealing?

Undoubtedly this will lead to Space Pirates of the Mark Watney (The Martian) kind:

“I’ve been thinking about laws on Mars. There’s an international treaty saying that no country can lay claim to anything that’s not on Earth. By another treaty if you’re not in any country’s territory, maritime law aplies. So Mars is international waters. Now, NASA is an American non-military organization, it owns the Hab. But the second I walk outside I’m in international waters. So Here’s the cool part. I’m about to leave for the Schiaparelli Crater where I’m going to commandeer the Ares IV lander. Nobody explicitly gave me permission to do this, and they can’t until on board the Ares IV. So I’m going to be taking a craft over in international waters without permission, which by definition… makes me a pirate. Mark Watney: Space Pirate.”

Multiple users for the iPad would be another.

Amen. Last time I used it, it was a mess beyond belief. Code intermingling with presentation layer. Dependencies upon dependencies. A case study of bad software engineering.

Thank you, thank you!

I can't take this seriously when it beings like this: "gimmeh teh CSS docs."

I wonder how much they took people still using their cell phone number from an area code they no longer live in. Would be cool to see an interactive version of this map too.

Here are two that I use frequently:

http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/iphone-gui-psd-v4/

http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/ipad-gui-psd-version-2/

Ah thanks for that insight - I was wondering why it asked for Flash on an iPad.

I tip my hat to the genius who came up with this.

Ha! That's a great idea - add it in as a billable item on client invoices.

Just some quick math about this...

Adobe has released a Creative Suite package every ~20 months (Wikipedia).

CS1 - 09/2003

CS2 - 04/2005 - 19 Months

CS3 - 03/2007 - 23 Months

CS4 - 10/2008 - 19 Months

CS5 - 04/2010 - 18 Months

----

If we bought the first premium suite (based off current prices in the Adobe Store) it would have cost us around $1900. Add in upgrades at $400 each, and we get a total lifetime cost of $3500.

If subscription pricing was around since day one and we went with the new subscription pricing monthly rate of $95 (with one year contract) we would end up paying ~ $8650 to date or about 2.5x of buying it over that period (91 Months).

I don't find it surprising that they're going down this route. It surely is an interesting way to charge for downloaded software as we've really only seen this on the web front thus far.

I'm a bit interested to see how many total subscriptions we'll sign up for in a couple years. Reoccurring billing is certainly a nice stream of cash - and a bit of a trojan horse for additional revenue ;)

The Times announced digital subscriptions today. Good move. The pricing - backwards as all hell.

NYTimes.com + Smartphone = $15/month NYTimes.com + Tablet = $20/month NYTimes.com + Tablet + Smartphone = $35/month (WHAT?)

First, how does one differentiate the value add between a smart phone and a tablet enough to charge the sum of those parts, not an incremental addition?

Two, if you go with the cheapest print option (weekday) at $14.80 a month delivered to your house, you get all access across all devices. As one of my friends noted: how could they not look around and be inspired by digital companies that have millions of users on a few dollars a month on drip....but no. They still think of themselves as a print provider. Name another service we pay $15 bucks a month to access from our smartphone.

This seems like a print centric decision.

The Times announced digital subscriptions today. Good move. The pricing - backwards as all hell. NYTimes.com + Smartphone = $15/month NYTimes.com + Tablet = $20/month NYTimes.com + Tablet + Smartphone = $35/month (WHAT?)

First, how does one differentiate the value add between a smart phone and a tablet enough to charge the sum of those parts, not an incremental addition?

Two, if you go with the cheapest print option (weekday) at $14.80 a month delivered to your house, you get all access across all devices.

As one of my friends noted: how could they not look around and be inspired by digital companies that have millions of users on a few dollars a month on drip....but no. They still think of themselves as a print provider. Name another service we pay $15 bucks a month to access from our smartphone.

This seems like a print centric decision.

iOS, actual app sales

Brilliant. Is there an equivalent in SF?

This isn't so much as a toolbox item but a must read I think http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

That's a damn good point.

Though I think Apple is the only one that can pull it off. I'm a bit surprised that they'll be able to keep to a one year product cycle with things like the iPhone/iPad when the rest of the market is hitting a new product every couple weeks. Not that they've been one to match the rest of the market, but a lot happens in a year.

Then again, maybe the biggest lesson out of the touch screen revolution is that its not the hardware - it's the software, and Apple has been certainly setting the pace on that front.

Is U of I local for you? I can't say enough how much pushing yourself by going somewhere new can propel your personal growth. I grew up in New England (a big college town no less) yet went to school in the South and I like to think I'm a better person for it.

U of I is a great CS school so I don't think reputation is a differentiator here for you.

I recently started using Sparrow as a secondary app for other email accounts (like my company's support email address) so that it doesn't clog my normal inbox, but gives me the power of a native app running all the time. Actually its a perfect secondary mail client.

A good person to read up on is Vanguard's founder John Bogle. He's the champion of low-cost/low-fee index funds. I'm pulling this straight from his wikipedia page:

"Bogle argues for an approach to investing defined by simplicity and common sense. Below are his eight basic rules for investors:

- Select low-cost index funds

- Consider carefully the added costs of advice

- Do not overrate past fund performance

- Use past performance to determine consistency and risk

- Beware of stars (as in, star mutual fund managers)

- Beware of asset size

- Don’t own too many funds

- Buy your fund portfolio – and hold it"

And might I add one more: Take advantage of your company's 401k match immediately! That's free money on the table.

I've followed that style for my retirement 401k.

When it comes to play money and individual investments, I invest in what I know and what I believe in. The opinion is that one can't know all the information about every company out there so at least you can invest in the companies that you do know confidently about...

I follow Apple - and hence I made a big bet on them since the mid-2000s and it's paid off nicely... I feel Netflix is another company in its class - all my friends have accounts with them and have nothing but good things to say about them. Passionate customers can lead to profitability. I guess that's my individual stock picking strategy.

I never understood why plugs like that needed to go a certain way. On a technical standpoint, yes, I get that the leads need to be oriented in such a way, but why design it so people have to think about it? Apple's mag safe connector is a perfect example of how plugs should work - it does not require anyone to think about what the correct orientation is.

Same with magnetic stripe readers for credit cards and transit passes. At this point, that reading technology is so ridiculously cheap that there should be no reason why we can't put in four different sensors so that it doesn't matter what orientation you swipe a card with.

Glad to hear with it resonated with you. We're definitely looking at other platforms but for right now the iPad was the easy choice for us to target initially.

Yes we are! That's another Lego concept that inspired us. We're seeing these characters/backgrounds like play sets that you can combine to make full story arcs. Space, robots, dinosaurs are the ones that I'm wicked excited about releasing in the future.

Congrats! That's so cool that something that started off as a side project might have a nice payoff. I would say one thing in regards to this posting actually. You're almost taking a bit of your possible sale value by saying the items in bullet point #3 and #2. I don't believe in the outlandish expectations a lot of people have for their projects/startups, but conversely you're selling yourself short by saying those things.

Hey ya'll - our startup just launched our first app for the iPad earlier this week. We're super proud of it. Though it's a kids creative play/animation app, I think it may appeal to a lot of the readers on HN since we built it with the mind set of late 20/early 30 something kids at heart.

Our goal with Toontastic was to digitize play and bring concepts from Legos and puppets to the iPad.

When I played with Legos as a kid, I had to make stop-motion animations if I ever wanted to save the crazy stories I made along the way. With Toontastic, kids play just as they would with physical toys but now they're able to record, save and share their stories. We have a video up on that page that shows it in action.

We think we have a solid v1 but I'd love to hear what you all think of the program and any ideas you all think might fit for a kids-oriented storytelling app. Were there any things that you did/played with as a kid that you wish you could digitize and share?

I think it's important to note that this isn't a New York Times piece but a Read Write Web (and an amateurly written one at that) reposted in the NYT template shell. It's a bit misleading to call it an NYT article entirely, though they should take some responsibility for republishing it.