winslett

As the author of this blog post, your comment is overwhelmingly my favorite.

For golf, you don't try harder, you relax more. At the highest level of sports, even rowing, I suspect it's similar. Only in golf do we compare the outcome of a ball flight -- we think we row similar to professionals, but there a ton of difference, you just can't see it in the result of ball flight.

My go-to golf philosophy book is "Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power":

To relax, you must surrender your mind-even the notion that you have a mind. You will find that relaxing your mind is the same thing as relaxing your body. There should be no separation between your mind's activity and your feeling-awareness of bodily sensations and impulses. Feel yourself letting go so that your body isn't "held" so much--this requires doing the same thing with your mind. When you relax your tissues, nervous system, organs, the muscles around your organs, every-thing, then the energy will flow. It is this very relaxation that allows for the energy, or feeling-attention inherent in your body-being, to circulate, develop, and be utilized.

Don't know how this affects daily writing ;)

Do all of these comments seem like they are AI generated to anyone else?

Finding a business / product that actually is working is unique. When you find it, stick with it. Nothing is perfect, and shit is going to be hard, it’s just the next level of the company. Be optimistic — look for what’s working and do more of what’s working. Don’t let pessimism get routed in the way you think. All of that, and fight the urge to build first — sell first.

You can do this with a lateral join.

SELECT * FROM A, LATERAL (SELECT * FROM B ORDER BY a.embedding <-> b.embedding LIMIT 2) AS closest_in_b ORDER BY A.id;

It’s going to have so-so performance. So, don’t hose your production server. Create a vector index on b.embedding. HNSW will be nice for this use case.

<3

Protip: in CRUD applications, most performance issues from the data layer have nothing to do with the database.

Typically, the performance issues are at the ActiveRecord level, when it's initialization 100s of instances of an object to render a table. With Rails, the #1 optimization technique is to use `ActiveRecord::Base.connection.exec_query ` to return a hash instead of initialization objects.

Side note: I still love Rails.

Tether is a fiat currency supported by the crypto oligarchs. It doesn't have to be backed. It just has to avoid taxes, avoid governments, and avoid sequestration.

You can't take a tether and redeem it for a dollar, so it doesn't really even have a price. Tether is just a placeholder for a dollar in the crypto-world.

Furthermore, Bitcoins aren't really priced in United States Dollars anymore, they are priced in Tether Dollars. The price reported on CNBC is tether dollars.

It's so synthetic, even that chart doesn't really matter. So, where can we find real dollars being exchanged for Bitcoin? We can find that in the GBTC trust. I would argue the actual price of a Tether is equal to the GBTC discount, which currently sits at 37%. So, a tether dollar is actually about 0.62 dollars.

Read the article. Retitled article should read “Not all nudges work”.

The interesting bit from the source article is that changes to the mean do not always reflect the value of the nudge. So, when judging a nudge, data should be spun various ways to determine impact on different segments of the population.

Hey, I'm the author this blog. It's intention is to connect technology decisions to financial decisions. Appreciate the feedback.

I totally agree with you on developer productivity. Said another way, to connect technology & finance: early on, when developer cost is much more significant to the company than infrastructure costs, emphasizing developers building the right product is more important than optimizing the infrastructure costs.

Secondly, I am a fan of ORMs. I exclusively use ORMs on CRUD-based actions. The typical first-fix for ORMs I see is to move dashboards, reports, and aggregations to native SQL. Just doing that get you a lot of performance improvements. Recently, for a friend, not associated with Crunchy & not using Crunchy, I helped them lower their cost of database operations from $2500 / month to $500 / month. All I did was find the slowest queries, determine the ORM was running a slow query, and doing an N+1 query , then point them in a direction to fix it. Because their cost of operations were looking at increasing so quickly, they were looking at migrating to a different database, NoSQL, or something else.

Again, appreciate the feedback. Cheers.

Totally agree that it’s “unofficial”, which makes it a when-not-if scenario.

At some point, total collapse of Tether’s pseudo-dollar will happen when the revenue generating exchanges feel they are support bad-money with good. All it takes is one player signaling a lack of support, and others stop supporting as well.

It’s a human psychological problem that’s a old as time. Think crypto can win over human rational to preserve self-interest? (side note: manipulation of self-interest is the goal of “weak hands” / “diamond hands”)

It is one step closer to shutting the doors on Bitcoin as an isolated financial ecosystem. Bitcoin-to-actual-USD is a trackable / taxable event. Whales avoid it like the plague.

By moving to a pseudo-dollar like Tether, market makers can hang out while they wait for a suspect better buy-in price in the future. Should pseudo-dollars go way, they actual-Dollar transactions get a taxable haircut. Additionally, the friction of going from actual-Dollar to Bitcoin increases.

Tether is effectively behaving as a crypto-clearing house with their pseudo-dollar.

Cryptocurrency has recreated the wild-cat banking crises of the late-1800s / early-1900s. Go read about the Knickerbocker Trust Company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knickerbocker_Trust_Company

These events ultimately lead to the creation of the Federal Reserve for banks to participate in a semi-cooperative system that didn't devolve into save-yourself during times of crises.

The story here is that "unless there is a massive run" is actually a fairly common event.

By taking on a vendor's tool, I would argue you trade off ease for understanding.

If you truly need to shard, it's best to move deliberately and potentially roll your own at the application level. Your understanding of the infrastructure is far more important than sharding for the sake of sharding.

SPA's #1 draw back is that you have to rebuild browser functionality inside of the browser.

The browser natively handles internet connectivity, back / forward buttons, refresh buttons, URL management. Additionally, users have been trained to understand the responses, hit the refresh button, and use the back button. Browsers have gotten better at distinguishing between your internet being down and the website being down.

Good SPAs have to rebuild all of that functionality.

Love the “easy to select for copy and paste” as a usability requirement.

I stumbled upon Deming's "Out of the Crisis" when wandering through the library in school. It has changed how I thought about system improvement ever since.

I use the things I learned for marketing, product, and engineering systems.

Want to improve a system? Before doing anything, collect data and measure. A system must be stable, else you cannot improve it. Marketing campaigns. Funnel optimizations. Performance improvement.

Most "stability" is achieved by simple things like squashing bugs (campaign bugs, performance bugs, or UX bugs).

Once you achieve stability of output (i.e. low standard deviation), then improve the system.

Simple, uh?

Exactly. He said “collective action” won’t work, then called for “collective action” among governments. In these thought analysis, an self-serving person is a good proxy for how any government will behave.

People can inadvertently fall into a bad career by being good at something.

Take a goal oriented person with outstanding genomics for sport. Their binary decision tree of life is skewed in one direction by compliments and dopamine. They build up to the ultimate outcome to be an extrinsic release. The day comes for the ultimate test. The world watches for 30 seconds and moves on. Win or lose, the world doesn’t care the way they cared. The release never came — just silence (with no monetary reward).

Instead of killing it by banning it, I suspect they could kill it by buying it.

If the Fed wanted to "invest" in Bitcoin, it would kill it by soaking up liquidity and creating a liquidity-squeeze. Because the amount in circulation is fixed, it wouldn't have to buy all of the Bitcoin -- just enough to kill any utility. This is a downside of an asset with a fixed quantity.

Once the community discovered the liquidity-squeeze spike, it would lead to a run-to-the-exit with a price crash. The short-squeeze spike and crash would spread across alt-coins as well due to rush-in-rush-out and leverage across alt-coins.

Once liquidity is killed, liquidity-squeezed, and a crash happens, the FED / SEC could make it illegal citing volatility and losses of citizens.

The Fed would need to do this discretely and never disclose their purchases. If it became public, the community would probably choose to fork.

I’ve seen these types of decks pitched internally at blue chips as well. There, an audience being bewildered by innovative words is exciting. Get in, get budget approved, get promoted before the devil even knows you’re there.

Shameless plug, Cloverly has a air travel offset endpoint:

curl https://api.cloverly.com/2019-03-beta/estimates/flight -X POST -d '{"airports": ["bhm", "atl", "sfo"]}' -H "Content-type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer public_key:47800ea0ee541b4c"

Shameless plug: check out Cloverly.com for an API for Carbon Offsets.

What are the tax implications of Evernote failing? Do the founders have to pay taxes on the investment that has been written down to zero?

I was thinking "single point of focus."

I feel like I should name drop Cloverly.com for this. It allows you to programmatically allocate renewable energy and carbon offsets for your purposes.

Disclaimer: I work there.

Yes! I spent 36 months at a company, which had organizational walls between product, engineering, marketing, and "growth".

With these tools, "growth" learned they could inject messaging using javascript to nudge users along instead of working to improve the underlying product. Other teams had NPS scores asking for ratings before the product was even used. Marketing put messaging on their pages to high-jack conversations and push lead-gen for sales. The customer experience and the budget was being pulled in 10 directions.

Unlike the article's issue being a product issue, this issue was an organizational issue. The messaging and tools meant that teams could actively pursue their own goals without working together.

This post was causing my spidy-senses to tingle. It was reading like something I’d find on Zerohedge. Then, I got to this:

Ipsos, which conducts the quarterly poll for MNP, surveyed 2,070 Canadians online from March 13-24.

I don’t trust this data as far as I can throw it.

Corrected headline “48% of 2,070 responses to online surveys stated that the respondee does not have $200.”

I shot skeet competitively when I was younger. I competed at a high level. Unlike many other sports where competitors affect your play, the only reason you fail in skeet is because of you. The target will fly the same. The gun and ammunition will perform.

The outcome of any one event is Boolean: you hit the target or you miss. Feedback is instant.

You have to learn to put your mind into the zone. You do that through repetition. While competing, if you worry about your competitor, or the next shot, or how you look, you will miss. Coincidentally, you learn to turn off your brain from trying too hard. A relaxed brain and body are quicker to react, and more powerful.

I leaned mental toughness through a game with small Boolean feedback, which rewards focus and rejects excessive effort. It is like instant feedback on meditation.

I like it. I like that it encourages human-to-human meetings through technology. I like the simplicity of it.

Given LinkedIn screw us with permissions to access contacts, I always cringe when an app requires access to contacts.