It’s better to be crappy than cool. So if you are a young person wanting to work in a cool industry, you gotta live in a cool city. In the US, the cool cities are SF/NYC/Boston/LA. The crappy cities are more or less any major city in the Midwest like St. Louis. I lived in Boston, i.e., Cambridge, for the last 12 years. I’ve also lived significant periods of time in Philadelphia, PA; Northern…
Hellbanning is a practice used by some online community managers to block content added by spammers and Internet trolls, as well as other individuals whose interests do not coincide with the managers Peterson’s Hellbanned Laws Those who comment on internet voting will, on average, get downvoted themselves. Regardless how sophisticated a social network’s hellbanning strategy, this network will…
PhD == Startup. Governments and universities should leverage this truthiness and the good ones will. All the contrasts are actually comparisons. The budget - Your PhD being a startup fits incredibly well with how PhDs already go. Professors control the student’s budget, which is often Seed or Series A in dollar value, 5-6-7 figures. The student’s salary is a founder salary (< minimum wage). The…
Let’s face it, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are media companies. The major TV networks were cutting edge once until the technology became ubiquitous. Now they are old, boring media companies. This day is rapidly approaching for social networks. Stratchery and others have commented on how FB biases everything towards what your friends think, creating a myopic world view. To…
Make a list of your accomplishments. Write them down. All of them. Regularly. The cloud (srsly) makes this possible very easily. With how much time you spend on devices, there is no reason to not do this. Your accomplishments need permanence. We need to be our own historians. Einstein had numerous colleagues essential to his success, but historians only list the accomplishments as they were…
One deduction: the arbiters of mainstream approval (and consequent rewards) are on the precipice of a calamitous diminution in influence. — Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) November 15, 2014 Detroit is synonymous with epic collapse. Once proud and a world-leading economic center, it has hopelessly lost it way in terms of human capital and infrastructure. Like Detroit, I think we are as Balaji…
Don’t snark, these buttons deliver a profoundly new user experience! This word went off in my head while going down yet another rabbit hole on a popular website’s commenting thread. The topic was Google’s new Material design and the use of box-shadows to give Material buttons dimensionality (example above). Pretty engaging stuff, I know. The post had generated hundreds of upvotes and comments. It…
All of college should be “one and done” like the NBA. Talented young basketball players are required to spend one year in college before entering the NBA. The idea is to have some transition time from high school and improve their readiness for their adult professional life. This idea has surprising generalizability. It would be wise to consider applying it broadly across college pursuits, both…