a more or less weekly digest of juicy stuff

• letter to a young programmer considering a startup, i urge you to consider both sides of the startup coin. there are so many ways to make a dent in the world. highly recommended
• why i create for the web, the most amazing thing about the web is simple yet devastatingly powerful, and the whole reason the web exists in the first place. it's the humble hyperlink
• always remember to put the glass down
• business cards can slide, awesome idea
• what if successful startups are just lucky? it's interesting because in this mindset your vision of how to succeed is really different. you start thinking about how to maximize your chances to win at a random game
• why he is there and i am here, i was always this good. i was also doing lots of stuff i wasn't good at. the only thing i changed in the last 12 years is that i stopped doing those bits
• the only way to grow huge, the only way to generate sustained exponential growth is to make whatever you're making sufficiently good
• how complex systems fail, spot on (pdf)
• the difference between information, knowledge and wisdom
• user experience euphemisms, hilarious
• meritocracy is almost as real as this unicorn, the only way that meritocracy could actually work is in a world where 1. we are all starting from the same position of advantage. time, money, ability, education, etc. 2. we had checks and balances on our biases
• why spies never discover anything useful, the basic lesson of game theory for a game of bluff like that of espionage is that, as long as it is possible for counterspies to generate misleading information most of the time, spies are useless even when their information happens to be correct. if the defence plays optimally, the spymaster can never have any reason to believe one piece of information produced by spies and disbelieve another
• the art of naming military operations
• why i don't trade stocks and (probably) neither should you, unfortunately, it's not enough for us to be right (even if we are). everyone else needs to be wrong in order for us to profit
• cow tipping or cow pushing is the purported activity of sneaking up on an unsuspecting upright cow and pushing it over for entertainment