Tyler Cowen’s Unusual Final Exam
I think I’m going to give this a shot next time I interview someone. I’ll ask them what question they wish people would ask them and then have them answer it.
Tyler Cowen’s Unusual Final Exam
I think I’m going to give this a shot next time I interview someone. I’ll ask them what question they wish people would ask them and then have them answer it.
Andre Torrez wrote today about a lesson that I was lucky enough to learn fairly early in life. It’s that he’s not busy, and neither is anybody else:
So the final piece I have been working on is never telling people I am busy. Because no, I am not busy. Yes, I have a lot of stuff to do, but I leave it at the office after work and on the weekends. I have many things I am interested in, but I can always make room for something if it is worth doing.
Rather than say: “I am too busy, I don’t have any time for X.” I realize I can be honest and say I am not interested enough in X to do it.
When I was in college a friend of mine told me that he read the first section of the Wall Street Journal every day. I responded by saying I was too busy to do that. This was of course hilarious if only because I was a total slacker who managed to get in at least an hour or two of Tetris on the Nintendo every day no matter what else was happening. I also usually found time to play two or three hours of pick-up basketball and, if I was lucky, make a late night nacho run as well.
Anyway, when I made the patently absurd claim that I was too busy to do something, he told me that it wasn’t that I was busy, but that reading the paper was not a priority for me. It was such an obviously true statement that I immediately feel a twinge of shame every time I’m tempted to claim I’m too busy to do something to this day.
I learned this week that my college friend was just promoted to be Vice President and Controller at a big utility company.
Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth (Part One)
Errol Morris investigates how fonts affect whether people believe what they’re reading. Whoa.
Two-Step Verification Dances Around the Issue
Andrew James for PandoDaily on weaknesses of two-factor authentication. I have two nits to pick with his article. First of all, Google has an app you can use to furnish your authentication code on your smart phone. There’s no need to rely on receiving a text to get your code. Secondly, human factors will always be the greatest security weakness. The goal is to minimize their impact.
The source code for TextMate 2, the Duke Nukem Forever of text editors, has been released under the GPL on GitHub. (Here’s a link to the repository.) I switched to TextMate when Ruby on Rails was just released and I switched back to OS X, and the editor has hardly progressed since then. (That was back in the summer of 2005, I think.) For the past couple of years, I’ve been using Vim for pretty much everything but Java.
It’s important to note that we’re not seeing a simultaneous release of version 2 of TextMate. The new version of the editor clearly is not ready to go. The question is whether there’s enough energy around the editor for development to progress. If Allan Odgaard is serious about pushing it to completion, it has a good shot at making it — TextMate still has a large, loyal user base and people who would be willing to contribute in small ways. If he’s publishing the source and washing his hands of it, then I think this is curtains for TextMate.
Steve Balmer's performance review, and ours
Larry White argues with the idea that performance reviews are even a good idea. I tend to think that they are useless at best and destructive at worst. Good management involves giving constant feedback all year, not bundling it all up for one incredibly awkward process that takes pace annually.
How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking
Mat Honan’s latest piece on being hacked. The important lesson here is in the explanation of how interlocking relationships between your accounts can make your online accounts much more vulnerable.
I know how it was done now. Confirmed with both the hacker and Apple. It wasn’t password related. They got in via Apple tech support and some clever social engineering that let them bypass security questions.
Mat Honan explains how his iCloud password was obtained. Humans, always the weak link.
Interestingly, however, there is one last bastion of economic activity that proved remarkably resistant to the triumph of the market: firms, companies and, later, corporations. Think about it: market-societies, or capitalism, are synonymous with firms, companies, corporations. And yet, quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. Within their realm, firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism!
An observation by Yanis Varoufakis that has often struck me as well.
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Daring Fireball turns 10
Happy 10th Birthday, Daring Fireball
Robinson Meyer writes about Daring Fireball, John Gruber’s Apple-centric blog that you probably already read every day. I’ve been reading it from the very beginning. I own the T-shirt. Happy birthday, DF!