We tend to put off happiness—only once this problem is solved or this goal is achieved will I be happy. There will always be more problems to solve and achieving a goal is yields temporary contentment before we find something new to want. Because we spend most of our time in the journey, the quality of our mind is essential to being happy now and in the majority of moments in life.

See also:

• Mindfulness is the practice of doing just that—improving the quality of your mind
• This comes from Sam Harris in the Waking Up app

Carveth Reed, a British logician and philosopher is attributed with the quote, “It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong” (sometimes attributed to the economist John Maynard Keynes). This is a useful idiom for a number of problems where information is limited or lacking precision.

For example, in growth investing much of the value of a tech company is in future potential rather than something concrete like historical performance of revenue. It’s not possible to accurately predict the future and so valuations are imprecise. But in this case it’s better to be vaguely right than to try to precisely analyze and be wrong.

See also:

• This sentiment is like a Kalman filter where you still need to do something with imprecise information

Charlie Munger’s first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily. Because of the way compounding works over time, to prematurely interrupt it (e.g. selling your shares or stopping to contribute) will forgo the largest upside—most compounding interest benefits occur at the end.

See also:

• Naval Ravikant talks about things that compound over time extensively

Since gains from bond trading are capped by the yield at maturity, but only returns if the bond pays out, the value generated is not from what you buy but what you exclude—avoiding bonds that don’t pay out i.e. the losses you don’t take.

This is a kind of determinate negation, bond management is defined by what it is not.

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See also:

• Web3

The internet brought digital abundance—content and media can be freely consumed at massive scale. The blockchain provides digital scarcity using mathematics to prove uniqueness. NFTs built on top of blockchain can be applied to digital art to transfer ownership as a token (in whole, non-fungible) to another party. By proving ownership and that there is only one owner, digital art can be valued higher with these guarantees.

While the application is novel, it’s unclear that the technology led to a digital art boom or merely the centralization of digital artists into marketplaces like SuperRare. It also seems to feature heavily in any kind of distributed metaverse with marketplaces for digital goods.

To get the COVID-19 vaccine approved quickly, companies focused on proving the efficacy. They did not run trials to find the optimal dosage or storage to maximize public health. For example, delaying the second dose, fractional dosing, removing freezer temperature requirements are all ways of increasing the distribution and reaching herd immunity faster.

Read the article

It’s difficult to start with microservices because that requires knowing more about the domain and boundaries within the domain that one could know up front. Due to lack of understanding, a microservices-first architecture often fails and it’s easier to start with a monolith and slowly peel away services.

In my own experience, I’ve found this to be largely true. You don’t yet know the right abstractions, even if it’s a familiar problem.

See also:

• Software architectural pattern
• Integrating between AWS services adds incidental complexity is a corollary and this occurs even with using a small number of services.

Notion is a popular wiki that I started using more seriously recently. Looking at Notion through the lens a text editor (the predominant way users create content) reveals a number of quirks.

• Keyboard shortcuts are inconsistent. For example, typing `ctrl-p` might move the cursor one line down or all the way to the bottom of the page.
• Tables are difficult to manage. You can’t create or fillout the table entirely using the keyboard and there are multiple modes when clicking cells (open linked page, edit) that don’t behave the same as editing other text blocks (e.g. editing external links in a cell is difficult).
• Inserting a link works differently if it’s an internal page or an external link. Relatedly, markdown link syntax doesn’t work.
• Creating a markdown checklist requires using the `[]` with no spaces which I think is unique to Notion (I might be wrong)
• There’s no such thing as normal tables, just ‘databases’

See also:

• Plain text files are a universal storage medium, Notion greatly extends plain text which hurts it’s portability
• UX (user experience)

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Clubhouse can be thought of as the next stage in the evolution of audio. It started with radio (passive consumption of centralized content) followed by podcasts (programmable radio with decentralized content creation) and now Clubhouse (centralized audio-only conversations where anyone can spontaneously be a creator or listener).

A corollary to this evolution is written content. It started with newspapers (centralized content) then evolved to blogs (anyone can publish) finally to Twitter (more accessible and centralized).

Pro rata rights allow investors to retain their percentage ownership in future rounds on the same terms as new investors. This enables them to avoid dilution that occurs as the company raises more money. However, pro rata rights are not always honored or some early investors are asked to give up their pro rata rights to make room for new investors.

As Fred Wilson writes, it’s becoming more common that pro rata rights are not honored in later stages of financing (especially when a company is doing well) as the amount of allocation available for later investors becomes small. This cuts into the returns of early stage funds (like First Round Capital) and causes conflict between the earliest investors and the later ones.

Today, most early investors will ask for and mostly expect to get pro rata rights. This is counter to the solution some investors propose—founders should be mindful of who they give the right to. Practically speaking though, since pro rata rights can be taken away, the right is re-earned each round by helpful investors (helpful beyond just the capital put in).

Of all the roles and responsibilities an early stage startup CEO has, the most important is finding product market fit. A good heuristic to use is to continually ask, “Is what I’m doing getting us closer to product market fit.” If not, it’s a sign that the thing you are doing is not the most important thing to be spending time on.

Read the twitter thread

See also:

• The focusing illusion makes you think what you are focusing on is the most important thing

In software development, when you are spending time trying to implement something that the framework you are using either doesn’t do or makes it harder. This is a sign of incidental complexity and that the value of using the framework might be exceeded by the additional effort to be able to use it.

See also:

• TypeScript adds incidental complexity to using libraries

In frontend development, a component-driven workflow is a way of building websites and applications by breaking down the UI into smaller components and iterating on them independently and composing them together. This has been popularized by Storybook.js where you write stories around components to make a faster feedback loop compared to loading the whole application (and data) every time.

See also:

• Faster feedback is a way of improving the ‘hand feel’ of software engineering
• Creators need an immediate connection to what they are creating (a la Brett Victor)
• If building parts of the frontend is slow, it makes more of the development slow i.e. slowness begets more slowness

Each state requires new hires to be reported as per the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA). This is needed for wage garnishment related to child support. Each state has a different time limit for reporting and the penalty for failing to report is $25 per newly hired employee.

See also:

• A challenge with compliance is selling non-compliance, in this case $25 is not going to be material enough to make sure reporting consistently happens.
• Back office

(source)

After noticing abysmal performance of Docker for macOS and after a few Google searches (searching ‘docker macos performance’ yields 5MM hits) to confirm the issue, the recommended solution is to use Mutagen. Mutagen efficiently synchronizes files between macOS and the virtualized VM that docker uses resulting in much better performance.

When a company chooses to operate in stealth mode it provides optionality in a couple of ways. First, you can better control timing of press announcements since the world doesn’t know what you are doing yet and you haven’t shared anything before (more appealing to a reporter). Second, it gives the company an option to figure out more about the market, iterate on the product, or pivot with lower risk.

Of course, none of this works if it’s already well known what you are doing and you don’t deviate from it.

If you are in stealth mode, it’s probably best to maintain strict confidentiality from the beginning, especially with investors as information tends to leak. Even so, it’s unlikely that you can be successful without talking about what you are doing to a large group of customers, investors, or subject matter experts.

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MAP (metrics, activities, people) is a framework for thinking about SaaS value and pricing. At least one element should anchor a product’s pricing.

An example of a metrics approach to pricing would be Slack—free up to 10,000 messages. This aligns nicely with the core value that Slack provides, communication.

See also:

• Willingness to pay should be at the core of product design
• Monetizing Innovation

Python 3+ has type annotations that can be used for static type checking using a separate program. There are several competing type checkers (mypy, pyright, pyre) that can be used that are sponsored by different companies (Facebook, Microsoft).

See also:

• Static types make it easier work on projects sporadically
• TypeScript adds incidental complexity to using libraries, I hope this isn’t the case with Python libraries
• TypeScript was a different approach that required an entirely separate language and compiler

A dynamic programming language used heavily in the startup and scientific community.

An antilibrary is one’s collection of books that they have not read. These tend to accumulate and can cause some anxiety in people. However, it’s actually a good reminder of intellectual humility—constantly seeing what we don’t know and might never know.

See also:

• Essay - Learning how to read for how to absorb the books one does read