Below is a list of values and principles I keep in mind when developing Noteland:

• Last forever: notes you write should be able to live beyond Noteland. Similarly, the service should continue to exist even if I’m the only user because it is so valuable.

• Refreshingly fast: apps seem slower and less responsive then they did before, the experience should be a breath of fresh air to those that forgot how fast things should be.

• Easy to maintain: adding new features and maintaining a high bar for reliability should be easy for one engineer to run.

• Single player first: primary value should be to the note taker, any other values are secondary. For example, publishing is in service of the single-player–helping clarify thoughts and encourage growing one’s knowledge–not to encourage others to make backlinks (although that would be a positive second order effect).

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It’s easier to work on projects intermittently when a strongly typed programming language is used like Rust. That’s because becoming proficient in a codebase often entails holding the whole program in you head. Types provide mental shortcuts around the flow of data–you can skim the program by reading the static types to trace the flow of data and transformations (read the input arg types and return type) without needing to fully read or understand the contents of a method or function. In dynamic programming languages like Clojure you need to pay closer attention to what each step of the program does to anticipate what values are being used where.

You can use CSS vars to create responsive layouts. One technique called css-media-vars (repo) is a sort of mixin for CSS selectors that have the effect of named breakpoints analogous to a media query, but with much less boilerplate.

See also:

• Discussion on HN about whether this is using or abusing CSS vars
• Demo of the technique in an example web page

A philosopher from the age of enlightenment, Kant is best known for writings about morality and the categorical imperative. He observed the need to replace religion as the source of morality with rationality.

Immanual Kant, in his book Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, argues for a universal imperative that we should treat people as the ends rather than the means. A similar Christian teaching is ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’.

The media tends to focus on the amount of lying that President Trump does–you can often find headlines that quantify it to some large number. The Trump paradox is not that he lies frequently (to some extent all politicians will lie), but that he says the truth about things that are obviously bad or embarrassing for him. This ‘saying the quiet part out loud’ and immunity to repercussions is the real horror.

See also:

• Interview with Slavoj Žižek by Dr. Robert Eikmeyer

There are four kinds of product ideation that can be thought of along two axis, organic vs inorganic and bottom-up vs top-down.

Idea extraction: observing and talking to other people to find problems.

Scratch your own itch: finding problems you personally have.

Idea safaris: starting with an industry, observe what happens at popular watering holes and look for patterns.

Live in the future: become the kind of person that has more interesting product ideas, get to the edge of a field that is going to be a big wave. Look for smart people and hard problems (they tend to be clustered) and join in.

Read the essay The Grand Unified Theory of Product Ideation.

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From Hegel’s Dialectics, an object that is what it is not. Slavoj Žižek describes the concept in a joke, a person goes to a coffee stand and asks for coffee without milk. The barista says, “Sorry, we only have coffee without cream”. In reality, both are the same coffee, but they are also different because of what they are lacking (coffee, cream).

Given a corpus of language, the frequency of a word (how many times it shows up in the corpus) is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table of words. For example, ‘the’ appears 2x as much as ‘of’ (7% of words, 3.5% of words respectively). This is another example of the Pareto principle.

A mission should be boiled down to a single aspirational statement that encompasses what the team actually does that’s valuable (not necessarily what leadership says they do), metrics describe the observable effects as the team succeeds in the mission.

The test for a useful mission is to be able to frame it as a question that can be asked frequently that leads to useful conversations about what the team should be doing. ‘Are we doing everything we can in the next day, week, month, year that furthers the mission of $MISSION’?

See also:

• Engineering management
• Remote teams need to be more deliberate about everything

The internet as a system contains values such as freedom and privacy that are deeply embedded in the implementation and it’s evolution. For example, by default the system is open, anyone can share their work by publishing (hosting a website) and anyone can access everything.

This is most obvious when observing an opposing ideology try to exert control over the internet–Chinese censorship and firewall, ‘shutting down’ the internet during protests in Iran. It’s counter to how it works and how people expect to use it.

See also:

• Audrey Tang first mentioned this in an interview with Tyler Cowen

Combating misinformation and disinformation campaigns using humor. Taiwanese hacker and Digital Minister Audrey Tang talks about how, for example, hours after a post containing misinformation is detected, Audrey’s team will publish a joke that contains the real information in it. Since meme’s and jokes get shared very quickly, this helps to rapidly inoculate the public and dispel the negative effects from misinformation.

See also:

• Audrey’s interview with Tyler Cowen
• Taiwan is using humor as a tool against coronavirus hoaxes

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Physician that lost his surgical license (due to someone dying during an operation) who went on to perform over 4,000 lobotomies. He created a technique known as the icepick method which allowed for a lobotomy of the prefrontal lobe to be performed through the eye socket with minimal anesthesia. This allowed the operation to be performed at psychiatric hospitals rather than requiring facilities for surgery.

He also performed a lobotomy on Rosemary Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s sister. At the insistence of her father to protect the political lives of John and Ted, she was given the surgery at the age of 23. Afterwards, she had the mental capacity of a two year old and lost the ability to walk. The Kennedy family covered it up and separated her from the family claiming she was “reclusive.”

An animated film from Studio Ghibli about Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer that designed the famous Japanese ‘Zero’ fighter plane. One of the themes is the power of creation as passionate engineers (“engineers turn dreams into reality”) and the terrible consequences of their usage.

Using a standing desk improves job performance, work engagement, anxiety, and quality of life. Daily sitting time of people using standing desks is 83.28 minutes less per workday than those with traditional sitting desks.

Personally, I find standing desks help with concentration and being more present during meetings.

See also:

• Effectiveness of the Stand More AT (SMArT) Work intervention: cluster randomised controlled trial, a year long study from University of Leicester on the psychological health effects of standing desks

PQ

In Hollywood set design, you need to optimize in a way that optimizes for the most impact on screen–money spent off screen is effectively useless to the end result, the film.

This is a good analogy for product work. Product work is hard because it necessitates change and therefore can involve significant internal effort (off screen to continue the analogy) to produce the end result (on screen), even if it’s small.

See also:

• patio11’s blog post ‘What Working At Stripe Has Been Like’ which talks about working in hypergrowth and why ‘off screen’ effort/spend is natural and necessary.

Cubic feet per square meter is a measurement of how much air breathability and air resistance a fabric has. A higher CFM is more breathable, but less wind resistant and a lower CFM is less breathable and more air resistant. For example, a fleece typically has a very high CFM (200+), but usually does not block the wind. Similarly a windbreaker has a low CFM (3-5), but can feel like wearing a garbage bag under high exertion.

See also:

• This comment on r/Ultralight with a list of CFM ratings for many jackets

The point in which the lineage of any two people currently alive can be traced to the same common ancestor. This point is believed to be between 5300 and 2200 B.C. While family trees are believed to be exponential, in reality there is much more inbreeding in human history. This results in a much narrower family tree and, as a result, all humans are more closely related.

The most famous personal injury attorneys from New York due to non-stop advertising, Cellino & Barnes created a breakthrough business that was very successful (each partner was making $10MM per year at one point). They learned that most people don’t have money to hire a lawyer upfront so they charge a third of any monetary rewards from a settlement. They also realized that they need to stay top of mind for when an injury happens.

Advertising seems to fit so well is that 1) the avg person doesn’t know many lawyers 2) when you need one you need them immediately 3) advertising on TV constantly reinforces the association of their firm and ‘personal injury’ which improves recall at exactly the right moment.

Source: Cellino & Barnes Breakup

See also:

• Ads work via cultural imprinting

The Nova SDS011 sensor is an inexpensive ($30) air quality sensor that uses laser scattering to detect particles at 2.5 and 10 nanometers (PM2.5 and PM10 respectively). By taking the concentration of particles you can calculate the air quality index.