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.

Air quality index is calculated from the value of a pollutant concentration (pm2.5, pm10) and a table representing quality based on a standard. Each country has their own guidelines. For example, India’s ‘Poor’ category is equivalent to ‘Unhealthy’ in the US. It’s also interesting that it’s framed as pollution on India and China, but it’s framed as a health concern in the US.

Example of calculating air quality index using python for pm2.5 with the EPA’s breakpoints:

PM25_CONCENTRATION = 70.0

# A lookup table of concentration high, low, index high, low, and label
PM25_CATEGORIES = [
    (0.0, 12.0, 0, 50, "good"),
    (12.1, 35.4, 51, 100, "moderate"),
    (35.5, 55.4, 101, 150, "unhealthy for sensitive groups"),
    (55.5, 150.4, 151, 200, "unhealthy"),
    (150.5, 250.4, 201, 300, "very unhealthy"),
    (250.5, 350.4, 301, 400, "hazardous"),
    (350.5, 500.4, 401, 500, "hazardous"),
]

# Find the breakpoints using the table
if PM25_CONCENTRATION > 500.4:
    category = PM25_CATEGORIES[-1]
else:
    category = None
    for c in PM25_CATEGORIES:
        low, high, *_ = c
        if PM25_CONCENTRATION >= low and PM25_CONCENTRATION <= high:
            category = c
            break

c_low, c_high, i_low, i_high, _ = category

aqi = ((i_high - i_low) / (c_high - c_low)) * (PM25_CONCENTRATION - c_low) + i_low
aqi = round(aqi)

print(f"The air quality index is {aqi}")

The air quality index is 158

The price of solar panels drops 20% for every time the quantity shipped doubles. This is similar to Moore’s Law for computing power and shows the increased efficiency as more experience is gained by an industry. This relies heavily on early buyers willing to buy at a premium thereby funding the future efficiency.

This can be applied more broadly to any emerging technology. If Swanson’s Law holds, increasing the amount of early buyers will accelerate the industry towards lower, more accessible prices. For example, in the case of climate change, buying early carbon capture technologies at scale could accelerate progress in reducing overall greenhouse emissions.

The user’s evaluation of the quality of a product is not separate from the aesthetics. This is especially important for products that are not observable by the user e.g. software or infrastructure. They can’t physically inspect the quality and rely on other signals as a proxy—the website, UX, documentation, etc. This isn’t strictly logical (you can simultaneously have a beautiful website and a terrible product), but an important factor nonetheless.

The idea that, as a result of mass surveillance, data collection and social media are leading to behavioral changes. People are filtering more of what they say and are less likely to engage with novel ideas or be wrong for fear of negative effects (everything from getting a job to a loan or even proper health care).

The solution argued by https://www.socialcooling.com is privacy since privacy is the right to be imperfect.

However this doesn’t fully explain what we actually see today—an acceleration of extreme ideas and fringe groups. Either people are not aware of the consequences or don’t care. The opposite might be true—it’s actually social heating and people are becoming more extreme as a result of the loss of privacy.

If everything is public or under surveillance, actions could have negative externalities. This puts more pressure on people to be perfect and project the values of the in-group. Privacy is a solution by providing space free from judgement individually or as small groups to explore ideas and take certain actions without fear of judgment.

See also:

• Social cooling

Using one’s natural tendency to procrastinate in a way that’s productive. Assuming the highest priority item on a todo list is the least likely to get done, then the items below it are much more appealing to do as a means of procrastinating. Therefore, being thoughtful about what is the highest priority item (it must not actually be that important) is a way of stimulating productivity of everything else. If the top priority task actually does become important and needs to get done then find an item that is higher priority.

Read the original description from John Perry

Neglected UX is when parts of the user experience are not quite broken, but subtly incongruous. For example, there might be elements using slightly different styles or UI patterns that are out of sync with the product.

The neglected UX within an app tends to add up over time (UX entropy) before it is noticeable enough to become a high priority. Addressing the issues with neglected UX tends to take a lot of time and is rarely apparent to others.

Famed animated film studio that created such popular films as Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and much more. Their films are often characterized by a magical or surreal nature and detailed, hand-drawn scenes that are visually stunning.

Most people associate the creative force behind the feature films with directors/producers/writers Hayao Miyazaki, Toshio Suzuki, and Isao Takahata. This is a good example of a cornered resource from the business strategy book 7 Powers. The absence of these people on the resulting work is easily recognized by fans of the films.

A book about business strategy by Hamilton Helmer which outlines seven ‘powers’ that are the cause of successful companies. Usually you see a few of these elements working in concert. For example Pixar exhibits process power (developing computer generated films) and a cornered resource (writers, directors, and Steve Jobs).

The seven powers are:

• Economies of scale
• Network effects
• Counter positioning
• Switching costs
• Process power
• Branding
• Cornered resource

Technology companies that are small and private, writing software on their own terms. They don’t operate in big markets, don’t take money from VCs, and intend to stay small and independent. The primary examples are Pinboard (bookmarking service), Tarsnap (encrypted backups), Sqlite (database), and Sublime Text (text editor).

See also:

• Blog post about small tech

Change is difficult for people. Solving product problems requires change. The default behavior is resistance to change. This is what makes working on products so difficult, even more for mature products. Successful product work not only requires finding the right problem and implementing the right solution, but also pushing against status quo preserving behavior from within your organization and users.

When AI comes about it will be colored by the creators. Data used to train and techniques for replicating traits we associate with intelligence will encode the culture and philosophy into the AI. In that way, we will likely have an “American AI” that is significantly different to AI created elsewhere in the world.

Listen to Genevieve Bell discussing the fourth industrial revolution (AI) on the Long Now podcast.

See also:

• Recent technological advancement is in simulation

The scripts used to embed media such as tweets and YouTube videos include a full complement of ad tracking and third-party cookies which are used to follow visitors around the internet to serve them ads and collect more data.

Privacy conscious website owners can use a tool like Blacklight to verify whether or not they are unwittingly contributing to intrusive ad tracking.

Blacklight is a tool from The Markup that inspects websites for ad trackers, third party cookies, session recording, keylogging, and other privacy compromising technology. It reveals the pervasiveness of these techniques and gives privacy conscious users a way to understand, in plain language, in they will be tracked and by whom.

To optimize code, reduce state, coupling, complexity, and code, in that order. Reducing state makes the program easier to reason about (e.g. pure functions are easy to test). Be willing to add more coupling if that means less state, more complex if it decreases coupling, and duplication if it makes code less complex.

Read the HN thread.

See also:

• Duplication over abstraction

Software engineers early in their career tend to optimize code by decreasing duplication and applying the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principle. However, this is not always the most valuable contribution, just the easiest optimization to spot. Over optimizing for decreasing duplication can lead to increased complexity of the program and more coupling which are more important concerns than duplication. One should optimize for reducing state, coupling, complexity, and then code.

Comments on the internet come in multiple waves and are fueled by objections. The earliest comments tend to be negative reactions to the post, knee-jerk reactions that seem to be fast to write. Next comes the objection to the early negative comments and usually has more substance that defends the post (dang, moderator on HN, says these are also the most upvoted). The cycle of objections continues until the post is out of view.

Read the original comment on HN

You don’t understand a distributed computing problem until you get it to fit on a single machine first.

Speeding up computing can be thought of as three different approaches: high (vertically scaling e.g. more RAM and faster CPU/storage), wide (distributed work), and deep (refactoring).

I saw this happen at work where an engineer rewrote a Spark job distributed over many machines to a single large machine calculating the same output using Unix commands and pipes faster than the distributed version.

Read the source comment on HN

Stone fish traps in use over the last 40,000 years located in the Barwon River that some believe are the earliest human construction in the world. It’s an example of a man made system that has endured for thousands of years and is still in use today—a model for how one might approach building new systems.

See also:

• 4th Industrial Revolution lecture from Genevieve Bell at The Long Now Foundation
• Inter-generational partnership
• Heirlooms foster long term thinking
• Time horizons as a competitive advantage

A quote from George Lucas about how Star Wars was about he Vietnam War and the backdrop of Nixon’s run for a second term. Democracies don’t get overthrown so muc as given away to dictators. This feels relevant today to the Republican party sycophants that enable a mentally ill and incompetent President as he runs for re-election.

The idea that life originated on another planet and was transported to Earth. It’s difficult to prove or disprove in a similar way to the Silurian hypothesis, evidence is difficult to obtain—artifacts from civilizations don’t last that long, evidence of life is not visible on any likely originating planet within our solar system.

See also:

• An extraterrestrial body like Oumuamua could fit