Illustration by Raúl Soria . We’ve all been on the receiving end of a half-hearted compliment, whether it was a generic “nice work” from a colleague or a chirpy “you look nice” from someone who couldn

We Quit Our Jobs to Build a Cabin—Everything Went Wrong Jul 30, 2020 And it was awesome We were two or three weeks into building a cabin when the first two-by-four became the target of a sudden, white

Like many people, I have most of my best ideas in the shower. This is sometimes annoying: I could use more than one shower’s worth of good ideas a day, but I’d rather not end up as a shrivelled yet in

Why it is Important that Software Projects Fail An essay on computer productivity DRAFT Dr A Berglas, February/October 2008 AXnthony@Berglas.org (Feedback welcome, remove X.) Copy at will but provide

Since the dawn of time Years ago, I worked with a friend who had built a few scheduling calendars in a previous freelancing gig. Sometimes we’d be working on something that tangentially related to tim

Syrian refugees attempting to cross the border between Greece and Macedonia in 2015.Photograph: Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images M ohammad Hallak found the key to unlock the mysteries of his new homelan

In front of a sea of coders sitting on folding chairs, their laptops on folding tables, a man appears on a purpley-blue lit stage. “Seven hundred blockchaingers,” the man shouts at his audience. He po

Dear Google Overlords In the first decades of the twenty-first century, everyone suspected that this world was being watched,sloppily and inattentively, by intelligences far inferior to humans: minds

In 2015, due to a series of events , I began a journey across the globe where I lived out of two bags for eleven months . In May of 2017, I left my full time job and started another journey, this time

E motional Resilience In Leadership Report 2020 WITH COMMENTS | PRINT OPTIMISED Jonny Miller (Curious Humans) & Jan Chipchase (Studio D) Executive Summary This interactive report shares a summary of t

How much Vitamin D should I take? This is still the looming question, and it’s time to address it. First, though, imagine that someone in a public forum online asked me, “How much metoprolol (a common

Copyright Plain English Campaign owns the copyright to this guide. You are welcome to print out any of our guides or save them to disk for your own use. You may not photocopy any guide or pass on elec

Many bloggers and “life-hackers” have made a full-time job of suggesting how you should organize your journal, or how you should most effectively Write about what you read . We should take this advice

‘Slow down, you move too fast … ’ – ‘The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)’ (1966) by Paul Simon We worship efficiency . Use less to get more. Same-day delivery. Multitask; text on one device w

If you’re considering an external display for your Mac, there’s a few important decisions to make. Apple doesn’t sell external displays any more, so you can’t just default to their wisdom. That’s an i

Gold and oil have historically been reliable stores of value. Because they are scarce commodities, they make dependable hedges to the inflation of fiat currencies. As a result, they have commanded pri

How I tracked data to reveal the best habits for improving my own sleep—and how you can, too Chris Davidson Jun 5, 2018 · 13 min read Photo Credit: Adi Goldstein on Unsplash It felt like I was driftin

This is a continuation of last week's post . Read it first or this won't make much sense. One clarification from last week that several people pointed out is that my definition of Beta was too simple

Chances are you’ve never heard of Nakhchivan. Jammed between Armenia, Iran and Turkey on the Transcaucasian plateau, this autonomous republic of Azerbaijan is one of the most isolated outposts of the

Vitamin D is a big deal. Recent studies have shown that patients with low Vitamin D levels are more likely to die from Covid-19 than their Vitamin D-rich counterparts,(1) and deficiency in the vitamin

It is one of the most commonly used supplements frequently taken to address joint pain, but there seems to be more to this dietary supplement than first meets the eye. Glucosamine was originally disco

You can't out-Google Google. For two decades, companies have tried to build a better search engine, and now the internet graveyard is filled with would-be competitors. Even the smash successes only ge

07 Jul 2020 • management One of the most harmful behaviors I’ve observed in ineffective leadership is a tendency to add chaos when one enters a room. Chaos comes in many flavors: A decision was reache

I ’d lost almost $200 million in October. November wasn’t looking any better. It was 2008, after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Markets were in turmoil. Banks were failing left and right. I worked at

You’ve likely heard the saying: “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” It warns against the futility of pursuing too many disciplines. Be a specialist, or you’ll be nothing. It may surprise you t

Why is there only one Elon Musk? Why is there so much low-hanging fruit? created: 2020-06-30 ; modified: 2020-07-07 Table of Contents Discuss this post on my forum. Am considering taking Tesla private

Now more than ever, it’s time for email. For years, productivity discussions have talked about focus, distractions, getting into the flow, etc., etc. With the coronavirus pandemic, uninterrupted time

Expensify has an unusual technology stack in many ways. For example, we don’t use DNS internally — just configuration-managed /etc/hosts files — and it works great . Similarly, we only make limited us

This is a (very late) reply to Patrick McKenzie's " Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice ". I find much of his advice very sensible, and it might be very helpful to someone in the

Jaana B. Dogan Apr 21 · 19 min read A large majority of computer systems have some state and are likely to depend on a storage system. My knowledge on databases accumulated over time, but along the wa

February 2020 • Ankit Shah Being Alone Loneliness is usually framed around your relationships to others—community, friendship, family. But that’s not the whole picture. To feel less lonely, you have t

Most career advice on the internet is from people who had some sort of meteoric success. Why read advice from someone who’s had a mediocre career? But there’s massive sampling bias. All this advice wi

As the 120-ton space shuttle sits surrounded by almost 4 million pounds of rocket fuel, exhaling noxious fumes, visibly impatient to defy gravity, its on-board computers take command. Four identical m

Illustration by Yulia Prokopova I am a programmer. I do not deal with digital painting, photo processing, video editing. I don’t really care for wide gamut or even proper color reproduction. I spend m

Trying something again My grand experiment at working at a $BIGCO has ended. It was fruitful – I made more money than I ever have, and the name recognition was nice the first few times someone asked w

Jun 6th 2020 Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today , our daily newsletter . For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our coronavirus hub T HE FI

The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mi

I It’s more than two millennia since the philosopher Socrates argued that humility is the greatest of all virtues. His timeless observation was that the wisest people are the first to admit how little

“Okay, I’m ready,” Alex says. My husband is wearing his green scrubs under a hospital-issued jacket with his name embroidered on the upper left side, over his heart: Dr. Alexander Fortenko, Emergency