You run a startup. Your company has been given data by users, data that it would be embarrassing to lose. You make backups. You're aware of the best-practices:

They're in the business of fielding complex applications from just about anybody. They can't just pick the best ones—they must accept or deny every last application.

This is a really bad situation to be in. To understand why, put yourself in the shoes of an employee at the patent office^[1] who must judge these applications.

Half-assing

Each application you see has its own deep complexities and needs time and expertise to understand, perhaps even expertise you don't have and experts you must track down. But when you're done understanding one application you haven't learned anything that helps you process the next one faster. Your supervisor is shielded from these complexities and inevitably judges you on the basis of one metric: number of applications processed.

Inevitably, employees in this situation employ a heuristic: they try to race through the simple applications, and half-ass the complex ones. There's now an incentive for poor applicants to craft complex applications; if your idea stinks a simple application is certain to be denied, while a complex, weighty-looking application has some chance of randomly being granted. Meanwhile, genuinely complex applications now face more randomness and may be undeservedly denied.

Bike-shedding

Over time applicants complain, usually the deserving but complex ones. Every time you the employee catch heat for such a complaint you loosen your constraints. Complex applications get handled more and more perfunctorily.^[2] Instead you spend more and more time with the simple applications, probing them intensely for weaknesses, ‘bike-shedding’ them in more and more adversarial fashion, looking for the vaguest of undeniable reasons to deny applications. After all, the acceptance rate is going up in that complex pile. The denials have to come from somewhere, lest you stand out in somebody's metrics.

Predator vs Prey

Over time applicants start to notice that even genuine applications have more chance of being granted if they are large and complex and seem weighty. As more and more applications grow complex, standards change. What was complex 10 years ago is now considered simple, and more likely to be denied. Nothing's being read in any sort of detail anymore. Every applicant wants to end up in the complex half of the pile. They aren't antagonistic to the application process anymore, but to each other. You the employee are now in a position of power, like a lion in the savannah, culling the herds of their weakest, least weighty-seeming applications. Your prey isn't trying to convince you of anything anymore, just to outgun some other application.

Red Queen

It starts being taken for granted that ‘you have to spend a month on the application,’ no matter how clear and deserving it is at the outset. “Standards” go up. You have to pay a lawyer to craft it. The number of lawyers, the expense of the lawyers, the armies of paralegals, everything's spiralling up, until not everybody can afford a patent anymore. Like the Red Queen, everybody is running as hard and as fast as they can just to stay in the same place.

Well, not everybody has managed to stay on the treadmill. The one thing that's been lost is the line in the sand showing a good patent application.

Zoom out

This dynamic has played out throughout history. It is how bureaucracies are created. To some extent it is inevitable; humans don't yet know a better way to deal with complexity. If you're planning an application process, be aware of these pitfalls. Consider ranking rather than judging, so that you don't have to grow your employees with the number of incoming applications. Consider some sort of limit on application length and complexity so that you don't have to grow your employees faster than the number of incoming applications. Think hard about how your employees will judge applications. Consider bounties for finding misjudged applications. Any of these ‘outs’ will help you avoid the worst-case scenario: high costs, which grow faster than incoming applications. Read more →

As a teenager it drove me crazy that my father would never apologize to me. Ever. Even when something was obviously his fault. I swore to myself that I would be more intellectually honest_i, that I would admit when I was wrong. That emphasis on intellectual honesty gave me a scientific bent and took me to engineering college, and to grad school. For 12 years I unquestioningly assumed the virtue — and importance — of intellectual honesty. Coincidentally, I also spent most of those years working alone.

Now that I've worked in teams for a while I'm starting to change my mind. In many social situations being apologetic sucks. It makes others around you feel awkward. If you're leading a team it makes you seem weak. If you're the rookie you sound like you're making excuses. If others aren't intimately familiar with the details it can magnify your screwups and make things seem worse than they are. And always it's a distraction, diluting your focus and that of your team. I'm learning to not apologize until it's clearly expected. Better to err on that side.

All this may seem crazy obvious to you. Apologizing isn't really part of western culture. I can remember others telling me dozens of times, "don't apologize." Somehow it never sunk in. Perhaps it's not even an eastern thing, just a personal fetish.

Looking back, I have a different perspective on my father. I realize he was an army officer who spent much of his day telling subordinates what to do. You can't be apologizing in that situation. You just don't think about whose fault it was, because the entire focus is on adjusting to a constantly-changing situation, and on what needs to be done next. I want that mindset. Read more →

The Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century weakened the grasp of the church over society, and tried to replace authorities like God, church and king with critical thought. Enlightenment led to the Age of Revolution, primarily the American and French. But the French revolution seemed to expose the failure of the Enlightenment's worldview, one that could cause both utopian liberation and tyrannous oppression. It felt like a new Fall of Man. The world lost its value; life lost its meaning; the individual no longer had grounds to reason about right and wrong. Those who articulated this dissatisfaction were the early Romantics, and they ushered in a new artistic, literary, and intellectual movement. In the process they created several iconic anti-roles that we still recognize in popular culture.

The Byronic hero

The Byronic hero appears as the wanderer, the outcast, the Wandering Jew, the mysterious criminal whose crime is never explained. The tremendous appeal of Byron's poems throughout Europe and America shows how widespread was the feeling of malaise.

The Visionary

Caspar Friedrich,
“Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”.

The Visionary was the first stage of recovery and the first positive Romantic anti-role. The word often used at the time was “mystic.” The Visionary tries to observe the world so intensely as to get to the essence outside of all mental categories. It was felt to be the special task and privilege of the artist and poet to communicate that experience.

The Bohemian

The Bohemian is perhaps the most modern of the anti-roles, characterized by a fascination with alcohol and drugs and sexual experimentation as ways to shift and change consciousness, put the mind through permutations of perceptions which are impossible for the square who is boxed in by his social role. Similar is the interest in non-bourgeouis modes of living, in indifference to middle-class standards of dress, furnishing, and cleanliness.

The Virtuoso

The Visionary avoided role-playing; the Bohemian defied it; the Virtuoso and Dandy transcended it, the one by fantastic mastery, the other by irony. Paganini was the first great Virtuoso and for decades the anti-role model and ideal. Other examples are Richard Burton the Virtuoso traveler and translator of the Arabian Nights, and the Virtuoso mountain climber who performs sublime feats of superhuman effort “because it was there.”

The Dandy

The Dandy transforms the role not by excess but by irony. The role of the highest status in European society is that of the aristocratic gentleman of leisure. By willfully playing this role better than those born and trained to it, the Dandy reveals the pointlessness of the socially adapted. The social type with the highest status spends his life in play and pettiness. The Dandy instead offers perfection and elegance without content, without social function. By stealing the clothes of society, he reveals its nakedness. He demands a greater exquisiteness and perfection than society can achieve. This explains the irritation of society with the Dandy, its efforts to deprive him of his ironic authority, the moral nastiness with which England relished the downfall of Oscar Wilde. Read more →

When I build services or write online I want to get feedback. Did anybody use them? Read my latest post? When my site has just a little traffic Google Reader summarizes too much. I want to be able to get my hands dirty with the data, to be able to drill down to individual user sessions to see how people interact with my site. How many real users did I have yesterday? Did somebody link to my latest blog post? How many people clicked on that link on Hacker News? Did any of them stick around and browse to other pages?

After several attempts at hard-coded scripts to answer such questions, I came up with a little collection of scripts that can be composed using pipes. Here's an example session on my commandline:

$ cat_logs access.log | dump_field IP | sort | uniq | wc -l

$ cat_logs access.log | skip_crawlers | dump_field IP | sort | uniq

$ cat_logs access.log | skip_crawlers | dump_field IP | sort | freq

$ cat_logs access.log | skip_crawlers | dump_field REFERER

$ cat_logs access.log | filter_field IP xxx.xx.xxx.xxx

You just built something and are trying to get the word out. What are the ethics of telling a bunch of strangers about it? Is all unsolicited communication spam? If I send a message to three people, is that bulk? What if I send a million mails, each email by itself? What if the wording of the messages is different? How different does it need to be?

Calling @addressed tweets and facebook events “spam” is increasingly meaningless; let's reserve the word for truly egregious messages. Instead, if you're considering telling acquaintances or strangers about something new, this formula may be useful: Read more →

Chuang-Tzu: Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

Tim Ferriss: The opposite of happiness is boredom.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: When people complain about the empty meaningless void, it is because they have at least one problem that they aren't thinking about solving — perhaps because they never identified it.

Alex Krupp: Given perfect freedom people have a tendency to do just enough to make themselves minimally happy, even if greater happiness is ultimately attainable.

me: There is no 'minimally happy'. Different things either make you happy or they don't. However, happiness from a source can last a long or short duration, ebb faster or slower.

Paul Graham: Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. Read more →

Mike Speiser: Most of today’s massive consumer web properties experienced exponential growth fairly shortly after launch. A few thousand users over a few months is probably sufficient to find out it you have hit a nerve.

Stephen O'Grady: Whatever the reasoning, more and more developers, projects and firms were transitioning away from centralized to decentralized. And happier for it. The trendline was clear, which is why we weren’t exactly going out on a limb predicting the ascension of Git, Mercurial and their brethren.

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Technology can compromise resolve. East Germans who watched West German television were paradoxically more satisfied with life in their country. The fact that Dresden—where the 1989 protests started—lies too far and too low to have received Western broadcasts may partly explain the rebellious spirit of the city's inhabitants. While we fret about the Internet's contribution to degrading the civic engagement of American kids, all teenagers in China or Iran are presumed to be committed citizens who use the Web to acquaint themselves with human rights violations committed by their governments. For the vast majority of Internet users, increased access to information is not always liberating. With their endless supply of entertainment, Twitter and Facebook might make political mobilization harder, not easier.

Technology empowers all sides equally. We cling to the view that all non-state power in authoritarian countries is good, while state power is evil and always leads to suppression. Not all opponents of the Russian or Chinese or even Egyptian state fit the neoliberal pattern. Nationalism, extremism and religious fanaticism abound. Facebook and Twitter empower all groups—not just the pro-Western groups that we like.

Technology drives decentralization; demonstration requires centralization. Thanks to the decentralization afforded by the Internet, Iran's Green Movement couldn't collect itself on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution. It simply drowned in its own tweets.

Technology increases noise and misinformation. We assume the Internet makes it easy for citizens to see who else is opposing a regime and then act collectively based on that shared knowledge. In the age of the Spinternet, cheap online propaganda can easily be bought with the help of pro-government bloggers. Add to that the growing surveillance capacity of modern authoritarian states—greatly boosted by information collected through social media.

Technology shines a harsh light. Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of "open government"; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors.

—Paraphrasing Evgeny Morozov

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Plato, de Tocqueville, et al.: In a democracy, the greatest concern is that the majority will tyrannize and exploit diverse smaller interests.

Mancur Olson: Narrow and well-organized minorities are more likely to assert their interests over those of the majority.

Neil Freeman: Just redistrict the states after each census.[1]

me: Can this idea be generalized? Minorities can be oppressed or powerful; strive to so intertwine motivations that minorities are eliminated. Track minority power and standard deviation of group size as a quality metric for democracy.

But maintain diversity. And don't allow collusion to foster bubbles. Read more →