Railay is a tiny little beach town in Southern Thailand famous for its rock climbing. I've been in Railay for two weeks. When the weather is good, I'm

A good friend passed along some business advice to me a few months ago. "Look for a line," he said. Basically, if you see a line out the door at McDon

i haven't written in a long while because i'm currently on a long trip around the world. at the moment, we're in indonesia. one thing that really surp

I was an Economics major in college but in hindsight I don't like the way it was taught. I came away with an academic, unrealistic view of the economy

Ruby is an awesome language. I've come to the conclusion that I enjoy it more than Python for the simple reason that whitespace doesn't matter.

Pyt

I've been very surprised to discover how unpredictable the future is. As you try to predict farther out, your error margins grow exponentionally big

I have a feeling critical thinking gets the least amount of brain's resources. The trick is to critically think about things, come to conclusions, and

Maybe I'm getting old, but I'm starting to think the best way to "change the world" isn't to bust your ass building companies, inventing new machines,

I've been working on a fun side project of categorizing things into Mediocristan or Extremistan(inspired by NNT's book The Black Swan).

I'm trying

Doctors used to recommend leeches to cure a whole variety of illnesses. That seems laughable today. But I think our recommendations today will be laug

Genetics, aka nature, plays the dominant role in predicting most aspects of your life, in my estimation.

Across every dimension in life your gene

Warren Buffet claims to follow an investment strategy of staying within his "circle of competence". That's why he doesn't invest in high tech--it's ou

Note: Sometimes I'll write a post about something I don't understand at all. I am not a neuroscientist and have only the faintess understanding of the

Your most recent experiences effect you the most. Reading this essay will effect you the most today but a week from now the effect will have largely w

I've had some free time the past two weeks to work on a few random ideas I've had.

They all largely involve probability/statistics and have no pra

Three unexpected things have happened to me during my two years of entrepreneurial pursuits in California.

First, I have not gotten rich.

Second

Figuring out what you want in life is very hard. No one tells you exactly what you want. You have to figure it out on your own.

When you're young,

In February I celebrated my 26th Orbit. I am 26 orbits old. How many orbits are you?

I think we should use the word "orbit" instead of year. It's l

Last night over dinner we had an interesting conversation about why we care about celebrities. Here's my thinking on the matter.

Celebrities are no

A year ago I wrote a post titled "The Truth about Web Design" where I briefly argued that "design doesn't matter a whole lot."

My argument was: "yo

Competition and specialization are generally positive economics forces. What's interesting is that they are contradictory.

Competition. Company 1 a

Doing a startup is surprisingly simple. You have to start by creating a product that people must have, then you scale it from there.

What percent o

Every Sunday night in college my fraternity would gather in the commons room for a "brother meeting". (Yes, I was in a fraternity, and yes I do regret

I think it's interesting to ponder the value of information over it's lifetime.

Different types of data become outdated at different rates. A stree

Have you heard of the Emperor Penguins? It's a species of penguins that journeys 30-75 miles across the frigid Antarctic to breed. Each year these pen

Or..We Think we have Free Will because we only Observe One Path.

"Dad, I finished my homework. Why?"

The father thinks for a moment. He realizes

Google has a list of 10 principles that guide its actions. Number 2 on this list is:

It's best to do one thing really, really well.

This advic

If you automate a process which you repeat Y times, that takes X minutes, what would your payoff be?

Payoff = XY minutes saved, right?

Surprisin

I wrote a simple php program called phpcodestat that computes some simple statistics for any given directory.

I think brevity in source code is alm

If a post on HackerNews gets more points, it gets more visits.

But how much more? That's what Murkin wanted to know.

I've submitted over 10 arti

All the time I overhear people saying things like "I will start excercising everyday" or "We will ship this software by the end of the month" or "I wi

If a book is worth reading, it's worth buying too.

If you're reading a book primarily to gain value from it(as opposed to reading it for pleasure)

My room was always messy. Usually because clothes were strewn everywhere On the floor, on the couch, anywhere there was a surface there was a pile of

Good communication is overcommunication. Very few people overcommmunicate. Undercommunication is much more common. Undercommunication is also the caus

Network effects are to entrepreneurs what compounding effects are to investors: a key to getting rich.

Sometimes a product becomes more valuable si

1. Is there any subject which cannot be explained simply?

No.

1. What about quantum mechanics, organic chemistry, or rocket science? Surely these ca

In computer programming, one of the most oft-repeated mottos is DRY: "Don't Repeat Yourself."

The downside of DRY's popularity is that programmers

When a problem you are working on forces you to wait, do you wait or switch tasks?

For example, if you are uploading a bunch of new web pages and i

Whether you're an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, a casual investor or just a shopper looking for a deal, you should know how to buy low and sell

Possibly the biggest mistake a web startup can make is to develop in a bubble. This is based on my own experience launching 13 different websites over

At our startup, we've practiced a diversification strategy.

We've basically run an idea lab, where we've built around 7 different products. Now we're

Over the past 6 months, our startup has taken two approaches to diversification. We initially tried no diversification and then we tried heavy diversi

It is better to set small, meaningful goals than to set wild, audacious goals.

Here's one way to set goals:

Make them good. Make them small.

Make t

Programming, ultimately, is about solving problems. Often I make the mistake of judging a programmer's work by the elegance of the code. Although the

If you combine Paul Graham's "make something people want" advice with Sean Ellis' product-market fit advice (you have product-market fit when you surv

The best Search Engine Optimization(SEO) system I've come across comes from Dennis Goedegebuure, SEO manager at eBay. Dennis' system is called LUMPS.

Do you "flip the bozo bit" on people?

If you don't know what that means, you probably do it unknowingly!

What it means

When you "flip the bo

Jason Fried from 37signals gave a great talk at startup school last month. At one point he said "software has no edges." He took a normal, everyday bo

Employees and students receive deadlines, due dates, goals, guidelines, instructions and milestones from their bosses and teachers. I call these "arbi

A lot of people have the idea that maybe one day they'll become rich and famous and then write a book about it. That's probably because it seems like

Finding experienced mentors and peers might be the most important thing you can do if you want to become a great programmer. They will tell you what b

Do you think in Orders of Magnitude? You should.

If you think in orders of magnitude you can quickly visualize how big a number is and how much eff

Imagine you are eating dinner with 9 friends and you all agree to play Credit Card Roulette. Credit Card Roulette is a game where everyone puts their

Do you want to become a great coder? Do you have a passion for computers but not a thorough understanding of them? If so, this post is for you.

Sa

What would happen if instead of writing about subjects you understood, you wrote about subjects you didn't understand? Let's find out!

Today's topic

What books have changed your life? Seriously, pause for a few minutes and think about the question. I'll share my list in a moment, but first come up

...when you don't get what you want.

How many times have you struggled towards a goal only to come up short? How many times have bad things happened

Decided to blog again. I missed it. Writing publicly, even when you only get 3 readers, two of which are bots and the other is your relative, is to th