Some Interesting Links

Over time, I've saved up a handful of links that I think people should read.

Over time, I've saved up a handful of links that I think people should read.

Career and Game Theory

Negotiating Your Salary: Our society has a taboo against employees talking about their compensation. It has kept wages low and given bosses leverage. At the end of the day, you're the entrepreneur of the one-person startup that is your career. Know your value and advocate for what you deserve.

Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued | Kalzumeus Software
Salary negotiation advice, mostly for engineers. Running total of raises negotiated due to this essay: $9M+.

Big Companies vs Startups: If you're debating between working at a large company and a startup, don't delude yourself about the tradeoffs. These are two distinct jobs, and you'll find that one might be a better fit depending on your interests. Be careful of joining a startup just for the money: the math doesn't work out!

To Build a Better Ballot: This election wasn't the first time we've heard pleas to abolish the electoral college. Before you preach about how your election scheme will save America, it might be worth examining the different voting systems and noticing how they all have strengths and weaknesses.

To Build a Better Ballot
an interactive guide to alternative voting systems

Self-Improvement

James Clear on Habits: Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. If you wish to be better, it's best done as small incremental changes. James Clear's newsletter also provides remarkably high value-to-word ratios.

Habits Guide: How to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones
How do habits work? How do you change your habits? How do you hold yourself accountable? This complete habits guide contains everything you need to know.

Systems Versus Goals: Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) has been known to assert that "goals are for losers" and pioneered the idea of using systems over goals. Pursue a good life strategy, and you'll find better long-term results compared to mustering up temporary bursts of motivation and willpower.

Goals vs. Systems - Scott Adams Says
In my new book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, I talk about using systems instead of goals. For example, losing ten pounds is a goal (that most people can’t maintain), whereas learning to eat right is a system that substitutes knowledge for willpowe…

Roam Research: I use Roam Research to take notes daily. The tool has become my second brain. Roam lets you form links between different items in your notes, effectively emulating how the human mind stores and processes information.

Roam Research – A note taking tool for networked thought.
As easy to use as a word document or bulleted list, and as powerful for finding, collecting, and connecting related ideas as a graph database. Collaborate with others in real time, or store all your data locally.

Strength Training and Fundamentals: The fitness industry is full of noise. It's especially confusing to those getting started. Remember the fundamentals. Basic barbell lifts, consistency, and incremental improvement will take you far.

The Truth | Jim Steel
“I am a college strength coach, and I am struggling. I am struggling with the state of strength training today. Whether it is training athletes or training the general population, there are a few basic tenets – commandments if you will – that have been thrown out the door and been replaced by soft…

Philosophy

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: Naval is a thought leader when it comes to building wealth and creating happiness. His ideas on happiness were key to lifting me out of a long rut, and I'm forever grateful for that. The "Navalmanack" compiles many of Naval's philosophies into a single source.

Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Nassim Taleb's Incerto: Nassim Taleb is a former options trader, statistician, and general polymath. He's redefined how we should view risk in the real world with his Incerto series. The link discusses antifragility, the concept of systems gaining strength from randomness.

Nassim Taleb: A Definition of Antifragile and its Implications
Here’s the definition of Antifragility from Nassim Taleb. While a lot of people use the word, not many people know what it means and its implications.

Life is Short: You're going to die. Therefore you should understand how much time you actually have left and how best to spend it. You don't want to be on your deathbed wondering where all that time went.

The Tail End — Wait But Why
No matter what your age, you may, without realizing it, be enjoying the very last chapter of the relationships that matter most to you. Make it count.

Killing Time: David Perell reflects on how life goes to waste when we get lost in the distractions of the modern world. If you burn time and find no fulfillment throughout your days, you'll end up with a life thrown away.

Don’t Kill Time - David Perell
If you’re okay with killing time, it’s not scarce enough. Time is scarce, life is short, and as the grains of sand slip through the hourglass, so does the precious gift of time. Once gone, it disappears forever. We all know these things. And yet, at work and at home, we’re so lost in a

Personal Finance

The Bogleheads Investment Philosophy: John Bogle was the founder of Vanguard and pioneered the philosophy of buying and holding low-cost index funds over a long period of time. This mindset has allowed many to become financially free.

Graham Stephan's YouTube Channel: Graham is a former real estate agent who rose to fame as a popular finance YouTuber. I agree quite strongly with his fundamentals on financial independence and frugality.

Software Engineering

Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting: In a keynote Jeff Bezos gave about AWS, he notes that software businesses pay a large but undifferentiated tax of "heavy lifting" in order to function. (Setting up servers would be a canonical example.) A former Netflix director later posts popular slides detailing key lessons for startups. One of these is to outsource your undifferentiated heavy lifting.

We Build Muck, So You Don’t Have To | Amazon Web Services
Earlier today, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos gave the keynote presentation at the MIT Tech Review’s Emerging Technologies Conference. The conference was held on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There were two distinct parts to Jeff’s talk. In the first part, Jeff made sure that the audience k…

The Morning Paper: This email list sends you a summaries of interesting computer science research papers. It's a great resource for those looking to identify meaningful spaces within the research world and those who struggle to digest research papers from scratch.

the morning paper | a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer

Oh My Zsh: As an engineer, a fair chunk of my working time is spent in the terminal. Investing a small amount of time to configure your development environment can pay large productivity dividends down the road. This is one of the many tools that I use.

Oh My Zsh - a delightful & open source framework for Zsh
Oh-My-Zsh is a delightful, open source, community-driven framework for managing your ZSH configuration. It comes bundled with several helpful functions, helpers, plugins, themes, and a few things that make you shout... OH MY ZSH!

A New Transport Layer for the Internet: Those familiar with the OSI model may have heard of TCP or UDP, but there exist more obscure methods of transporting IP traffic. One such protocol involves using delivery pigeons to transfer data. (It hasn't gained much traction due to performance issues.)

RFC 1149 - Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers