Write like you talk.

“You can make anything by writing”― C.S. Lewis

A better way to make products is to make them with people, not for people. Products need to be built on empathy, backwards and emergent from the community.

They’re gambling big while they should be making small bets.

Radical openness makes something truly magic happens: learning and humility become inseparable.

You can also create charges using customers instead of cards:

I wanted to put down roots.

The common thread throughout the alternative setups of these companies is their willingness to experiment.

twelve hundred polling organizations conducted nearly thirty-seven thousand polls by making more than three billion phone calls

Gallup had read the work of Walter Lippmann. Lippmann believed that “public opinion” is a fiction created by political élites to suit and advance their interests.

George Gallup was one of the few people who understood that the Digest risked underestimating Democratic votes, especially as the Depression deepened, because its sample, while very big, was not very representative: people who supported F.D.R. were much less likely than the rest of the population to own a telephone or a car.

We, the undersigned, believe that society and the economy are served best when workers have both stability and flexibility.

the art of systems design becomes the design of ontologies

When you work on a small project, your contribution is, obviously, HUGE. So is your ownership. And so is your motivation.

She said he questioned her on things like modular manufacturing and how to find the right employees.

But corporate success means corporate sprawl

Ordinary people seek entertainment. Extraordinary people seek education and learning.

To be accounted for, objects have to enter into accounts. If no trace is produced, they offer no information to the observer and  will have no visible effect on other agents.

we make objects mute owing to our instrumental approach to them, we need to relate to them differently so that they  will tell stories about themselves.

I will show, a convenient fiction in this new work, enabling the philosopher to hear the call of things and to speak to  and  for   them, despite the new rule that we cannot think of objects as being-for-us

we are working our way toward asking how the fundamental Heideggerian principles of specu-lative realism (Harman 2005, 76) remain informed by medieval mysti-cism and indeed what a mystical discourse can do for objects deemed mysterious

e highest beings hear God not only through and in existence and through and in life, but also through and in understanding. Intellection and utterance are the same here.

ey remain silent and are no longer actors: they remain, literally, unaccountable.

Being is inseparable from propositionality.

Nathan Ensmenger in his book The Computer Boys Take Over: “Programmers dislike activities involving close personal interaction. They prefer to work with things rather than people.”

The role of roles. A role is a systemizing concept that has widespread use in business and industry.

One of the main benefits of persona stories, when produced as outlined here, is they and their resulting scenarios and visual designs will be descriptive rather than prescriptive. That is to say they describe interactions we have good reason to believe will work (because we have done research and evaluation with real users) rather than just prescribing what users must do. It is a subtle but extremely important difference.

nformavores will keep clicking as long as they sense (to mix metaphors) that they're "getting warmer" -- the scent must keep getting stronger and stronger, or people give up. Progress must seem rapid enough to be worth the predicted effort required to reach the destination.

make your content look like a nutritious meal and signal that it's an easy catch.

The ISS moves so quickly that if you fired a rifle bullet from one end of a football field,[7]Either kind. the International Space Station could cross the length of the field before the bullet traveled 10 yards.[8]

When you look at the sky near sunset, you can sometimes see the ISS go past ... and then, 90 minutes later, see it go past again.[6]There are some good apps and online tools to help you spot the station, along with other neat satellites. My favorite is ISS Detector, but if you Google you can find lots of others. In those 90 minutes, it's circled the entire world.

Numbers are important. Number of users is important. So are lots of other things. Different services create value in different ways. Trust your gut as much (or more) than the numbers. Figure out what matters and build something good.

his penchant for thinking in pictures

If you’re not paying with money, you’re paying with your data.

minds are starting to turn towards new problem spaces and potentially creative new solutions

We have to take risks, but test quickly.

writing intrinsically champions and improves creativity, critical thinking, and clarity

Writing was a way for students to not only understand the project and its lessons, but to understand their own level of comprehension—to be self-aware of what they knew and didn’t know.

What each of the companies had in common was that they built something that was useful, created a feedback loop of getting user feedback and iterating on the product, and kept at their startups long enough for the market they were in to mature.

every moment you aren’t gathering data is a moment wasted

All the data suggests it is not the person, it's the context they’re inhabiting.”

Governments are also operating systems.

But what the market deems valuable is not necessarily aligned with what is ultimately good for us as a society or even what we want. Because under conditions of extreme inequality, the market is biased towards people who have lots of money, at the expense of virtually everyone else.

they will simply refuse to work with an agency unless the agency agrees to adopt 18F’s culture and workflow, at least for the project at hand

a two-pronged, top-down-and-bottom-up approach is the only way to unstick the the world we find ourselves in today

Transparency as an asset versus transparency as a liability

They very explicitly had to install a hierarchy

it depends on context whether something is data, code, both, neither, etc.

Looking back, we should have chosen a smaller part

Knowledge occurs in ideaspace, but arguments occur in wordspace, often due to low fidelity translation between the two spaces.

Tangible items force everyone to react, which helps you guide crucial conversations.

Creating tools is not about creating patterns; it is about spreading them, amplifying them, and giving more people access, validation, and power to make the most of them.

it is exceptionally important for open source software to code in such a way that optimizes for quick developer ramp up

When you’re doing open source work, lease, please, please think of the next developer when you reach for that shiny new gem, that clever piece of meta-programming, that half-adopted convention.

The next person to look at your code may not have any context at all. They will wake up, Memento style, and only see the code at hand. They do not have the history you do.

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Over time, all visuals will have this link.

Find today’s Gardners, and let them cultivate its soil.

You’ve gained a sense for weaving yourself into a project usefully, leveraging your strengths

enter a forward to http://www.mydomain.com in the "Forward My Domain" section of the Domain Details tab, rather than setting up something in the Forwards tab

reviewers working for psychology journals rarely take this into account in any rigorous way. Neither do they typically ask to see the original data.

it is inefficient because it misallocates resources by depending on information that is irrelevant to the decision being made.

details matter, and if you can’t see clearly what steps two and three are, it doesn’t really matter what your vision for step 20 is. I embrace the mundane work and find insights while exploring it.”

you run out of mental energy if you keep paying attention to everything you’ve done in the past.” 

I once railed that social media is not media — it’s not simply a place to get attention and then advertise. I was right back then; it had potential. But that no longer applies. Now it is just media. It’s like putting up ad signage at a rock concert. Yeah, lots of people see your ad, but it’s the concert they’re talking about, not you

Nobody wants to talk about your brand. Nobody wants to interact with your marketing. Any gains you see are illusory. Social media is not a marketing channel. Give up.

Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap.

The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask. Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.

Mapping the coast of the island of knowledge, to continue the metaphor, requires a grasp of the psychology of ambiguity.

Workday, a human resources software company, makes a similar product called Collaborative Anytime Feedback that promises to turn the annual performance review into a daily event.

“Data creates a lot of clarity around decision-making,” said Sean Boyle, who runs the finance division of Amazon Web Services and was permitted by the company to speak. “Data is incredibly liberating.”

“These businesses were my babies, and I did whatever I could to make them successful.”

Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more. “The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff,” said Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer.

As the company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared.

Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.

data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees

“It would certainly be much easier and socially cohesive to just compromise and not debate, but that may lead to the wrong decision.” Tony Galbato, Amazon vice president for human resources

There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said the plans protect people going into socially valuable but low-paying lines of work from crushing debt. “That’s good for them. That’s good for our economy. It’s good for our society,” he said.

Critics say the plans are a hidden subsidy to well-off students and colleges, which can justify tuition increases by reassuring students that they may not have to repay their debt.

People don’t want just the outcomes; they want the progress outcomes represent.

Outcomes are lagging indicators. They only tell you if something did, or didn’t work. They don’t tell you if it’s working.

To “break smart” is to adapt intelligently to new technological possibilities.

In terms of talking about the self, what this is telling you is that the self is multilayered. There's a narrative component to it

It feels like my soul doesn't extend into that part of my leg.

we're on the cusp of having a Third World transportation system in the highest tech part of America, which is richly ironic

If we’re going to fix things, we need to design a better system

Instead of thinking of technical debt as yesterday’s work that I failed to do, I think of it as tomorrow’s feature I can have today

apple-lesson

Perhaps this allseems laborious or trivial, but knowing exactly what goes into and comes out of a news application is fundamental to understanding how to preserve one.

Imperative programming: telling the "machine" how to do something, and as a result what you want to happen will happen. Declarative programming: telling the "machine"1 what you would like to happen, and let the computer figure out how to do it.

the function we pass to map is pure; it doesn't have any side effects (change any external state)

ember install:addon ember-cli-flash

As Park says, "We need both kinds: people who can hack the technology, as well as people who can hack the bureaucracy."

the code is a black box, and what they enjoy is the program

Code is the tool. The program is the product.

The only thing that matters in software development is that your users love the software.

How it’s implemented doesn’t matter at all unless it’s implemented poorly.

what we’re doing here is to yank government—upgrade it, patch it, and ultimately transform it so that it is responsive and can interface with this new private sector in a much more effective way.

The travel stress alone can be debilitating.

William James was just wrong when he tried to argue that “two minds can know one thing.”

sometime in the late 1800s and early 1900s, probabilities started cropping up in ways that appeared objective

the universe is before us so that we can shape it, that it can be changed, and that it will push back on us. We’ll understand our limits by noticing how much it pushes back on us.

One way to look at it is that the laws of physics aren’t about the stuff “out there.” Rather, they are our best expressions, our most inclusive statements, of what our own limitations are.

Schrödinger thought that the Greeks had a kind of hold over us—they saw that the only way to make progress in thinking about the world was to talk about it without the “knowing subject” in it. QBism goes against that strain by saying that quantum mechanics is not about how the world is without us; instead it’s precisely about us in the world. The subject matter of the theory is not the world or us but us-within-the-world, the interface between the two.

the cost of carry

“One of the great challenges has always been that people look in retrospect and get great insight, but the voters miss the benefit of journalism

But because he’s an academic, Yanich’s findings won’t be published until long after election day

Assign Admin

Note that you can reference any SVG element inside the xlink:href attribute, even if that element is in an external file. The referenced element or group does not have to exist in the same file. This is great for organizing files (for example you could have a file for reusable components) and for caching the used files.

setupController: function(controller, model) { controller.set('content', model); }