When going to college many years ago, I decided to challenge myself by setting a goal to see if I could graduate in only three semesters, taking the same classes that people would normally take over a four-year period. This article explains in detail all the time management techniques I used to…

Prioritizing Permalink Sebastian Sebastian Profile 1918 posts Ban User No bio set 5 years ago 0 Sebastian, fyi - thank you for your posts on time tracking. I am greatly benefitting from them. There is definitely room for an app/webbased/offline component here. It's gotta flexible,…

I stumbled onto this post the other day through Hacker News. Basically Ryan Dahl (the guy who wrote node.js, a web framework that makes running web servers easy with javascript) called out the deplorable state of software today. I fully agree with him. And here’s why - I’ve seen things. In college I…

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You probably already know that sometimes you have to fire your customers. It turns out, when you’re starting a business, sometimes you have to fire your co-founder, too. Of course, in a perfect world you’d have the perfect team from the start, but — and I speak from experience here — that rarely…

August 2011 I realized recently that we may be able to solve part of the patentproblem without waiting for the government. I've never been 100% sure whether patents help or hinder technologicalprogress. When I was a kid I thought they helped. I thought theyprotected inventors from having their ideas…

When I started programming many of the elements we take for granted now, did not exist. There was no DirectX and not many compatible libs were available for the free compilers of the day. So I had to write my own code for most basic programs, keyboard handlers, mouse handlers, video memory…

Below, I link to blog posts and other online resources that offer advice for entrepreneurs. My selections are tailored for consumer Internet startups, but should be helpful to teams in other sectors. There’s a lot of information here, so don’t try to digest everything in one session. I'll update…

This is an older article I originally wrote about speed reading based on my personal experience. I’ve since posted a critique of the original methods, backed by more significant scientific research. Please read here: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading: Here’s the Facts . Reading is an incredibly…

Sometimes it’s not the obvious things that create the biggest problems. In this case one of the hidden job killers in our economy today is the explosion of patent litigation. Every technology company I have is getting hit by patent lawsuits that are the biggest bunch of bullshit ever. Every week it…

Portfolio versus resume Having emerged from engineering and mathematics, computer science programstake a resume-based approach to hiring off their graduates. A resume says nothing of a programmer's ability. Every computer science major should build a portfolio . A portfolio could be as simple as a…

What Is Intelligence, Anyway? By Isaac Asimov What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over…

By Peter Coy There is a comforting story about the debt ceiling that goes like this: Back in the 1990s, the U.S. was shrinking its national debt at a rapid pace. Serious people actually worried about dislocations from having too little government debt. If it hadn’t been for two wars, the tax cuts of…

On July 13 Salesforce.com sponsored a seminar on Sales & Business Development at the ATI. ATI’s Aruni Gunasegaram moderated a panel consisting of Adam Berman of TVA Medical, Shelia Burns of Luminex, Jason Mathias of HomeAway, and Randy Potts, recently of Convio. Much of the discussion focused on the…

In March 2005, a photocopy was handed to me in preparation for work with one of the top wigs. It enumerated the rules necessary to avoid conflict and ensure efficient communication between me and someone who doesn't have time for bullshit. Recently, I discovered said photocopy hiding within one of…

On Wednesday, less than 30 minutes before Apple announced another record-breaking quarter of financial results, the Wall Street Journal published a story by Yukari Iwatani Kane, Joann S. Lublin, and Nick Wingfield regarding the issue of Apple CEO succession. (You can circumvent the WSJ paywall using…

(page 4 of 6) Endgame does sell commercial products. It’s also a major supplier of digital weaponry for the Pentagon. It offers a smorgasbord of wares, from vulnerability assessments to customized attack technology, for a dizzying array of targets in any region of the world. Last year, Endgame…

The productivity paradox The productivity paradox, popularized by economist Erik Brynjolfsson, notes that computational power has advanced exponentially for decades, yet growth in labor productivity remains modest. While many factors explain the paradox, the one most relevant to modern knowledge…

A New York University professor’s blog post is opening a rare public window on the painful classroom consequences of using plagiarism-detection software to aggressively police cheating students. And the post, by Panagiotis Ipeirotis, raises questions about whether the incentives in higher education…

Google sets impossible bodacious goals…and then achieves them. The engineering mindset of solving the impossible problem is part of the culture instilled in every group at Google. Tough engineering problems don’t have obvious answers. You need to invent the solution, not just optimize something that…

I originally planned on making this topic into an eBook and have it released alongside “ How I Launched, Marketed and Promoted A High-Traffic Blog in Under 15 Days ” but I’ve decided against it. I wrote this (very personal) article to document the rapid rise and ultimate collapse of my very first…

December 2005 The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators.So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad? Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cureit. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are aninfinite number of things you could be…

Anatomy of an A+: A Look Inside the Process of One of the World’s Most Efficient Studiers May 18th, 2011 · 81 comments Scott Young’s Graduation Gift to Study Hacks I have to give credit to Scott Young : it was talking blogs with him back in 2007 that helped convince me to start Study Hacks. The fact…

Contents Jump to: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . My philosophy: Optimize transaction costs Distilled into empirically-wrought principles, my high-level advice is: Reduce transaction costs to engaging in productive behavior. Erect transaction costs to engaging in counter-productive behavior. Minimize…