hkmurakami\'s blog

Startups in Japan

Tue, 19 May 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I was recently asked by a friend of a friend about "Startup culture in Japan", particularly with respect to social entrepreneurship and Fukushima. This is my reply. Take it with a massive fistful of salt, since even though I am ostensibly involved in startups in Japan, there is a stark difference between an American who is peripherally involved versus a native born Japanese person fighting in the trenches day to day in Japan.

"Startup culture" can mean any number of things, from the culture within new companies to the way startups are seen by the public. But From what you mentioned about more "social startup" oriented observations, I'm going to assume that you're interested in what the prevailing attitudes of "starting companies / joining young companies" is like.

As you likely know, Japan is a place where the typical successful career trajectory is to join a large company and stay there until retirement. Compensation plans at these big companies are backloaded, and longevity is rewarded with promotions, social standing, pay, etc. Given this backdrop, staring companies and joining young companies is still very much an unpopular thing to do in a broader context. The most recent new grad employment polls showed that the top 4 places of desirable employment in Japan are the giant import export companies. Students are smart and flock to the best opportunities. They are no different than us in the states, other than those "best opportunities" being different from our economy.

That being said, compared to just 5 years ago, being involved in startups is seen as a much more reasonable endeavor, perhaps because these old big companies are seen as not being as stable and financially rewarding as they once were. Founders seem to be much more visible on media outlets. Funding climate is somewhat improved (though still far behind the States), and some younger people who don't quite fit the mainstream mold as well are finding startups to be a reasonable alternative given the tradeoffs. I see skilled software engineers (who have some of the highest career mobility in Tokyo right now) joining startups that have raised significant rounds and can afford to pay decent salaries.

But whether any of these newer startups (post DeNA / GREE / Cyber Agent etc.) will achieve strong exits is yet to be seen. The latest high profile IPO, GUMI, just hand a spectacular crash as both of its topline and bottomline numbers suffered greatly shortly after its recent IPO. There is a noticeable dearth of large exits outside of mobile gaming. Even LINE (which has an IPO on the horizon) makes most of its revenue from games. Without strong exits, the entire startup ecosystem is on life support. Without exits, funding dries up, wages go down, and talent goes away. Talent is everything in starting a company, and exits trickle down to attracting better human capital.

On the area of more direct "social entrepreneurship", I believe that a company must make a profit and be sustainable as a business no matter how noble its intentions may be. If the company can't make money, then its death is just a matter of time and its beneficiaries (or customers) will suffer in the end when the company inevitably falls. This is in contrast to a nonprofit which could perpetually run in the red operationally and depend on government and foundation grants.

Regarding Fukushima, I think most of the endeavors are in the realm of nonprofits rather than startups. Other than very cheap skilled labor or land in the Sendai area, I don't see very many competitive advantages there. (I do know a guy who went back to Sendai where he's from to start a product design firm there to support the area there).

Regarding daycare centers, there is absolutely a market that is not being served by the currently available private and public options. However, it's a topic that has been in public discourse for at least 5 or 6 years now, so if there hasn't been significant progress by now, I question the economic feasibility of such an endeavor with respect to real estate costs and the customers' ability to pay a price above the cost of operation. Japan's low marriage and fertility rates are legendary now; there are various theories about this, but my thesis (and shared by many others) is that the young in Japan simply do not have much disposable income. That factor would also stifle efforts for childcare startups.

Perhaps there are other opportunities though. For instance, a friend of a friend has started a company that is a "yelp for young mothers", where users rate and leave reviews about restaurants and other establishments that are children-friendly (many places in Japan, particularly Tokyo, are very unfriendly for mothers with strollers, for instance).

If the country feels that this is an important area, then government should consider handing out grants or subsidies or credits, much like what we have seen in renewable energy all over the world (what allowed solar energy to be viable in its early years).

Thoughts on VC Blogging

Wed, 11 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMT

The best VC Blogs are among the best resources for learning about a range of subjects in the tech industry. Some examples (the usual suspects) that come to mind include:

These blogs offer both anecdotal and data-backed perspectives on subjects ranging from B2B SaaS pricing models to Series B fundraising dos and don'ts.

When I read something, afterwards I like to step back and consider things form one higher level of abstraction. If I'm reading a novel, this might be a reflection on the plot devices or syntax that was employed. If I'm reading a blog post, I like to think about the motivations of the author.

For VC Blogs, I can think of a few drivers:

Awareness & Expertise building (transition from founder to VC)
Paying it forward
Dishing out the dirt
Position Building
Inbound funnel

1. Awareness Building

Each blog listed above is affiliated with young funds that needed to differentiate itself and make itself known to the world (and have succeeded spectacularly at doing so). Demonstrating and communicating experience, perspective, and thought leadership goes a long way towards associating the fund's brand with one of competence.

2. Paying it Forward

It's long standing culture to "pay it forward" in this industry. We've all been helped by people more senior than us, where they took a chance on us even though they had very little to gain. Once we find our own bit of success, we're compelled to take a chance on the next generation and help out where possible. It's something that can have huge leverage -- a small amount of effort on our part can be a huge boost to someone else, hopefully leading to a virtuous cycle thereafter.

It's also "good for business". Good deeds tend to come back to us in unexpected ways.

3. Dishing out the Dirt

a.k.a. "Tell it Like it Is". Ben Horowitz is particularly (in)famous for this.

We all have a desire to dish out the dirt, and lay it all out. But we can't. We're still beholden to the powers that be. Pissing off some famous guy or company (or even just saying how tough things are how mentally worn out we are) could come back to bite us. So we shut up. And wait. We wait until we've made it -- when we are no longer beholden to anyone.

Horowitz himself says in his book that he couldn't say most of the things in his book while he was running Opsware because of the possible negative effects it could have on the company. He has come out in full force since then.

Still, some VCs do things that I really don't like. This post is for them.

Four Things Some VCs Do That I Don't Like - Ben's Blog

Can you imagine anyone saying this while still running a (young) company? No way. A blog can be an outlet for all those years of not being able to publicly say things that you've wanted to scream at the top of your lungs to the world.

4. Position Building

Position Building is pretty interesting. It allows the blogger to gradually shift the trends in their favor by taking a position on an point that could be taken "either way". The key is that they take positions on issues where either position is arguably correct. This is in contrast to outright predatory behavior or misdirection.

The most visible form of this is often used by Venture Capital's older brother, Hedge Funds. The very visible founder takes the stage to shift discourse on a public security in his favor (ex: David Einhorn pushing hard for AAPL to buyback stock). VCs are more subtle than this. For example:

...some of the smartest founders I work with are taking advantage of the seed funding boom to raise larger early rounds, buying themselves more time to get more done and hit more of those critical inflection points. If you're only new and shiny once, get as much out of it as you can.

What the Seed Funding Boom Means for Raising a Series A - First Round Review

This is a well supported piece of advice within a well argued longer post. But "larger seed rounds" have recently been a point of contention between Angels / Seed Funds and VC Funds. Early stage or multistage VCs have been coming down the ladder into seed rounds, sometimes taking seed rounds for themselves and squeezing angels and Seed Funds out by offering more cash and a perhaps a higher valuation. Given this context, First Round Capital's (a young multi-stage fund founded in 2004) well reasoned advice can be taken as position talk that is beneficial to VCs over investors with shallower pockets.

Take Hunter Walk's (partner at Homebrew, a Seed stage fund) perspective on the matter:

Anecdotally, over the last 3-6 months we're definitely seeing more examples of larger early stage or multistage funds offer to do 80-100% of a company's seed round.

...

(c) Barbelling of VCs: There have been debates as to whether the VC industry is barbelling - that's to say, a number of near-billion dollar+ funds on one end and sub $250m funds on the other. To be caught in the middle, especially without a strong brand and partnership (aka the Benchmark exception), is to miss out. But theres a lot of capital concentrated in that middle right now, often in firms who have a partner or two known as top in their vertical but without necessarily a broader reputation in other spaces. Thus the firm doesn't see the breakout good deals in those other spaces. In order to go after them, they need to head earlier into seed. And they need to own enough of the company in order to get the returns they need from a $500m fund, so instead of owning 10% and splitting the seed round with another investor and some angels, they go to own 20%, which is more typical of their model in Series A and beyond. They're less price sensitive and more ownership sensitive, so these firms are willing to pay more to get the deal. This theory is the most structural one suggested here and I tend to believe is influencing some early stage investment behaviors.

Goodbye Party Round, Hello Piggy Round: Should Seed Stage Founders Raise From Just a Single Investor? - hunterwalk.com

He treads lightly in his post, offering 4 possible explanations as to why this may be happening (one of which I cited here). But as a seed stage VC, he isn't exactly enthused about this development.

It's a clash of positions. Both sides of the argument have perfectly valid points. As a founder, there is no clear right answer. But they write to steer things towards a more favorable future for themselves. There's nothing sinister or predatory about that.

5. Inbound Funnel

But ultimately...

Investors want to make sure they get 'the call' from founders when they begin fundraising - so they're motivated to send 'happy vibes' in order to stay around the hoop.

What the Seed Funding Boom Means for Raising a Series A - First Round Review

This is likely the biggest reason why VC Blogs exist today.

Ulterior motives aside, these blogs are like Google/Stackoverflow for a developer. Never have there been so many great free online resources to figure out what to do, what not to do, and where to go.

It's a good time to be a founder.

[Idea] Ad Retrieval

Mon, 09 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMT

There was a discussion about the ongoing decline of web display advertisements on Hacker News today, and one comment caught my attention.

There have been a few times I've seen an ad on a website that looked like it was for something I wanted, and wanted to click it.

The problem is that I pretty much ignore the ads while I'm reading the page content, and so I only noticed these ads when I'd finished the content and clicked a link to leave the page, and my eyes are wandering while I wait for the new page to start loading. I click back to try to get back to the ad, and something else has taken over its spot. I might refresh a few times to try to get the desired ad back, but that has never worked for me.

tzs

I've had this problem occur to me many times. I've reloaded a page 10+ times in an effort to get the original ad to load, usually to no avail. This HN'er and I can't be alone in having had this experience.

Is there a way we could somehow get the original ad to load if the user desires? The HN discussion also brings up the fact that both click through rates and CPC are declining. In contrast, users actually wanting to click the ad and see the product should have very high signal fidelity and intent.

If my browser had a "load previous ads" feature, I would use it a handful of times a month. Multiply this by a possibly very large number of users, and this could possibly have a nontrivial effect.

3 Reasons to Attend Business School

Sun, 08 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I went to business school and dropped out after 3 months. For me, it turned out to be a waste of time and money. But that doesn't mean business school is useless for everyone (which is the popular opinion in Silicon Valley these days). It's been a little over a year since I've dropped out, and I can think of 3 good reasons to attend.

Career Transition

Business School facilitates industry and/or functional career transitions. While it's typically difficult to change both industry and function (ex: energy sector analyst to sports marketing), it's even possible to achieve such a dramatic change by taking some small steps (academic year internships, etc.) over the course of two years. If changing just industry or function, the transition is relatively straightforward.

While it technically wouldn't be impossible to make such transitions without the significant financial and temporal commitment of business school, what these programs offer is considerable de-risking of the transition. It virtually guarantees a soft landing in even the worst case scenario even if things don't work out perfectly.

Yes, there are people who can make these transitions without another academic line item on their CVs. But not everyone has the track record, network, or drive to make it a reality.
Rest

For those coming from an excruciating career start in places like banking or consulting, business school can be a 2 year respite that won't leave a blank in the resume. Students who are sponsored by their employers won't even have to fork over the tuition that can be prohibitive to many. Even without this, they may have enough of a cushion built up and have very good financial prospects coming out of school that the financial downside can be mitigated.

Terms like "funemployment" are thrown around casually in Silicon Valley, but not every industry or career trajectory will let people randomly take 12+ months off and come back to the workforce seamlessly. "I was working on some side projects" doesn't (a) have much credibility and (b) isn't even possible for some functions (ex: corp finance) for most careers outside of software or design.

For many industries, not having a blank period in the CV can be worth a lot of money.
Network

The business school alumni network is a value-add that I understand in theory, but have yet to see used in the wild. However, I have been using my undergrad alumni network from time to time, and thus I can see how people without a super-nepotistic (i.e. helpful and supportive) alumni network like that of my alma mater would see a great benefit to being part of an alumni network that seeks to help each other out as a kind of a fraternity.

Further, no matter who we are, our current network of friends and professional acquaintances tends to encompass a fairly narrow range of backgrounds. A business school class of roughly 400 students covers a very wide range of industries and functions. The ability to quickly tap the knowledge and perspective of someone in the trenches in practically any sector can be an asset.

For example, when I needed a sanity check and first order guidance for what to do for year end tax compliance at my startup, I was able to chat with my business school friend with an big-four accounting background to confirm what next steps I needed to take.

This is likely not an exhaustive list of reasons why business school might make sense for someone. But what I learned through my own experience enrolling and dropping out is that it's critical to have something concrete that you want to gain over those 2 years that would be very difficult to obtain otherwise. I only had vague, weakly held ideas that brought me there, and I paid the price for it (literally).

The Psychlogy of Professional References

Sat, 07 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Reference checking a candidate is standard protocol for vetting a potential new hire. But I wonder how effective this step actually is. Basic human psychology seems to influence the accuracy and usefulness of many of the references.

The person providing the reference has two relationships to consider: the one with the candidate and the one with the hiring manager. The relative strength and usefulness of each of these two relationships influences the nature of the reference given.

First, if the relationship between the referer and the hiring manager is stronger, then the referer has an incentive to provide an accurate picture of the candidate. This is because the referer has "more to gain" through the maintenance of her relationship with the hiring manager than with the candidate. Both strengths and weaknesses will be accurately depicted.

Next, if the relationship between the referer and the candidate is stronger, then the referer has an incentive to provide a positive picture of the candidate. The referer is unlikely to outright lie about the candidate's qualifications, but is likely to focus on the candidate's strengths and positive contributions and gloss over the shortcomings. The referer has more to gain from her relationship with the candidate than with the hiring manager, and will thus lean towards helping the candidate regardless of the exact situation.

In most cases, the referer has worked with the candidate before while never having worked with the hiring manager. This means that the referer is generally predisposed to helping the candidate rather than the hiring manager. This is particularly the case when the referer is listed as a reference on the candidate's CV.

Lastly, even if the referer's relationship with the candidate is weak, it is still stronger than the nonexistent relationship with the hiring manager. Thus this situation reduces to the case where the candidate's relationship with the referer is strong. However, if the referer thinks that it would be a bad idea to piss off the hiring manager or their organization with an inaccurate picture of the candidate, the situation may reverse itself.

In the end it's all about incentives, and I don't think the incentives are properly aligned for most referers to give accurate depictions of candidates.

Why Tokyo Is an Affordable Place to Live

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMT

disclaimer: this post is written from the perspective of a resident of San Francisco working in high tech

My friends are always shocked when I claim that Tokyo is a very affordable city to live in.

How could this be, they ask. Tokyo has, in their minds, always been one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in.

There are a handful of factors at play:

Inflation and Deflation

The idea of Tokyo as an expensive city was cemented in our minds during the 90's, when it was indeed one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in. But Japan has spent the last 20 years in a deflationary environment where asset prices have largely remained stagnant.

Contrast that with the West where inflationary policy has lead to a steep increase in prices throughout the economy. This is most acute in San Francisco, where real estate expenses continue to skyrocket, health care costs continue to rise, and college tuition increases know no bounds.

Yes, Tokyo is still an expensive place to live compared to most of the world. But living expenses in the pockets of the West where we live in as tech workers has dramatically increased to the point where Tokyo is now an attractive option.
Food

It's easy to eat out and get cheap, healthy, good food in Tokyo for about $10. The equivalent in the Bay Area would cost about $20.
Health Insurance

Health Insurance is heavily subsidized by the State, and its burden is substantially lighter for Japanese residents compared to the US.
Tip

There is no tipping culture in Japan, making meals automatically 15% less expensive than in the states, all else being equal.
Public Transit

The train and bus system in Tokyo is (I believe) the finest in the world. It is on time, frequent, clean, and the riders are extremely courteous (do NOT use them during rush hour though). There is no need to ever own a car living in Tokyo (unless you're a gearhead, of course)
Apartments

A 1 bedroom in a great neighborhood in Tokyo costs roughly $2500/mo. The equivalent in SF would be about $3100~$3500. There are also options that are less than $1000/mo with great public transit access to the heart of the city.

Of course, the caveat is that rooms in Tokyo are substantially smaller than the SF counterparts. However, (a) you get used to the smaller sizes, and (b) we often don't even have the option to pay less for a smaller room in SF.
Tax

Japan has a surprisingly low tax rate for moderate income earners. At a $60k income, the base federal income tax is roughly 15%.

US federal income tax at the same level would be roughly 20%, with an additional 10% added on for California state income tax.
Currency

This may perhaps be a temporary phenomenon, but with the exchange rate at 120 Yen to the Dollar (it was as low as 78 Yen to the dollar in 2010), our dollars go much farther than they used to just 5 years ago.
Supply Demand Arbitrage

Japan's market dynamics are unique in that the supply side must offer much more "value" to the market than anywhere else in the world. This takes the form of quality, service, cleanliness, politeness, and many other forms. While we need to pay a premium to receive such benefits in the States (where the baseline is much lower), the default "value" provided to the consumer by the supplier is much higher in Japan. As a result, on a "per dollar" basis, our money goes much farther in Japan than in the States, provided that you are a consumer who is already paying for such benefits in the States.

This balances out in the domestic market because each person must assume both the role of the supplier and the consumer under normal circumstances. The ordinary citizen must work comparatively more as the supplier compared to other countries, but once she is on the demand side, receives much more per dollar than her global counterparts.

This opens up an arbitrage opportunity for people who only participate on the demand side in the Japanese domestic market, and fulfill their supply side role elsewhere (ex: a remote software or design job, or accumulated savings).

As a result, Tokyo becomes a fantastic place to live, as long as you don't have to work there.

10 Things I Learned in My 20's

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I turned 30 earlier this year. Naturally, I now know things that I wish I had known earlier in my life. Here are ten things I've learned in my twenties, from both my success and failures -- but mostly failures.

The Geographic Location of Your College Matters

This matters for two reasons: work and friends. All things being equal, you are much more likely to end up working for a company in the area than elsewhere (there are many forces that contribute to this, from the on campus recruiting to the perceived coolness of the surrounding industries that are ingrained in you over the years). Because of this, your friends are likely to stay in the general area of the school (e.g. East Coast vs West Coast). This means that even if you defy the odds and start working elsewhere, you will lose many of the good friends you made in college.

I personally experienced this going to an East Coast, Wall Street feeder school and going back to Silicon Valley. Yet another factor to consider when considering the impossible question of which school to attend.

Bonus tip: On campus recruiting is 10x easier than off campus recruiting after graduating. Take advantage of it! (I never did it and paid the price for it, as the financial crisis hit)
Under Load on Courses during Your First Semester of College

The first 6 or so weeks of college are when everyone is looking to meet new people and make friends. After this period, people become comfortable with spending increasing amounts of time with whatever cohort they have discovered for themselves. It's also the time where you can try out a bunch of different student clubs and see what works for you. And for many (including myself), you can use the extra time to adjust to a new city and a new stage in your lives where you will need to make decisions and set schedules by yourself.

I overloaded on courses my first semester and paid the price both physically and mentally. I hardly slept or ate, losing 15 pounds over the first 6 weeks of college. I felt completely burnt out, and was not performing well academically. My schedule was a mess and I was living hour to hour, let alone day by day. This remains one of the three darkest times of my life.
Take Difficult Courses Your First Year

It will be torture, but you will make lifelong friends there who will there, suffering alongside you. There is a reason why Vietnam vets remain lifelong comrades. That "we're in it together" environment fosters lifelong bonds.

For me, this was Physics 105, the Physics major track Mechanics course. Problem sessions would run weekly on Thursdays from 8pm to indefinite in the Physics building in the corner of campus. We would be there until 2am, give up for the night, go play Mario Kart 64 at one of our rooms until 4am, split up, meet up again at 11am the next day, keep working until 4:50pm, and make a mad dash to the Physics building to make it in time for the 5pm deadline. It was hellish and made me give up any hope of majoring in Physics after that course. But the guys who struggled alongside me and the brilliant ones who would lend us a hand at tackling the problems became my best friends in college and thereafter.
Be a Host

Feel like you're losing touch with friends because you're too busy? Having trouble meeting new friends? Got some money but no time? Host events!

Board game night, video game night, poker night, chess night, movie night, Super Bowl parties, GoT viewings, you name it. Buy some beer, chips, grapes, order pizza, and encourage but don't require guests to bring something as well, from extra chess boards to deviled eggs (I have a friend who keeps bringing deviled eggs to chess night because he wants to eat them himself). You don't need to drive anywhere, friends will slowly bring their friends from other social circles, and you'll all have a great time.
Investment or Hobby?

With each purchase, know whether you're doing it as an investment or as a hobby. This applies from everything from a car, an education, to a home.

If your car purchase is a hobby, you only have to think about how much you enjoy the car. If you need it as an investment so that it will enable you to reap financial windfalls from it (you need to get to work), then its utility and ROI should be your concern.

If your education is a hobby and your are doing it for the love of the subject and do not need to make a living, then you can choose to study an esoteric humanities discipline and get away with it. If you need to support yourself after college, then you need to consider the return on your tuition you will gain from your studies.

If your finances are such that your home purchase needs to increase in equity value, then you must consider your alternatives and evaluate whether purchasing a home has the best probability weighted expected return on your capital. If your home falling 20% in value makes no difference whatsoever to you, then you can buy whatever your heart pleases even if the property is very illiquid or macroeconomically likely to fall in value (e.g. Japanese real estate).

Most purchases will fall somewhere between these two extremes, but it's a worthwhile mental exercise for your large purchases.
Watch Some TV

I urge you to watch some quality TV shows so that you can have it as an conversation topic option when meeting new people. I used to think that talking about TV was uninteresting and frankly beneath me, but I now view it in a different light.

Conversation topics are just conduits to get a better view of another person's character. Just as we can learn about a person from what part of a Hemingway book resonated and affected them strongly, so can we with TV shows.

For the last 10 years, I barely watched any TV. Obviously if you don't watch TV shows, you can't have a conversation about TV shows. This can be a problem when you meet people with whom you have little in common with (what do you mean you don't read trashy Sci-Fc novels!?), since TV and sports are usually the two most common and widely accepted fall back options. It's one of the easiest ways to get a conversation going, and you can glean a surprising amount of information about a person from the more meta aspects of any conversation, including TV.
Spend Money on Others

I recently realized that spending $50 on a random gift for a friend is much more satisfying than buying something for myself. This is anecdotal and I'm not exactly sure how it works, but it seems to be backed by some research as well.

This also applies to splitting the bill on a meal. If you have a regular group for meals, try taking turns footing the bill rather than splitting it every time. Sure, someone will likely get the short end of the stick, but it'll grow the camaraderie and make it more likely that you'll get together again sooner rather than later.
Overpay When Splitting the Bill

A couple of bucks here and there is just not worth being labeled a cheapskate to your friends. The appropriate "rounding threshold" will depend on your group. It might be to the nearest 1, 5, or 10 dollars.
Find "Your People"

"But you find your tribe. Jerry Seinfeld said in an interview last year that his favorite part of the Emmy Awards was when the comedy writers went on stage to collect their prize. “You see these gnome-like cretins, just kind of all misshapen. And I go, ‘This is me. This is who I am. That’s my group.’ ” By your 40s, you don’t want to be with the cool people; you want to be with your people." New York Times

There was a time in my early to mid 20's where I wanted to be with the "cool people". In High School, scoffed at classmates who played D&D. Looking back, it was a reaction against my own uncoolness and a reflection of my lack of self confidence.

But I gradually realized that I was just trying to be someone who I wasn't. To the people who mattered to me, it didn't matter where I fell on the objective coolness scale. I felt more alive and invigorated and excited about everything when I re-embraced my deep rooted nerdiness. I felt at home and in my element around my fellow smart, uncool, nerdy folks.
What It Means to "Make the Most Out of Your Mistakes"

This phrase is such a cliche that I always subconsciously rolled my eyes at it. To be honest, I still roll my eyes at it. Cliches are a problem because their ubiquity prevents us from thinking deeply what the phrase is actually trying to communicate.

I've made many many decisions that in hindsight can be classified as mistakes. Let's take my own career for example. Going to school in the East Coast was a mistake considering I knew I wanted to be in Silicon Valley high tech. Majoring in EE rather than CS was a mistake. Not committing myself to becoming the best engineer I could be (even if I was never going to be the best) was a mistake. Going to the UK made it even harder to come back. In many ways, my experience in Japan was traumatic, and I made very little money or career progress. I once negotiated way too hard with a semiconductor company and had an offer rescinded. Going to business school was a waste of time and money given who I was and what I wanted to do. My mistakes far outnumbers the optimal decisions I have made.

Each mistake puts you in a situation that is objectively worse than where you could have been. Some doors that were available to you will now close. But unknowingly, new doors will start to creak open as you move forward in your currently suboptimal path. There will be some cool opportunities that will arise from the things you learn and the people you inadvertently meet. I wouldn't have met my team if I hadn't made all these mistakes in my life. Maybe my optimal path would have put me in a better place (maybe I'd be a Facebook millionaire!), but maybe not. There's no way to know, it's useless worrying about something I no longer have any control over, and I'm quite happy where I am today. That's probably why we say we would do the same things all over again, despite all our mistakes.

Thanks to Kevin Ko for reading drafts of this post.

Books Read in 2014

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I read 45 books in 2014, about the same number as last year. 30 of them were in Engilsh, while 15 were in Japanese. 38 were fiction and 7 were nonfiction.

It was definitely a year of novel reading. 2015 will likely lean heavily towards business nonfiction though, now that I am working again.

Below is the list of Engilsh books with a short comments for some noteworthy ones.

The Cricket in Times Square (George Selden) - This children's book came up in a conversation with a musician friend. Turns out I had definitely read this in elementary school but had completely forgotten about it until I started reading it. It's amazing how our brains retain experiences over decades but are dormant unless triggered.
The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James) - A Victorian classic where the female protagonist struggles between independence and properness as "a lady". I need to re-read this as a social commentary after studying the era more.
The Turn of the Screw (Henry James)
Famous Last Words (Ray Robinson) - A gift from a TL'er a couple of years ago. Quotes range from the whimsical to the profound.
Player Piano (Kurt Vonnegut) - I've read so many Vonnegut books over the last few years that I'm having trouble keeping them straight. I think this one was written in the 60's when mass factory production was making serious headway in the world. There are eery parallels to today's world where social discourse talks about technology and robotics taking away jobs and hollowing out the middle class. Vonnegut's earlier work seems less insane compared to his later ones.
Great Expectations (Charles Dickens) - Pip! Pip! Great novel.
The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway) - Probably my least favorite Hemingway novel to date.
Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes) - Apparently this is often assigned in Junior High literature class, but I didn't have that fortune. Simple and arguably a bit juvenile in how straightforward it is, but a great, sad story.
Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka) - What the... it's short. Just read it. Consider it part of your missing education. Truth in absurdum.
Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel García Márquez ) - I learned of the "Magical Realism" genre with this novel (though apparently Murakami is the posterchild of the genre and I'd read plenty of his stuff before). I had a hard time becoming invested in the narrative and the characters since many of elements were so unrealistic yet not "magical enough".
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (Kurt Vonnegut) - Yet another trip down absurdum. I don't think the book was as memorable as some of his other works.
The Fall (Albert Camus)
Fantastic Voyage (Isaac Asimov) - First Asimov novel I read. I didn't realize that his work would be so casually readable.
The Hunger Games (Susan Collins) - I thought that this book would be a good read for a daughter if I ever have one, but then I got to the cringe worthy romance part and threw away such notions.
Catching Fire (Susan Collins)
Mockingjay (Susan Collins) - This book was terrible in every way.
Daemon (Daniel Suarez)
The Gods Themselves (Isaac Asimov)
The Andromeda Strain (Michael Crichton) - A good pop sci-fi joyread.
The Stranger (Albert Camus) - Wow. I remember nothing about this book.
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) - Re-read this in order to read P&P&Z. My roommate called this "literary yak shaving" haha. It was definitely more enjoyable than when I read it when I was 16.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Seth Grahame-Smith) - Inferior to P&P in every way, but a fun read nontheless. The annoying characters in the original have horrible things happen to them, and you get to bask in sweet, sweet schadenfreude.
Models: Attract Women through Honesty (Mark Manson) - A friend pushed this on me. The gist is to treat yourself and others well (both materially and emotionally), expect others to do the same to you, distance yourself from those who don't give you that respect. As my friend put it, it's "The Game for thoughtful guys", which seems pretty apt. I actually think it's decent from a psychoanalysis perspective as well.
The Art of Loving (Erich Fomm) - A psychoanalysis book written in the 50's.
The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho) - I felt like the story was too overtly a parable and that it was shoving a cliche one size fits all life philosophy down my throat. I disagree with the simplicity of its advice, but the prose was strangely poetic and enjoyable.
The Circle (David Eggers) - A doomsday scenario novel where a Google-like company becomes all knowing and all powerful. The theme has been so rehashed and worn out for me that it made the narrative a chore to get through. The minituae of the psychological transformation and cool aid drinking of the protagonist was well done though.
Crazy Rich Asians (Kevin Kwan) - A trashy pop novel that I thoroughly enjoyed.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz) - Probably the most pragmatic business book for running a startup that I have ever read. I only take investing advice from fund managers and traders, and I now see that I should do the same for business books as well. The preface says something like, "business books typically say what to do when things are going well. I'm going to tell you what I did when everything went wrong."
The Science of Success (Charles G. Koch) - Say what you will about the Koch brothers' political shenanigans, it's undeniable that they know what they're doing in the business world. I decided that it may be fruitful for me to look into how they operate and what their philosophy is. This book is filled to the brim with jargon and cool aid, but I did get a glimpse of Charles Koch's framework that guides his philosophy.
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (Tucker Max) - Picked this up for $1 at a used book store. I remember reading his blog during college -- does he still do this stuff? The guy must be pushing 40 by now.

I also read the following Haruki Murakami novels in Japanese:

After Dark - I have no idea what the heck happened in the latter half of the book. Way too magical and hypnotic.
Kafka on the Shore
Wind up Bird Chronicle - Pretty high on the "what the hell is going on" magical narrative scale, but somehow he made it work. I've read a good portion of Murakami's novels now, and I feel that this may be most representative of his style.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Murakami's newest novel. I personally enjoyed it a lot, and thought this one was most similar to real life with all its loose ends and unanswered questions, much like "South of the Border, West of the Sun".

Pride for Your Work

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 00:00:00 GMT

I was talking with a friend today about our work, and I argued that pride in your work is an essential quality in any employee. His position was that this was optional, and a nice to have. I was pretty sure he was misunderstanding what I meant, so I proceeded to clarify my position.

Even when I'm tasked with the most mundane, boring, painful task, I will never deliver something that is below my own standards of quality. I refuse to ship something that I cannot be 'proud' of, because my work is a reflection of who I am.

I've inheirited work from people with far more technical competence or professional experience than me, where their work screamed that they didn't give a damn. And it was always the deadweights and incompetents who delivered shoddy, careless, error laden work.

High performers never returned crappy work no matter how busy they were. They 'owned' their work, even if said work was reviewing someone else's deliverables.

When I say 'pride in your work', I don't mean the wishywashy, 'oh I'm so proud of how our little app is making the world a better place' nonsense. I'm talking about a basic level of self respect and giving a damn about the quality of your work.

Turns out we were both on the same page about this little thing, and parted ways for the night.

Thoughts on "The Circle" by David Eggers

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 00:00:00 GMT

"The Circle" is a parable and dystopian Sci-Fi novel about a near-future world where the world is on the cusp of being run by a neo-Google corporation.

The novel was a bit of a disappointment, since the themes and warning calls by the author are quitodian for a person immersed in the tech landscape. A friend quipped that authors who gain recognition quickly devolve into producingly overly social-commentary driven works, and "The Circle" certainly falls into that category. That being said, the book likely opened some eyes in a less tech and privacy conscious cicles.

One theme that I resonated with strongly was how work is used as an escape, distraction, and numbing agent by the protagonist to prevent herself from having to confront her growing personal schisms. I believe that this is a 'problem' rampant already in our society today; being busy and preoccupied prevents us from much needed introspection and self-examination. It's easier to look away than to treat the cause of our unhappiness -- work facilitates denial.

The book is a bit over 450 pages in hard cover, but only the last 100 pages are truly exciting. The drama in those latter pages made the read worthwhile.

Dignity

Sat, 25 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - David Eggers

What about dignity?

You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it. It's never dignified, always brutal. What's dignified about dying? It's never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it's fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.

I saw this quote in a friend's Facebook status many months ago. I was reading the book today and the passage jumped out at me. I'm shocked at how memorable this quote has been, despite initially seeing it completely out of context.

You Know, (written)

Tue, 21 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT

A Short Talk about Richard Feynman (2005)

And in fact, sometimes it was those throwaway conference talks that have ended up being some of Feynman's most popular pieces. On nanotechnology. Or foundations of quantum theory. Or other things.

You know, Feynman spent most of his life working on prominent current problems in physics. But he was a confident problem solver. And occasionally he would venture outside. Bringing his "one can solve any problem just by thinking about it" attitude with him.

"You know" is one of the most common "filler" phrases we use in speech. For the purposes of public speaking, we're taught to eliminate these filler words as much as possible. Rightfully so. These phrases are distracting at best.

The quote above is from a transcript of a talk given by Steven Wolfram. Understandably, he uses "You know" now and then during his talk.

What I noticed though in reading this transcript, is that his use of "You know" gives the text a more human tone than had the phrases not been there. It makes the text more conversational.

It's really surprising to me, since I never expected that it would such a different effect on the listener/reader when used in speech v.s. writing.

Thrun Pivots Udacity

Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Sebastian Thrun, leader of Google's driverless car project, former Stanford professor, and Udacity founder, has pivoted Udacity to vocational training.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. The greatest challenge of education is to nurture the desire for learning in students and for students to be in a situation in life (e.g. situation at home - income, safety, etc) in order to even have a chance at becoming motivated.

MOOCs disproportionately benefit those who already have the means, the background, and most importantly the drive to learn. MOOCs address the problem of access. But access wasn't the main problem to begin with for the vast majority of students whom people like Thurn was trying to reach.

MOOCs helped people like me. They didn't do much to help those that really needed a helping hand.

The Dangers of Intelligence

Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

This is going to be a self-character assassination post, but here goes!

Imagine ourselves as characters in a RPG. We have a bunch of parameters that indicate our skills and prowess: strength, stamina, speed, diplomacy, etc. Intelligence is just one of the many attributes that make us effective. But within the overeducated segment of society, intelligence carries unrivaled caché. What we seldom realize is the danger of this attitude.

In The Twilight of the Elites, Chris Hayes asserts that our society -- particularly the Elites -- worships intelligence to an abnormal, unjustified degree. For instance when Obama praised Larry Summers, he would always stress the economist's extremely high intelligence.

According to my friends, I apparently fit Hayes' description of an elite to the dot. And just as Hayes observed, I am guilty of overvaluing the importance of intelligence found in others [1]. With the help of friends, I'm now starting to see that this is a potentially self-destructive trait to have.

In certain pockets of this country, intelligence worship isn't much of a problem. The high intelligence lot permeates places like the Greenwich Hedge Fund industry or the Silicon Valley tech scene. They are comfortable places, where we congregate among like minded and similarly equipped peers. Our potential arrogance is kept in check by the friends and colleagues that blow us out of the water.

But step outside of our comfortable compounds and we are suddenly faced with regular people! When we value and expect high degrees of brain power and don't get it, our disappointment/condescension/etc. often shows. And most people are not stupid; most of them are quite capable. Unless we're really really good at acting, our feelings will show. We aren't doing ourselves any favors and we probably won't be winning them over.

But maybe we don't need to win them over? After all, they aren't exceptionally bright right? Maybe, but probably not. Another side effect of emphasizing intelligence is that we tend to strongly discount other strengths that people may have: the strength, stamina, speed, diploma, etc that we mentioned earlier. Overvaluing intelligence means that our circle of colleagues will most likely be deficient in one or more of these areas.

Intellectual circlejerks feel good, but probably limit our own growth and what we can do as a group. Points in the same attribute seem to be closer to an additive relationship, whereas points in different attributes seem to be multiplicative. If you have 10 people with 10 points each in intelligence, the group may output 10+10+10+10+10+10+10+10+10+10=100. But if you have 2 people, one with 10 points in brain power and another with 10 points in salesmanship, the duo may output 10x10=100 on their own. Reality may not be this extreme, but I suspect that I'm not too far off.

So to recap: if we place too much weight on the intelligence of others, we...

won't feel comfortable in most normal situations
we will alienate normal but capable people
we stunt our own growth
we get less done as a group

Sadly I'm suffering from all four of the above. It's easy to write this out in a blog, but changing my ways in person is has not been easy by any means. In fact I have an allergic reaction to the very notion of changing my ways. I fear that by doing so, I will lose something in my character that is fundamental to who I am (and while I am full of flaws, I am rather fond of who I am today).

For the time being I think I'll continue to hide away in my ivory tower. But at least I'm self aware of the damage I'm doing to myself by doing so, and for now I'm okay with that.

[1] Now granted, I am not nearly as intelligent as some of my friends

"We Had It Pretty Good"

Mon, 25 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

As twenty-somethings, bschool students have usually only experienced one or two jobs. We come here, cash in hand, with hopes of going on to something better than before.

But once we're here, we're hit with a battering ram of recruiting events and are exposed to lot more companies than we ever had been in the past. Even the sheepest of us are all but forced to "network" and talk to recruiters, alumni who work there, and an assortment of other employees at the firm to get a better sense of what they're like.

The most valuable thing I've gotten from all of this is that I've learned a lot about myself and my particular needs. I've also realized that I had it pretty good at my previous place, and I was pretty lucky to have semi-randomly landed in a team of pretty awesome nerdy engineers.

And a not so small number of classmates seem to share this sentiment:

"You know, I didn't realize it at the time, but I had it pretty good before."

Life is funny, don't you think?

Keep Saturdays Sacred

Sat, 09 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

From "Keep Saturdays Sacred" -- Steve Klabnik

You see, in college, my friends and I were moderately obsessed with writing software. We sorta stumbled onto a tradition of making sure that every Saturday, we got together and wrote code. At some point, we realized that this was the formula:

1. If none of us set our alarms, we'd all wander into the computer lab at 1pm Saturday.
2. We then went and got some burritos from Chipotle.
3. Once we were appropriately stuffed, we'd go back to the lab and hack on whatever.
4. In our town, food was half off at certain restaurants after 11pm. So we'd code until then, and then go get some food, and then go home later.

...

We weren't even always working on the same projects. They were often quite different, and changed all the time. But it was a safe place to try things, a safe space to fail. A place to get support and help. To socialize and figure out just what the hell we were even doing.

It was also an incredible privilege. Over the last few years, I've been too busy to keep that going. Life gets in the way. It's hard when you don't have that group. Maybe the solution, then, isn't that it's all day on a Saturday. Maybe it's just finding some kind of gap time, but doing it every week.

When I read the titile, I expected the post to be about not working on Saturdays. But what it turned out to be resonated even stronger with me.

Ever since coming back to school, I've had a hard time keeping up with my various side projects. Having an environment like Steve's would help me tremendously.

Unfortunately, replicating Steve's environment isn't really feasible for me and my particular school situation. But at the very least, I can set aside Saturdays to work on whatever not-required-for-school personal projects I feel like working on.

So that's what I've decided to do from here on out. Today is the first such Saturday, and other than checking how I did on the accounting quiz before realizing what I'd done, I've kept my promise of staying away from schoolwork. I've read a hudred pages in a book and have spent an hour or so googling Postgres and Jquery basics for a web UI thingy I've been meaning to build for the last month. Maybe I'll even get around to working on part 2 of my interview with @gfx.

If you're in the area and doing something like this on some of your Saturdays interests you, shoot me a message. :)

How to Improve Your English

Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I've met numerous international classmates since coming back to school. For many of them, particularly from East and South East Asia, adapting to the English language and American Culture remains a large hurdle. The culture problem is a monumental challenge. I still don't have an answer for it.

But I can tell you my conviction about learning and improving a language.

Every moment you're not using English, you're becoming worse at it. Every moment you're using your native language, your English is becoming worse. If improving your English is a priority for you, you must maximize your use of English and minimize your use of your first language. It's a brutally simple and brutally painful truth.

I am a dual-native speaker of English and Japanese (meaning that both languages are independent in my mind), yet even then the more I use Japanese, the worse I become at English, and vice versa. When I didn't speak English all summer during my Elementary School years, I got back to school and had trouble pronouncing words.

Over the last 12 months, I've made the conscious choice to minimize the amount of Japanese I use. I never speak Japanese to the Japanese classmates here. I have cut down Japanese media consumption dramatically. I update my Japanese blog sparingly. I've committed to staying in the States professionally, and am pouring resources into improving my command of English.

I know first hand how painful it can be to be in a foreign culture and have to use a foreign language. Everything is going by you at 3x speed, you don't understand the cultural pretext, and your brain is on over-drive trying to stay afloat through all this. The last thing you want to do when you get home is to expose yourself to even more English. I went through all of this when I worked in Japan as a foreigner.

Yet this is exactly what you have to do if you need to improve your English. You can't let your guard down, because your skills are decaying faster than you grew them every single time you relax and take a break from English.

If you're not growing, you're contracting. If you're not moving forward, you're moving backward.

-- Reid Hoffman

If you're reading this post, you know that you don't need to be convinced. You know deep down that this is what you need to do. Lean into the pain

296 Days since aaronsw Died

Tue, 05 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

When I visited Lawrence Lessig's Wikipedia page yesterday, I spotted a photo of the professor with a young Aaron Swartz. Naturally, I navigated to Aaron's Wikipedia page.

When I saw photos of him there, I immediately started to tear up. I cried all day 296 days ago when I found out about Aaron death. The emotions I had felt that day came roaring back. I'm misty eyed even as I write this post.

I'm happy that I haven't forgotten; I'm sad to be reliving the loss again.

Business School & Lawrence Lessig

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

We were discussing "Personal Branding" in class today, and students were giving examples of people they thought had strong personal brands. Examples included Oprah and Richard Branson. I offered my input and said "Lawrence Lessig".

The professor and all seventy odd classmates collectively drew a blank. Little wonder that I am a black sheep here.

Worth Their Weight in Gold

Sun, 20 Oct 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In the 10/12 - 10/18 issue of the Economist, the "Free Exchange" column discusses the impact good teachers have on their pupils income. "Good teachers, they find, are worth their weight in gold," the article posits.

Well being the stickler for accuracy I am, I wanted to run the numbers on this.

Assuming that teachers' weight range from 110 lbs to 220 lbs and the spot price for gold is currently just north of $1300 per ounce, we find that the range of these teachers' value in gold would be in the range of $2.3 million and $4,6 million.

Let's also say that each teacher positively affects 100 students a year for 20 years. Then they have a value add of roughly $1,100 to $2,200 to each student.

Each student will be taught by about 50 teachers from 1st through 12th grade, and I think it's reasonable to say that a string of great teachers could increase her lifetime earnings by hundreds of thousands of dollars. An increase of $10,000 per year over a 40 year career is an additional $400,000 in earnings. Each of the 50 teachers would be adding $8,000 to the student's lifetime earnings. [1]

So the statement may not be so outlandish after all. Good teachers really may be worth their weight in gold or more.

[1] I'm obviously glossing over things like NPV and the effect of college education.

Public Spaces

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I was chatting with a Professor today when he brought up the subject up beautiful public spaces. When traveling in Europe, he had marveled at and had enjoyed the great public spaces that could be found in its cities (Barcelona in particular). But back in the States, there seemed to be a dearth of such spaces. Or was there?

He continued to his crux, which was that great public spaces do exist in the States! They're just masquerading as our universities!

It's so true. Every campus I've ever set foot on has been marvelously beautiful with a great set of people, both students and locals, enjoying what it had to offer. The campuses that I have spend time in first hand -- Stanford, Loyola Marymount, Cornell, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Cambridge, Foothill College, and UCLA -- have all been magnificent places.

But wait, what does that mean for us though?

Well it means a lot of things, but I'll just make one point: we're missing out dearly if we don't try to spend some time in these spaces from time to time. I've spent at least 20 years of my life near Stanford and haven't taken advantage of my proximity nearly as much as I should have. I definitely need to rectify that when I move back. I'm definitely jealous of my friends who attended the school and continue to live near by.

Back to School

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:00:00 GMT

As some of you know, I'm back in school. Yup, AGAIN. It's the third go around for me, and my friends sure are ribbing at me.

"You sure must like collecting those letters!"

dry laugh... ;)

I think most people who know me online would guess that I'm going to be attending an engineering masters program, perhaps in CS. Logical, considering my gradual professional migration from hardware to software, and my newfound involvement in Free and Open Source Software.

Admittedly, that pull is strong. Deep down, the more I move away from engineering, the more I realize I really do like it, even through those grinding, painful, sleepless nights of torment when a dumptruck full of shit hit one of those massive Hollywood music video wind generator fans. I like making stuff (thank god for the web where I can build and push stuff out with ease), and I like people who make stuff even more.

But actually, I'm here at business school (at UCLA, for those that are wondering). There's a whole slew of factors why I'm here, but the short version is "I want to be the guy in between the suits and the hackers who can fight for the technical guys".

That's been my motivation since I was 16 (when I realized that I likely couldn't be the best in a purely technical field), and though I've oscillated here and there, and while the details have morphed a bit, the feeling deep down has persevered inside of me throughout all these years.

Now I'm painfully aware of the stereotype of MBAs in tech as out of touch, haughty, pointy haired manager types. Hopefully I can pick up some skills and knowledge during these two years and simultaneously avoid getting "corrupted" in this way!

So my posts here will probably start becoming a bit more concrete, which will surely be a welcomed change from the abstract nonsense I've tended to write in the past. Some will be from the curriculum, but I imagine most of the stuff will be interpersonal observations.

I'm living on campus so if you're in the area, let's meet up sometime. Shoot me a message!

How Milestones Motivate Us

Sun, 29 Sep 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I used to think that milestones like 100,000 downloads, 1 million users, or $10MM in revenue were just arbitrary, meaningless markers. With respect to the operation of the business itself, I still think that crossing these threholds doesn't change anything. After all, what's the difference between 99,999 downloads and 100,000 downloads?

But the one area where these arbitrary milestones matter (and oh man do they matter a lot) is team motivation. And as we all know, motivation is a huge factor in getting us to go the extra mile. My own productivity definitely gyrates wildly depending on my motivation levels.

I'm a contributor to the Fluentd Open Source Project, and there have been two recent milestones/events that have been a boon to my motivation levels.

This month, Parviz Deyham from Amazon Web Service promoted Fluentd as the best data collection tool for Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), a hosted Hadoop framework running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

In the best practices whitepaper, Parviz, an Enterpise Solution Architect at AWS, notes that, "Fluentd is easier to install and maintain and has better documentation and support than Flume and Scribe."

From the Treasure Data Blog.

Amazon is obviously the 500 pound gorilla in anything cloud data, so it's an amazing feeling to get recognition and a hat tip in their whitepaper.

And just this week,

"This week, Fluentd website has more traffic from US than Japan (both around 30%). Apparently, the integration with ElasticSearch + Kibana is driving the adoption. Next milestone is to surpass logstash in mind share."

From Kaz, CTO of Treasure Data

Fluend has historically been very Japan-heavy in terms of community involvement and usage, so seeing the data behind our increased mindshare elsewhere in the world (and particularly in the States) is really encouraging for the project team.

Simply put, when we do great work and get recognized for our efforts by people who matter to us (The AWS guys, hackers and programmers world wide), we definitely get fired up to do more.

No wonder the high morale companies and teams don't cheap out in celebrating such milestones. However much you're paying for the booze, pizza, and decorations, you're easily making back through the amped up team motivation.

Myers Briggs: ISTJ

Sat, 21 Sep 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The Myers Briggs test came up during lunch today and I was interested in what I'd be. I'd taken a short online test before and gotten something close to the classic INTJ outcome but not quite.

I didn't want to spend too much time on this so I chose the shortest one from this list that the blog author thought was nevertheless very accurate. And here are the results:

drumroll...

ISTJ - "Trustee". Decisiveness in practical affairs. Guardian of time- honored institutions. Dependable. 11.6% of total population.

Introverted (I) 67.5% Extroverted (E) 32.5%
Sensing (S) 76.67% Intuitive (N) 23.33%
Thinking (T) 66.67% Feeling (F) 33.33%
Judging (J) 84.38% Perceiving (P) 15.63%

I - Introversion preferred to extraversion: ISTJs tend to be quiet and reserved. They generally prefer interacting with a few close friends rather than a wide circle of acquaintances, and they expend energy in social situations (whereas extroverts gain energy).

S - Sensing preferred to intuition: ISTJs tend to be more concrete than abstract. They focus their attention on the details rather than the big picture, and on immediate realities rather than future possibilities.

T - Thinking preferred to feeling: ISTJs tend to value objective criteria above personal preference. When making decisions, they generally give more weight to logic than to social considerations.

J - Judgment preferred to perception: ISTJs tend to plan their activities and make decisions early. They derive a sense of control through predictability.

Source: Wikipedia

I think this is pretty spot on. I thought I'd dig a little deeper on what ISTJ's are generally like.

ISTJs generally have the following traits:

* Value tradition, security, and peaceful living
* Will work long and hard to fulfill duties
* Can be depended on to follow through on tasks
* Loyal and faithful
* Stable, practical and down-to-earth
* Family-minded
* Dislike doing things which don't make sense to them
* Dislike abstract theory, unless they see the practical application
* Natural leaders
* Prefer to work alone, but work well in teams when necessary
* Extremely observant, they take in facts via their senses and store them internally
* Vast, rich inner store of facts which they rely on to understand problems which they encounter in their lives
* Profound respect for facts and concrete information
* Make decisions objectively, applying logic and rational thinking
* Dislike change, unless they are shown it's benefit in a concrete way
* Have strong opinions about the way things should be done
* Appreciate structured, orderly environments
* Have very high standards for their own behavior and the behavior of others
* Not naturally in-tune with other people's feelings
* Able to accomplish almost anything if they put their minds to it
* Community minded "good citizens"

ISTJs have one character trait that puts them at a definite advantage in terms of career success - Perseverance. An ISTJ can do almost anything that they have decided to do. However, there are areas in which they will function more happily and naturally. An ISTJ will do best in a career in which they can use their excellent organizational skills and their powers of concentration to create order and structure. ISTJs seem to fit extremely well into the Management and Executive layer of the corporate business world.

Source (.doc)

Not so sure about the whole "management and executive layer of business" thing. I think I'm pretty darn picky about who I work with and for whom to serve (as a manager I consider myself to be serving the team, rather than the other way around). But I'm a not-so-talented person who's gotten this far through nothing but sheer work ethic, so the perseverance part is certianly true for me.

Type description

ISTJs are faithful, logical, organized, sensible, and earnest traditionalists who enjoy keeping their lives and environments well-regulated. Typically reserved and serious individuals, they earn success through their thoroughness and extraordinary dependability. They are capable of shutting out distractions in order to take a practical, logical approach to their endeavors, and are able to make the tough decisions that other types avoid. Realistic and responsible, ISTJs are often seen as worker bees striving steadily toward their goals. Despite their dependability and good intentions, however, ISTJs can experience difficulty in understanding and responding to the emotional needs of others.

Although they often focus on their internal world, ISTJs prefer dealing with the present and the factual. They are detail-oriented and weigh various options when making decisions, although they generally stick to the conventional. ISTJs are well-prepared for eventualities and have a good understanding of most situations. They believe in practical objectives, and they value traditions and loyalty.

Source: Wikipedia

Everything I've read about ISTJs match my own characteristics. In fact, it's so spot on that it's a bit eerie.

edit: This site presents a comprehensive description of the attributes.

Why Immigrant Parents Americanize Their Kids

Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I was talking tonight with a friend about why immigrant parents in America often strive to Americanize their children. We were at a loud crowded bar and I honestly don't expect her to have heard everything I said, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to summarize my thoughts and observations here. After all I'm the son of immigrant parents myself, and while perhaps not as thoroughly Americanized (after all, I am a native bilingual) as some of my peers, I unabashedly identify myself as American and don't really identify much with Japanese culture at all.

Oh by the way in this post I'll be talking mainly about Asian immigrants, since (a) I'm personally part of this group, and (b) we tend to conform to American culture much more than Latin or European immigrants.

Okay, to begin, we should to recognize the fact that parent, no matter who they are or where they are, want the best future for their kids. This may sound trivial, but it's the foundation on which the rest of their decisions are built upon.

Now, when these parents come to the United States, they are some kind of professional: engineer, doctor, lawyer, accountant, researcher, etc. As such, they're thrown into the grindstone that it American corporate (or academic) buracracy and politics. Whether it be kissing up to a teacher, begging a professor for an extension, schmoozing with the boss or navigating thorny blame games in a meeting, life demands more than merit, hard work, and expertise in any society. It asks for political savvy and negotiating skills, whether it be to get a higher salary, nab a promotion, or avoid blame for that product that blew up in the field. We like to believe that merit conquers all, but honestly, that's hardly the case.

So these immigrants (Chinese, Thai, Indian, the whose gamut) come to the States and are thrust into a situation where they need to employ all the social savvy and in-between-the-lines-reading and mind games, and are horribly equipped to do so. It's not just the language barrier, but the stark difference in social and workplace culture, modes of communiction, styles of management and types of organizations, and so on. They produce great work, yet are passed up for promotions and raises while the smooth talker who can put up the appearance of producing results moves on ahead. They struggle to forge many deep, trusting relationships with others in and outside the office, and tend to congregate with fellow immigrants. They establish a good life, and most likely a better life than what they could have had in their home countries, but they know that they could have done so much more had they just been, yes, "American".

And so the last thing they want their kids to have to go through is the same struggles and challenges that they faced and succumbed to. They don't want their kids to suffer unnecessarily, if they can easily avoid such a scenario by thoroughly Americanizing them. It's a rational and understandable choice.

The assimilation effort starts early. Many kids are given Western first or middle names (Indians are a curious exception, as I have never met a single Indian American with a Western name). Parents use broken English at home instead of their native tongue to help their kids pick up English without a hiccup. Efforts are rarely made to have the kids become fluent in their parents' native tongue, and kids develop conversational ability at best but are often illiterate (the vast majority of Chinese and Taiwanese Americans fall into this category).

The parents' strategy is optimized to eliminate the problems that they encountered as immigrants. As a second generation Asian American, I must admit that the strategy is effective. After all, my speaking Japanese at home and becoming bilingual definitely held me back in developing my English vocabulary and writing skills. In every phase of my life that I have reduced my exposure to Japanese, the time spent consuming and creating English content has increased, and my abilities have improved in kind.

Individual families will fall along a spectrum, with some outright shunning all customs, language, and heritage to fully immerse their children in their adopted country, while others may make a strong effort to make sure that their kids maintain a connection to their roots while adapting well to the Western way. It's a choice that each family has to make, and no matter where we fall on the gradient, there are benefits and drawbacks. Many years of my life would have been much more pleasant (particularly in my younger years) had I been more fully Westernized, but on the other hand that would have precluded me from consuming the enormous amount of Japanese entertainment and media that I have chewed through over the years, and would have denied me from realizing the sort of culture-gap issues that I think about often these days.

Some friends of mine with a newborn child have said that they hope that their child grows up to be like me: I guess they mean well educated, somewhat conservative, and bilingual and pseudo-bicultural. But having struggled with English early on in my life, I shudder a bit to imagine their child having the same difficulties I went through. But I see why they'd want this too...

I guess I should be glad that I don't have to worry about this conundrum just yet.

(Thanks to aforementioned friend whose inquiries inspired this post.)

Twilight of the Elites

Mon, 02 Sep 2013 00:00:00 GMT

"Twilight of the Elites" is a book by Christopher Hayes that examines how the constituents of "the elite" have changed in recent history, compares the guiding philosophies of the two eras of elites, and offers insight into how and why the current "ruling class" have failed to be responsible custodians of society.

I think there are two camps that will pick up this book on their own volition. The first group is comprised of those who are understandably irate and outraged at the elites. They may be seeking to understand the situation they are placed in, but they are also looking to feel good about themselves by reading a book that generally lambastes the "1%".

The second group is comprised by the elites themselves: those that are aware that something isn't quite right in their fifedom, or those who are incredulous of this accusation. The book may be entertaining or insightful to the former group, but it is more important for the latter. After all, the elite are the ones who can most easily affect the way in which the elites behave; enough of them just have to start reconsidering some of their attitudes and actions.

I'd say that the book is definitely worth reading if you consider yourself to have even a remote possibility that you are part of the elite already, or even a budding elite. Making self-inquiry for the current set of elites difficult is the fact that more than ever, the elites of our generation don't consider themselves to be elites. I fall into this camp. But when examining my views, attitudes, and actions, it seems indisputable that I indeed fall within some spectrum of this "elite". If you were part of the culture of hyper competition in high school and college, if you are in a profession or institution that is looked up to by our society (whether it be a law firm, a bank, or an technology company), then I think the book is worth reading.

The following are excerpts from the book that I found particularly elucidating.

The meritocratic elite is more diverse than its predecessoras as racial minorities and women have been allowed into its institutions. And it places a greater value on high levels of educational attainment, advanced degrees, and professional schools. Where the Establishment emphasized hmility, prudence, and lineage, the meritocracy celebrates ambition, achievement, brains, and self-betterment.

So then: What makes the elite the elite?

"From the hour of their birth," Aristotle once observed, "some are marked for subjection and some for command." For nearly all of human history the former have vastly outnumbered the latter, and while modern democracy represents the single most durable challenge to this imuutable logic, our own history shows that democracy does not necessarily foreclose the possibility of rule by an elite.

So long as the franchise is granted to a small enough group of people, or the layers of representation between the masses and political leaders are sufficiontly attenuated and mediated by powerful interests, a democracy in name can still feature rule by the few over the many.

For generations, scholars and thinkers of both left and right who have taken to analyzing the elite have recognized that the most salient features of its members isn't their consumer preferences, aesthetic tastes, or some vague notion of "snobbishness," but rather their relatively small number, their power relative to the power of the wide swath of their fellow citizens, and their interconnectedness.

Societies whose upper class is marked by birth, title, and lineage do not tend to cultivate a voracious appetite for competition in the same way ours does. There is a certain security that comes from being at the top, but in a society of fractal inequality there is no top. There is always another height to which to ascend, more competitors to vanquish, more money to obtain. Which is why our elites display a destructive and combustible combination of egomania and entitlement on the one hand and insecurity on the other.

This means that we are cursed with an overclass convinced it is composed of scrappy underdogs, individuals who are obsessed with the relative disadvantages they may have faced rather than the privilege they enjoyed. It is remarkable how under siege and victimized even the most powerful members of society feel, how much they tout their own up-by-their-bootstraps story. In fact, a basic ritual associated with entrance into the circle of winners is constructing a personal story about how it was through grit, talent, and determination that you fought your way into it.

Are You Valued? Monitors, RAM, and a Look Back

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Sef Kloninger wrote in 2012 that one way to gauge whether a company values its employees is the size of the monitors. The post is short and a fun read, so I urge you to hop over and spend 2 minutes reading the post.

Places that value their people consider equipment expenses small compared to the productivity (and happiness) of their people. The best engineers are given the best tools to do their jobs. Big monitors are a very visible sign of this.

from Why Quit? Because They Have Bigger Monitors

I've been a part of three organizations in various capacities since finishing school. Each company had distinct attitudes toward employee hardware allotment. Ironically, the conditions have improved with each successive step.

1: Japanese Bigco

My first job out of school was in R&D at a Japanese company. Here I was given an old 19 inch monitor and a machine with just 256 megabytes of RAM. Pretty sure the processor was flimsy as well, 1.6 GHz at the most (not sure if it was even dual core to be honest but it probably was). The specs alone are enough to make any engineer cry, but add the security bloatware on top of this and the machines were torture to use. The running joke was that we'd get to the office in the morning, log in to our machines, then go get coffee because it'll take 5 minutes for to fully log in.

The miserable machines given to us was a matter of constant and incessant griping among the new hires. I was fortunate to not have much computing needs beyond Lotus and Microsoft Office software (though screen real estate for Excel definitely would have helped), but my friends writing software were also given pitiful machines. Some of them broke "official company rules" and installed additional RAM bought out of pocket because it was literally impossible to do their job on their inadequate hardware. What a clever (read: evil) way of cutting IT costs!

The more senior employees had marginally better hardware with respect to computing power and RAM, but I don't think I ever saw a single 24 inch monitor on an office desk (some lab machines had 24 inch monitors). I remember ~~stealing~~ borrowing RAM from a colleague's machine when she transferred to the office in Germany. It's a dog eat dog world there...

2: Silicon Valley Late Stage Startup

My next gig was at late stage startup in SV. Here, I was given a 19 inch monitor and a 2.4 GHz dual core machine with 2 GB of RAM. The machine was a few years old but since I was mainly just using Office, it was more than enough. When my senior colleague left a few months later, he handed me his 24 inch monitor as a parting gift of sorts. This handing of decent equipment, as I would find out later, was kind of a tradition amongst team members. I'd see it more than a few times in the ensuing years, and I did the same myself when I left earlier this year.

Once I moved from Marketing to Software, I found that the new team director would support the purchase and procurement of any hardware or software (within reason of course) that would make us more productive. As the PM of the group I would follow through on quite a few hardware upgrades for various members of the team, including monitors, hard drive capacity, RAM, processor speed, networking gear, cables, developer boards, compilers, and so on. Since we were an embedded software shop, each engineer typically had multiple machines and multiple monitors to go with them. The hardware wasn't top of the top, but it was good to very good, and any obstacles would be readily lifted through purchases once our frustrations were voiced.

3: Silicon Valley Early Stage Startup

I'm not an employee of this company, but have been affiliated with it from its early days. Even in its cash strapped, seed stage days, this company gave all employees dual 24 inch monitors and a macbook of their choice. These days I think the engineers have a choice between a 27 inch monitor or dual 24 inch monitors. One guy has a standing desk, so they're pretty flexible with the needs of their team members.

They don't spend wildly like some of the hot SV starups and don't give everyone 30 inch monitors like Google, but they don't hesitate to drop money when productivity and employee happiness is at stake.

The Best Approach?

You'd think that the best approach is to always provide the best hardware possible with reason, but this is the only the case if employee retention is a high prority for the company. In certian Japanese industries where changing jobs is still quite a challenge, it's probably not necessary to give employees good hardware; they don't have too many places they can go anyways.

But if you're in a place and industry with intense competition for talent, then providing even "good" hardware can be suicidal. The late stage startup I was at definitely has a retention problem, where the best engineers continue to head for the door after a few years. Hardware is just one of the problems there, but it is a readily identifiable sign that the company just doesn't put its employees first.

I'll definitely ask about the hardware we get when I start looking for my next place of gainful employment.

I Have a Thing for Keyboards

Tue, 27 Aug 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I have a problem, and my problem is keyboards.

I think I developed this problem in college, where I had access to a good number of different keyboards in the various computer and engineering labs across campus. Every keyboard has its own quirks, and I remember using the good and bad of each design as I used them.

I remember feeling a sort of mini-ecstasy when using the new generic Dell keyboards when our student lab was given a new set of computers. The particular sound of the key presses, as the key caps rubbed against the next key, was strangely tantalizing. (for those of you that are wondering, this was the generic bundle keyboard shipped with Dell computers around 2006)

In grad school, I bought a bunch of lightly used keyboards from the college IT department for 5GBP each, despite the prospect of having to carry them all back to the States in a few months. I don't use any of them on a day to day basis anymore, but I'll pull one out from time to time to mix things up a bit. Our family has a good number of computers in use (each family member seems to have 2-3 machines they regularly use), so the spare keyboards have come in handy for the odd server in need of one.

As for personal keyboards, I've primarily used three in recent years.

From about 2008 to 2011, I used the QSENN DT35, the favorite keyboard of Korean gamers. The key distances are smaller than the average keyboard we typically find in the States. Loved this keyboard especially during my gaming days.

For most of last year, I used the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro. Great layout, but after a while I didn't want to contend with the heavy key presses any more.

Coupled with my growing RSI issues, I decided to take a chance on the Kinesis Advantage Qwerty/Dvorak. I made the switch in May 2013, and have been very happy with the change. The keyboard is fairly large, so those with smaller hands should be careful.

One major drawback of using a Kinesis keyboard has been that I now have a hard time typing on regular keyboards. The problem is accentuated by the fact that I now use Dvorak. I can get by using my various laptop keyboards if I change the input settings to Dvorak, but it's now almost impossible for me to type to Qwerty. If I had to take computerized tests with an essay portion again (like the GRE), then I'd be in serious trouble. That's something to consider for younger potential Dvorak converts.

Little Keyboard Macros to Save the Day

Tue, 27 Aug 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I'm not much of a programmer, but I do write some HTML/CSS for this website and others [1] that I maintain. Coming from a C background, I've never gotten over the pain that is HTML comment markers, .

If I had a dime for every time I thought, "Why can't they support # or // or even / / for commenting?" then I could probably buy a small coffee from the local Peet's Coffee (I don't think I've ever actually gotten a coffee at Starbucks in my life, come to think of it).

But today at lunch I had an epiphany: I have a Kinesis Keyboard with the ability to record macros. Why don't I just record for two of them? I haven't done it yet, not sure if I will, but here it is for posterity. As an aside, any string that we manually type frequently fits the bill for this (ex: our email addresses).

Of course, doing this will marry me to this keyboard even more than I am now, so I'm not sure how wise this is in the long run.

[1] jhackers.net, re-noun.org

A Surprising Chris Christie Supporter

Tue, 20 Aug 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The NY Times is reporting that Chris Christie's reelection campaign is increasingly looking like a test run for a 2016 presidential election bid. This is hardly surprising; his actions and comments, distancing himself from the uber-conservative lingo that dominated the months leading up to the November elections, already seemed to signal his positioning efforts for his campaign to come in 4 years.

What was surpring to me though was this line from the article:

The governor has tapped some boldface contributors like the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The Valley is known to be quite left leaning, even amongst the uber-rich. It's somewhat surpring to me to see Zuckerberg's name listed as a supporter of a Republican candidate, all be it a moderate one.

HP's Fall from Grace

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Hewlett Packard, once renowned and beloved, has fallen. While the Autonomy writedown, the board spying scandal and the Mark Hurd affair grabbed headlines and our attention, less obvious has been the change in its core values and actions reflecting those values. Simply put, the company has strayed far from its roots of what once made it great. As an exercise, let's take a look at some remarks by David Packard (taken from his early 90's book, "The HP Way") to see if the company still adheres to them 20 years after publication of the book.

"When Bill Hewlett and I put together the initial plans for our business enterprise in 1937. we hadn't yet focused our interest and energies on the field of electronic instrumentation. What we did decide, however, was that we wanted to direct our efforts toward making important technical contributions to the advancement of science, industry, and human wellfare. It was a lofty, ambitious goal. But right from the beginning, Bill and I knew we didn't want to be a "me-too" company merely copying products already on the market. To this day, HP continually strives to develop products that represent true advancement."

Witness one of the newest additions to HP's lineup of laptop computers.

Looks awfully similar to Apple's Macbook Air doesn't it? Worse yet is that they weren't even the first ones to rip off the industrial design of the Macbook Air. That honor goes to ASUS and their Zenbook product line.

There are companies that thrive by actively stealing technologies and ripping off designs super aggressively (cough Samsung cough). But to these companies' credit, they go about their duplication and reverse engineering efforts with incredible speed, gutso, and determination. They bar no holds in competing and doing everything in their power to win, and for that I respect them, though I do not admire them.

When you copy half assedly, you get the worst of both worlds. You lose respect and you don't even make money.

When deciding whether to go forward with the 32 bit computer business that would pit HP squarely against IBM's mainframe business, "Bill Hewlett's sage advice had always been, "Don't try to take a fortified hill, especially if the army on top is bigger than your own. Omega was case in point. The project was cancelled ... [but] if we could scale it back to a sixteen-bit machine and simplify the operating system, we might have a promining product. So the Omega development program was redirected and renamed "Alpha." The result was a sophisticated, low-cost, sixteen-bit machine for processing small to medium-sized on-line business transactions. Alpha became HP's first generas-purpose computer, introduced in 1972 as the HP3000. The HP3000 ... is one of the computer industry's most enduring success stories. More than twenty years after its introduction, its descendant machines are just now entering their obsolescent phase."

When the iPad had 90% market share and near complete mindshare of the Tablet market a few years ago, HP lauched the Touchbook, an undifferentiated product at the same price point as the iPad. It was never relevant other than during its brief $99 firesale during the holiday season of 2011.

Since then, products like the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7 have shown themselves to be worthy alternatives by offering a lower price point and smaller form factor to consumers. While their overall success is debatable (the Kindle Fire reportedly isn't doing all too well lately and the Nexus 7 still only sold about 10MM units in 2012), they have certainly cemented themselves in our minds as products at least worth considering.

"Just as it has in the past, our growth in the future will come from new products... By new products, I mean products that will make real contributions to technology not products that copy what someone else has done. This must be our standrd in the future just as it has been in the past."

At least in the consumer space, I can't remember the last great product HP has created. I wonder if they have created anything of note after the inkjet printers of the early 90's. Perhaps there have been great technical breakthroughs that weren't productized well, a symptom that Microsoft Research has always struggled with (remember the surface table?). I do hear that HP makes quality server and networking equipment though.

I've ripped on HP throught this post but I want to make one thing clear: I have an undying affection for the company. I grew up just minutes away from its headquarters and my first job in my life was at HP Labs as a research intern. I know that its engineers are talented, wonderful people. It pains me to see it in its current state.

It will be a happy day in my life if and when the company once again becomes a technical leader and a great place for engineers to work.

The Strange Parallel Universe of Japanese Hallmark Holidays

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The Hallmark Holidays are holidays of dubious historical or religious origin that are often primarily characterized by some form of consumption activity. I was originally writing a post about which Hallmark Holidays can and should be resisted and which ones we have to give into, but after writing 90% of it I decided it was terrible so I'm going to make fun of the strangeness of the Japanese version of the Hallmark Holidays instead. When lacking in imagination, go for cheap predatory humor!

Mother's Day

Mother's day is all about the carnation. This is true in the States as well, but while the flower is somewhat optional in the States, they make a much bigger deal about it in Japan. Maybe the flower lobby flexed its muscles on this one.

Father's Day

Father's Day is all about daughters giving their dads a tie, and the fathers proudly wearing the ties to work. Young boys also give such gifts to their dads, but the imagery for some reason is dominated by teenage girls giving the gift (maybe because in the typical family, the father is detested by the adolescent daughter going through the mood swings of puberty).

Valentines Day

The holiday consists literally of girls giving boys chocolates and get this, boys giving gifts to these girs a month later on 3/14 worth 3x the price of the chocolate they received. There's even a cultural expectation on how much the guy should spend on the return gift! Fantastic work by the chocolate industry and the teddy bear and jewlry industries.

There is also a nebulous expectation that small chocolates are "courtesy chocolates" devoid of significance, while elaborate, large, expensive or hand made chocolates are "the real thing", and are synonymous with the girl's confession of admiration. For further information on this subject, please refer to any number of romantic comedy manga and anime.

Christmas

In the West, Christmas is a mixture of religion, family, and consumerism. When we hop over the pond, we take away religion and family and in put food and sex in its place. You heard me right! Fantastic holiday!

All those stories you hear about Japan eating cake and fried chicken for Christmas are totally real. KFC even runs special ads during the season! On top of that you're seen as a loner if you don't have a house party to go to with friends or a boyfriend / girlfriend to spend the night with. Girls become utterly desperate to be in a relationship during Christmas, which I find quite amusing. Oh, and the hours between 9pm 12/24 and 3am 12/25 are called "The Six Hours of Sex", and is the time of year with the highest amount of copulation in the entire year. I don't have the numbers but I bet the kids of young couples are disproportionately born in October and November.

I guess it makes sense that these western holidays have very heavy consumerist bias, even heavier than those in the States. After all, if you're going to take the trouble to import another culture's holiday, you might as well make sure that you can maximize your monetary returs for your troubles!

This post was brought to you with all sorts of biases and prejudices.

The CD Dilemma in the Digital Age

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Like many who grew up in the 90's, I own a considerable number of CDs. CDs are of course physical objects, and they take up physical space. I've been trying to reduce the number of objects I own for the last few years, and these are prime candidates to hit the road. But there's a problem. Since I never listen to them anymore, I'd ideally like to throw them away while retaining the "rights" I have obtained by purchasing these disks. Of course, this is not possible.

What do I mean by obtaining "rights"? What I mean is that if we have purchased these physical music recordings, then we have the right to copy them for our own, personal, noncommercial use. It means that we can burn another CD so that we have one copy in the living room and one in the car. It also means that we can rip a MP3 legally for our PCs and portable music players of our choice. But once we throw the physical disks away, we immediately lose these rights since we no longer have this physical object which has a secondary purpose (after the sound data itself) of of providing us with the right to reproduce the recording for personal use. If for one reason or another we are prosecuted for having digital copies created from these disks, we have no way of defening ourselves once we've throws the physical disks away.

Now, the chances of this kind of scenario happening are remote. Thus I imagine that many of us have already ripped MP3s from the disks and have long since tossed these shiny pancakes into the trash. Books present a similar problem, and I increasingly see friends scanning their books and tossing the remnant papers away. Perfectly pragmatic. Yet I cant't help but feel annoyed at the lack of elegant choices for us to transfer our means of proof of ownership from a physical to digital medium in this day and age. As far as I can tell, our only real choices are (1) to repurchase the songs on iTunes or Google Play or some other digital store (and even then we should always be aware that we never actually "own" these digital copies and they will be retracted after our death), or (2) let go of ownership entirely and move to a subscription service like Spotify or Grooveshark. Neither option is ideal, and I'm 100% confident that a perfect solution will never arise (the RIAA certainly has no motivation to do anything, and there's no money to be made for other companies so no one will ever push for a solution), which is quite sad.

My non-solution for the time being is to use the Grooveshark web app, which is free of charge and doesn't even require a login. If forced to make a choice between outright digital purchases and a subscription service, I'm leaning heavily towards a subscription service. Maybe the era of content ownership is coming to an end, as we learn to cope with owning neither our digital books, movies, or music. It's a Brave New World.

The un-unelectable

Thu, 25 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

It dawned on me today that there are some members of congress who are immune to unelection no matter what they do or what they vote on, irrelpective of the needs and wishes of their constituents. The example for me was Nanci Pelosi, whose combination of considerable influence and district properties have made her invulnerable.

Pelosi reportedly was the organizing force bedind the recent defeat of the NSA defunding bill. Now consider the fact that she represents San Francisco, a famously liberal, anti-surveillance, tech hotbed. Working to support the kind of surveillance the NSA has been reported to be operating in such an overt way should be political suicide. It goes agaist the strong wishes of a considerable portion of her constituents.

But let's now consider her klout and power, and see if she has anything to hear in binding her actions.

She is the Minority leader in the House, which basically means that she is one of the most powerful members of the Democratic party. Barring some kind of Eliot-Spitzer-like PR meltdown, the Democratic party has her back. There is no primary election threat from her party. None. Nada. Zilch.

As I mentioned earlier, her district is San Francisco, a bastion of liberal communities even within the left-leaning SF Bay Area at large. This means that a Republican opponent is highly unlikely to have a fighting chance against her, even if the challenger is an upstanding individual with a good platform. The "R" label is enough to kill a good candidate by default. Pelosi has been a congresswoman for the last 20 years and her name value is unmatched not only in San Francisco but across the state and the country. Unsure voters can't be blamed for defaulting to her name if they don't have strong positions. After all, most SF residents (especially those who can still afford to like there after the recent surge in real estate prices there) like a good life and don't have much to complain too wildly about. Even if a popular Republican mounts a good fight, her party will back her with the full might of its money and influence.

So if no Democrat or Republican can keep her straight, can a Green Party member or Independent candidate take the bill? Again, they'd be outmuscled by the might of the Democratic National Convention which will come to the rescue.

It's a bit disgusting to think that some congressmen are virtually guaranteed reelection no matter what they vote for. They can act with impunity with little regard for the wishes of the constituents of the district they represent. It's a sick side effect of the political process we have today.

I used to consider public service as one of the ways I could give back to the coutry in the future. But as the years pile on, I'm increasingly skeptical that I'd be able to get anything productive done even if I beat all sorts of odds to be elected to office. Yet another way we've all become disillusioned by the supposed pillars of our society.

Book Review 2013 H1

Tue, 23 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Towards the beginning of 2013, I recieved a request from a reader for a book review of the books I had read in 2012. I never did get around to this, but I thought I'd instead list and write a little bit about the books I've read in the first half of this year. I've written one liners for the books that I thought were particularly interesting or well written.

Japanese Books are marked with (J).

Republic Lost - Lawrence Lessig:
The first book I read this year has also been the most important. A seminal book on the corruption of the US Congress.
iWoz - Steve Wozniak:
A must read for an engineering geek. A pass otherwise.
The Giver - Lois Lowry:
Reread. As good as I had remembered it, from 15+ years ago.
Fixing the Game - Roger L. Martin
(J) Perfect Blue - Miyuki Miyabe:
A heartwarming, fun and light mystery novel.
The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe:
Incredible storytelling. Genre-defining.
(J) Trinity Blood - Sunao Yoshida
What Money Can't Buy - Michael Sandel:
Insightful, given the trend for seeing everything from an economic perspective lately.
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway:
Gutwrenching and heartbreaking. No wonder they call it a masterpiece.
(J) Half Moon Series vol 2 - Tsumugu Hashimoto
(J) Half Moon Series vol 3 - Tsumugu Hashimoto
(J) Half Moon Series vol 4 - Tsumugu Hashimoto
(J) Half Moon Series vol 5 - Tsumugu Hashimoto
(J) Half Moon Series vol 6 - Tsumugu Hashimoto
(J) Half Moon Series vol 7 - Tsumugu Hashimoto
(J) Half Moon Series vol 8 - Tsumugu Hashimoto
(J) The Blind Spot of Veiss - Housuke Nojiri:
Space SF of the classic kind.
(J) The Equation that the Professor Loved - Yoko Ogawa:
Every character is a kind, charming soul.
(J) The Dragon Sleeps - Miyuki Miyabe:
Yet another great yet light weight mystery from Miyabe.
(J) The Night Ferris Wheel - Kanae Minato:
Depicts the imperfections of Japanese families exquisitely.
(J) How They Lived Death - Shigeaki Hinohara
(J) Wheel of Fire - Miyuki Miyabe
(J) Divided Front - Kanata Takase
Lester Land - Lawrence Lessig:
A light weight version of Republic, Lost. A good primer book on the subject.
The Perdators' Ball - Connie Bruck:
Great reporting, poor storytelling.
The Will to Lead - Marvin Bower
(J) Only You Can Hear - Otsuichi
(J) Genshoku Edo Goyomi - Miyuki Miyabe
(J) Hatsumonogatari - Miyuki Miyabe
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury:
Reread. Didn't realize how riveting this book is the first time around.
Free as in Freedom - Sam Williams:
For Free Software aficionados.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar - Eric Raymond
Gathering Blue - Lois Lowry
The Messenger - Lois Lowry
Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut
Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut
South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami:
The traslator does quite a good job yet still couldn't capture the original's air completely. Shows just how hard translations are to get right.
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells:
Unbelievable that this could have been written before 1900.
The HP Way - David Packard:
Proof that HP has strayed far from its roots.
Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut:
The best (and least strange) Vonnegut book I've read so far.
The Dog Stars - Peter Heller:
Desolate yet somehow charming postapocalyptic SF novel.
The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow - Cory Doctorow
The Road - Cormac McCarthy:
The most masterfully depressing book I have ever read.

I have a stretch goal of reading 100 books this year but it's somewhat unlikely I'll get there since I'll be busier in the fall. It's been great being able to read a wide variety of books so far this year though.

Interviewers Need to Get Out of the Way

Mon, 22 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The best interviewers get the most out of their guests (more than if the guest were to give a monologue). They refrain from driving the show and instead let the show develop naturally from the guest's remarks.

The worst interviewers impose their own personalities onto the guest and the show and make a concerted effort to steer the direction of the show as they will. The guest is hampered from expressing the most interesting parts of his character and his arguments, as critical points are often diverted rather than expanded upon by the interviewer.

The first and most memorable encouter I had with the latter was in watching various MSNBC shows in the summer of 2005. The interviewer kept putting words into the guests mouths and asking questions where the desired answer was obvious. The show host insistently imposed her persona onto the direction of the show and stifled the guests. It was disgraceful and frustrating to watch.

I recently came across an even more elucidating example of this problem. . The first video is with a host who imposes his persona onto the guest. The latter is with a host who refrains from doing so and does a much better job at drawing insights from the guest. The guests are Richard Stallman and Steve Wozniak, respectively.

Pretty big difference (though admittedly the second interviewer is just plain "better" so maybe this isn't an entirely fair comparison, but the difference in viewing experience is dramatic).

(The only exception might be shows where it's understood that the strong personality of the host(s) is a vital part of the show's value to the viewers. ex: Pardon the Interruption on ESPN)

On Expressing Disapproval

Mon, 15 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I think it's natural for us to employ aggression or biting sarcasm when expressing our disapproval or disagreement online. I'm as guilty as anyone with respect to the former option (clever quips don't come naturally to me, so the latter isn't really in my arsenal).

But such attacks don't really do anyone any good. If the objective were to feel good about ourselves by showing our superior understanding, then we could just laugh at the monitor and comment verbally on what a fool this person is.

No, when we write a dissenting comment online, we want to be heard, understood, and maybe even have our opinions accepted. In this case we're much better off employing the classic approve -> disapprove sequence. Here's an example I ran across recently:

Stepping into an area about which I have strong opinions. I appreciate your effort, I just think you're way off base.

source

So I Bought Some Indie Games

Sun, 14 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

So I bought some indie games today. The Steam summer sale (where games have 50%+ discounts) gave me a final nudge to make the plunge. I've been considering this for a good few months and it's nice to have finally pulled the trigger.

I haven't bought a game in quite a few years now, and I can't imagine buying a block buster AAA title in the future (I don't even have StarCraft 2!), but there was something about indie games that I couldn't resist (the huge price cuts don't hurt either!).

The best graphics today, with all the light effects and fancy textures honestly hurts my eyes. Now I think it's amazing what the developers are now capable of (we've come a long ways since the FF7 style stubby arms), but for an old geezer like me it's just too much. I'm a bigger fan of 2d sprites or same alternative. I never thought that games needed to be realistic, and feel that oftentimes having limited information can do wonders for a storytelling experience (which is why I prefer books over manga over anime. The less sensory information I have, the more I can use my brain to fill in the holes).

I'm also a fan of clever game design over the best graphics or physics firepower. With less cost overhead to deal with, I feel that indie studios can afford to give me such experiences much more than a AAA studio. When your marketing and development budget is $N million dollars, you understandably can't afford to try now tricks as often.

While I'm not a programmer myself, I generally like programmers and want to support independent developers whenever convenient. If given the choice between buying a megacorp product and a 5 man shop's product, given similar value propositions and it's not overly mission critical for me, I like to think that I am doing good by supporting the little guy. It's good to have options in life, and game developers having a choice over who they work for and what they work on is an appealing idea. To that end I'd be doing a little bit of good for them by throwing a few bucks their way.

I've had these beliefs (especially with respect to small time dev shops) for quite some time, yet never really acted on it (like many Android phone users, I tend to be on the cheap skate side of things). But now that the perfect situation had come up, it was just time for me to put my words into action.

Oh by the way, here are the games I bought. Thanks to @bhelyer for the feedback and suggestions!

Super Hexagon
Proteus
Binding of Isaac
McPixel
Thomas Was Alone

I'm about $12 poorer but feeling great about it!

"DDG It"

Sat, 13 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I've been a devoted user of the Duck Duck Go search engine for around a year now. The switch from Google was motivated partly by the quasy feeling I got when considering all the information Google would have on me through my searches, but also by Duck Duck Go's convenient ! bang shortcut feature. I'd say the ratio was about 7:3. Sometimes I have to fall back to Google using the !g option (especially since Duck Duck Go doesn't seem to support non-English queries for the time being), but overall I'm happy using it as my default search engine.

There have always been people who have taken the contrarian position to Google services, and had "opted out" of using any of them. I've given this some passing consideration, but haven't taken the leap (I certainly can't imagine ditching GMail at this moment). Of course there are some who have.

Originally, I think much of this opt-out motivation stemmed from their aversion to Google having control over all actions and information passing through their services. The earliest traces of this reaction can be traced to ads being served on GMail pages (meaning that Google was parsing our email to serve contextual ads).

This group was joined later by a camp of ex-users who were incensed at their favorite Google services being given the axe, Google Reader being the latest and most prominent example. If they couldn't count on Google continuing to support the varying products through good times then bad, these folks preferred to look for another option.

The latest wave of defectors has been catalyzed by the leak of the PRISM surveillance program run by the NSA. It's one thing for our friendly neighbors at Google to have access to all of our prized kitten photos, but having the NSA dog lovers hunt you down for your feline loving way of life would put things in a whole different level. Sites like PRISM Break have made it easy for us to take the first few steps in reducing the amount of surveillance hoisted upon our digital lives. Now of course, if various governments around the world are tapping into the backbone infrastructure of the Internet and are recording everything, this may all just be a drop in the bucket in extricating ourselves from this predicament. Maybe we all need to go take a few courses on cryptography.

I'm not sure where I stand in all of this. I happen to use many of the services recommended in PRISM Break (Ububtu OS, Thunderbird, Firefox, etc.), but that's because I am a fan and supporter of Open Source Software, not because I have a heightened sense of alarm against the NSA's activities. Google shutting down some of its products has been an annoyance from time to time (I'm definitely not satisfied with Feedly's UX compared to that of Google Reader), but I completely understand their decisions from a business perspective. Living a stone's throw away from their HQ tends to make you sympathetic to their cause (not unlike the Bay Area's rather absurd affection for Barry Bonds, of which I am certainly guilty).

My guess is that I'll start slowly moving away from Google and other 3rd party services as the years go on. Paying $20 a month for a Linode VPS has lowered my resistance towards paying for software services, so I can definitely see myself paying for any number of Google service replacements in the future (and besides, I like supporting smaller software dev shops, including indie game studios). I don't feel any rush at this moment though, and the only change I've made is in my choice of search engine.

It's good to have alternatives, if only for the reason that a non trivial secondary of tertiary player will keep the market leader a bit more honest than otherwise. At least in terms of Geek mindshare, Duck Duck Go seems to have captured our imagination much more than Bing ever did, by positioning itself as the search engine that won't track you no matter what. It currently handles about 3 million queries per day, which is nothing to scoff at. Its growth has been phenomenal.

Google has established its place within our lexicon and is now synonymous with online search. That grip it has on our minds through those 6 letters is a powerful force. It rolls off the tongue and pronouncing it is almost as easy as "search" itself. This sort of linguistic accessibility and cultural congealment shouldn't be seen lightly. It's a potent barrier for any competitors to gain a foothold in the battle for our minds in the search space.

"Duck Duck Go" isn't the tongue-friendliest phrase out there (though its childhood playground image probably helps give it an approachable and friendly air), but with just 3 syllables, it's manageable in speech. But the same cannot be said for keyboard friendliness. So I think I'll just abbreviate it to "DDG" when I write online. Who knows, maybe it'll catch on.

Some Lawyer Tips

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I've had the (mis)fortune of having had to work with lawyers several times over the last few years, so I decided to write a short post listing out the little things that have proved valuable in working with them. This list is based entirely on personal experience and personal preferences, so take any information with a bucket full of salt.

Finding a Lawyer

There are two "good" ways to find a trustworthy, capable lawyer, assuming that the office of the lawyers that you usually use doesn't have a practice area for your legal soup de jour.

The first option is to talk to a lawyer who you have worked with in the past whose character and skills you trust, and ask for a reference. This obviously isn't foolproof, and I've had some poor experiences when my doctors have referred me to practitioners of other medical disciplines, but your batting average will likely be better than a shot in the dark or (god forbid) a stab at the Yellow Pages (do the Yellow Pages even exist anymore?).

The second option is to talk to a friend / acquaintance / business partner whose professional judgment and past use of legal advice you know and trust, and ask for a reference. Note that this shouldn't be any random friend, but someone you know to have sound sense and mileage using legal services. This should not be your dental hygienist (yes, my dental hygienist really did refer me to a lawyer. I accepted the information but went to a law office with whom my family has worked with in the past).

I'm actually not sure if asking for a referral from a friend who is a lawyer is an option that works. I have no evidence, but my instincts tell me that practicing law and knowing quality legal professionals in a different practice area are very different things. The issues are exacerbated if said friend is a relatively junior lawyer.

Compatibility

Some Lawyers are aggressive, and some are more "reasonable" in their approach. This is true whether you're dealing with a liability case, a tax law case, or anything else. There is always a range of strategies that can be pursued, and different lawyers will choose different parts of the specturm. Find one whose style fits your needs and / or your particular situational needs.

Preparation

When you call the law office and set up a consultation, ask her what materials you should bring that day. Having all the materials in front of you will make the conversation go much smoother.

You will likely have many documents, so be sure to label each with post-it notes as tabs and have a short cover letter that lists the contents of the set of documents that you have brought.

This organizing step will (a) help you refresh yourself about the scope of the case, and (b) cut down the time you'll be billed by the firm.

Refuse Their Offers to Come out to an Office Near You

Lawyers at big firms will sometimes offer to have meetings at an office closer to where you live or work, separate from their every day office. Refuse this offer and take the time to go to their regular office. Your lawyer will bill you for his travel time, and when you are paying hundreds of dollars per hour, this can really hurt your wallet.

Be Aware that Some Lawyers Have Pet Strategies and Arrangements

Each lawyer will have "pet strategies" that they like to use and suggest to their clients. Depending on your circumstance and the lawyer's inclinations, what they most strongly suggest may not be the optimal choice for you. It would be nice if we could place infinite trust in the services we hire, but the reality is that we often have to oversee the effort and make some judgment calls ourselves. This is true when hiring contractors to do work on your house, and is true when hiring lawyers.

Of course, we laymen can't hope to understand all the intricacies of certian complex legal structures or strategies, but getting high level information on the options available to you and forming your own thoughts on what might be best for your situation will be necessary to begin having a constructive conversation with your lawyer in order to figure out what is truly optimal for you. You can't depend on anyone but yourself to represent you in fighting for your best interests, even if you are paying them.

Addendum

Hopefully you're fortunate enough to never have to work with a lawyer, but keep some of these things in mind if you do. Even if you reject any or all of my suggestions (which is totally fine by me), just thinking about these issues in earest will be helpful.

How I Came to Support Same Sex Marriage

Sat, 22 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Last fall, as election season raged on, I was thinking about the candidates and California State Propositions I would vote for. Same sex marriage was not on the ballot this year for California. Prop 8 had reached the Supreme Court earlier in the year. However, the issue was front and center in several other states.

I started thinking in earnest about what my views were regarding same sex relationships and same sex marriage, and how I should best make my voice heard (through votes and other actions) given my beliefs. I decided to throw out my incumbent positions from my mind and construct a belief and decision framework from scratch.

Previously, my position was that I was is favor of providing all the rights afforded to "married couples" (tax benefits, visitation rights, etc) but in an ideal world I preferred this to manifest itself through a civil union rather than "marriage". Having had gay friends in college for the first time in my life, I definitely wanted them to enjoy all the rights and privileges that heterosexual couples have access to. Growing up in a fairly conservative family and attending a prep school founded by a Mormon family, I unfortunately can't confidently say that I held these beliefs prior to college. But once I had personal relationships with friends who, at that time, wouldn't have the same rights and privileges as I would, I knew for sure that they deserved all the nice things I had access to.

But at this time, I wasn't quite comfortable with gay "marriage". This was certainly due to my conservative upbringing with the undertones of a Christian values. While I myself am agnostic, the values and positions of those around me had permeated into me over the years. While I wasn't "against" gay marriage, I definitely wasn't comfortable with it either. When every image of marriage I'd had in my life had been between a man and a woman, same sex marriage instinctively felt somewhat awkward.

As I sat there in the fall of 2012, I was adamant about throwing all these preconceptions and existing beliefs out the window. I was going to start from scratch, start from the very basic building blocks of my attitudes and wishes for my gay friends as well as my assessment of the political situation, and construct a position anew.

What was the most important thing in all of this? Until now the most important factor was myself and what I was comfortable with. Since I wasn't quite at ease with "gay marriage" itself, I had wanted to see a civil union with full rights. But when I really thought hard that day in my kitchen, feet on the counter with an absentee ballot in front of me, I realized that the most important thing in all of this wasn't me and what I ideally wanted. What mattered most were my friends who still didn't have all the rights they deserved. It became clear to me then that a future where they'd enjoy all the benefits I had access to, currently kept away from them owing to the random whim of genetics, was infinitely more important than my nit picky discomfort.

The political situation is very polarized. The choices are either "yes gay marriage" or "no gay marriage". The choices presented to me as a voter doesn't include "civil unions with full rights". So there are only two possible futures. Yes or No. No middle ground. Faced with a choice, Yes or No, I could no longer say No in good conscience, now that my values and priorities were made anew. I had to say Yes. Even if I still wasn't 100% comfortable with what the Yes would bring, the Yes world would be much better than the No world for me. It's not the best world for my selfish soul, but it is easily the better choice and the only good choice that had a chance of becoming a reality.

And so finally, after all these years, I am a supporter of gay "marriage". I still feel a little bit uneasy when thinking about it. But this isn't about me. This is about the people who are affected directly by this. This is about the people, friends, who should have every right I have and yet don't.

In closing, I should mention that while I have "come around", I don't think everyone needs to do the same. Whatever decision we make by examining our own beliefs deeply is fine by me, whatever that decision and position may be.

But I do hope that the decision is yours and yours only. I hope that we all think hard for ourselves, looking back at who we know and what we value, and come up with our own choice, rather than hazily following the lead of others. It's not our community's choice or our parents' choice or our religion's choice. It's our own choice as independent, introspective, incisive individuals.

UCB... UBC!?

Fri, 21 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I went to the dentist the other day. A filling had chipped out and I needed some repairs. I made sure to ask for an afternoon time since I'd probably have trouble making a morning time. It had already taken a miracle or two for me to make last week's 7:30 am routine check up where they found said chipped filling. Odds were against me that I'd be able to work another miracle and make an early morning appointment in consecutive weeks.

A was wearing a UBC shirt that day. No, that's not a typo. Not a University of California Berkeley shirt, but a University of British Columbia shirt. Gold letters on navy blue. Just like UCB. A friend had given it to me a few years ago. Confusing? You bet.

Now for those of you aren't familiar with the most intimate details of my life, I should explain that I like in the San Francisco peninsula. Berkeley is a stone's throw away. Grew up here. I've left a few times for school and for work, but I always seem to find my way back. A lost dog of sorts, just on a longer time scale.

I was leaving the building, the dentist having done exquisite work (so far as I can tell) as usual. I was passing by a guy with a construction hat, clearly part of the remodeling crew working on the boarded up, partitioned off parts of the builing, when he hollered, "Berkeley?"

I misheard him at first. Heard "Dr. Krauss?" (my dentist). I smiled and replied, "Yeah."

Ten seconds later, I immediately realized that he had misread my shirt as UCB and thought I was a Cal student. It's been a good number of years since I'd gotten my paper scroll, but I could probably still pass as a grad student.

The mistake is almost a non-mistake. Some Asian guy walking down the hall of a medical office in an upscale neighborhood wearing a gold-on-blue shirt with a U, a B, and a C is almost always going to be a Berkeley student. Especially if we're only a ten minute drive to Stanford campus. Hell, if I had seen myself walking down the hall, I'd have thought the same thing. A kind of practical joke.

When my friend gave me this shirt, I myself did a double take. The shirt looked exactly what I expected a Berkeley shirt to look like. What I didn't know then was that Berkeley shirts don't say "UCB" on them. They say "Cal". University of California.

Does anyone actually know this without having been a student or staff member there? Even the parents probably don't know this, since this sort of trite knowledge is the exclusive territory of those with ample doses of school pride. I have a gew horribly colored orange shirts to remind me of my own inflated sense of academic self-importance. I no longer have the gall to wear them off campus though, so I guess it wears off once we leave the source of the soul-dying agent.

Clearly, neither the guy or myself have ever been Cal students.

PayPal's Marketing

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I received marketing email from PayPal today. "5% cashback!"

Looks great on the surface but this is PayPal, a company notorious for its draconian practices, after all. To say I was suspicious would be an understatement.

I give the email text a cursory look and find out that the promotion is valid for the first £50 (I made this account when I lived in England). 5% of £50 is a measly £2.50, which is hardly worth anyone's time, especially if we actually have to spend money in the firsts place. If my account were based in the States, this amount would presumably be $2.50, an even smaller amount. No thanks PayPal, I'll continue to not use you unless absolutely necessary.

Two takeaways.

First, it's frustrating that we often really have no choice but to use PayPal even though we'd desperately like to use an alternative (ex: ebay). As a buyer, sellers often only allow us to pay via PayPal. As sellers, PayPal is often the choice that makes the most financial sense (especially if you're running a business online and process many transactions. For instance, PayPal is by far the cheapest for micorpayments.). There are new entrants to this space like Stripe or WePay, but neither of them come close to matching PayPal's ubiquity or price points.

Second, it's made me realize (for the umpteenth time, embarassingly) that we're constantly bombarded by these sorts of advertisements throughout the day. Coupons that come in the mail, daily deals that are shared with us on our social networks (though this is far less prevalent these days), signs all over the supermarket proclaiming their discounts at us, and on and on. These promotions take up mindshare and often cause decision fatigue. Constantly being exposed to this kind of information noise and feeling like we need to properly parse it all takes its toll on us. As a matter of fact, just thinking about it in the abstract as I write this is making me weary. JC Penny's no sales plan totally failed, but a world where that was the nom would actually be quite nice. But then again, all this promotion must surely be backed by some kind of psychological theory, so we're unlikely to ever see the end of it.

The upshot of all of this? Take 30 seconds to unsubscribe from these emails.

click click click...

Voice

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Regular readers of this blog may have probably noticed that my writing style tends to be a bit... well... schizophrenic. I can be very stoic in one post, haughty in another, melancholy in others. What I've noticed through all this is that my psyche and hence my writing style are easily affected by the material I've exposed myself to recently. Translated to English, that means that my writing style tends to drift towards that of whatever I've read most recently.

For instance, I've been reading a lot of fiction lately. As a result, my latest post has taken on a voice that is more befitting of a piece of fiction told from the first person perspective than that of a blog post written with my own voice. Admittedly, a post written in a ponderous style that is quite detached from reality really isn't the way to go for a blog post that's under my own name.

I write fiction because I find it aesthetically pleasing and because I find it artistically satisfying. I like the way the sentences sound and the way the people come to life in my head and on the page. I like to tell stories.

Blogging has a whole different aesthetic.

Cory Doctorow

If I were a professional writer, controlling my voice would be an occupational prerogative. As an amateur nobody, I think I'll continue to embrace the whims of my mind, though surely this will continue to embarrass me from time to time. This won't be the last time where I think to myself, "What the heck did I just write??"

Numeric Compulsion

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Growing up, I'd always been the kind of guy who'd give the exact time to the minute when asked for the time. If it was 2:18, I told the person it was 2:18. Not 2:20, Not 2:15. I remember being mocked in elementary school for this particular trait of mine. They told me I was too particular. I didn't see what was wrong with that.

These days I answer 2:15 in the same situation. I'm more discerning about the kind of information I'm giving, and its purpose. It's a spillover effect of having become more judicious about my words, who I am talking to, and what my words may convey to that person. I'm more deliberate with words that aware of the effects of those words on others than ever before. I've come to accept that 2:18 and 2:15 convey the same thing to most people, and that it's the 'normal' thing to do. I can't help but think that my newly cultivated way with words has affected my affection for numeric accuracy for the worse. This makes me sad.

I started reading Catch-22 yesterday. Early on in the book is the phrase, eleven-times-seventeen-years.

I started to move on, accepting that the letters denoted some big absurd number. But I doubled back. I had a compulsive need to know the value of the expression. "seventeen times ten plus seventeen..."

Looks like I haven't quite lost it all yet.

I Read "The Time Machine" and Grew My Vocabulary

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I spent a good portion of yesterday reading "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells, a classic Sci Fi book from the late 1800's. It was a wonderful book, less than 100 pages in a standand typeface (I read it in a large font edition, so the book was 130+ pages). But this post isn't about the book itself. It's about how many words I didn't clearly know [1], and my rare decision to look up every single one of them.

Those who know me know that I have a decent command of the English language, yet suffer from a curious vocabulary deficiency. Grammar was drilled into me in my youth, but I had done the bare minimum on the vocab side (this would come back to bite me repeatedly in those incessant standardized exams that plagued my adolescence).

I'm not sure what made me decide to painstakingly look up each of these words. I read plenty of books these days, yet have usually just glossed over words whose meaning I didn't completely understand. Whether it be fiction or nonfiction, modern or classic, I could get through a book just fine by inferring the meanings of those words with murky meanings.

Maybe it was because the large typeface made it easy for me to read the book, and hence each of the words. Maybe it was that this typeface let me read a little bit faster than usual, making me feel that I could afford to lose some time looking up words. Maybe it was because the prose was exquisite, and I felt an urge to understand the meaning of all the modern and archaic words that the author had chosen to employ. Maybe, it was just because the book was short and the task wouldn't be unbearably long. Then again, maybe it was the intense afternoon heat of that day.

So I read and read. And I referenced and referenced. I finished the book in the wee hours of the morning, satisfied with my work and melancholy about the story's development. And here it is, as the list that came to be -- all the words that were outside my recognition.

expound
recondite
fecundity
infirmity
spasmodic
accension
humbug
hearthrug
sconce
candlestick
askew
quack
unhinged
therewith
draughty
deportment
jocular
wooden
day week
Tubingen
drawing room
haggard
woolgathering
wont
cadge
peptone
tramp (person)
palpitation
futurity
interstices
petulant
forthwith
incontinent
overset
rhododendron
mauve
verdigris
parapet
girdle
buskin
consumptive (older use)
fretted (stone)
variegated
transverse
hypertrophy
dilapidated
frugivorous
indolent
gesticulate
precipice
derelict
intimate (v.)
rotund
precocious
copula
ameliorate
hither and thither
connubial
gibbous
malachite
rap (to strike lightly)
conveyance
sepulture
decadence
arbor
bower
glade
expostulate
flagstone
pallor
vestige
groping
blunder (movement)
flaxen
lemur
import (significance)
etiolate
cicerone
shirk
halitus
unmeaning
carlovingian
sufferance
practicable
darkling
preternaturally
burrows
faun
bole
scintillating
while away
rill
watchword
perforce
contrivance
down (land)
estuary
oblique
megatherium
deliquesced
slake
camphor
steatite
lignite
ere
insidious
hillock
tumulus
wan
corrugated
boss (protrusion)
palp
liverwort
sable (color)
begrimed
grate
cretaceous
saurian

I don't think I can do this with every book I read; it would simply slow me down too much and soon make my hobby of reading entirely joyless. But this day, I'm glad to have taken up this task, for it has shown me just how little I know and how far I have yet to go in handling this quaint language of ours.

[1] including words that whose meanings I could infer from the prose, but ones that I wouldn't be able to verbalize when facing them standalone.

The Normalizing Effect of Curse Words

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I was watching a very strong technical presentation recently. The speaker knew his subject thoroughly, and spoke with confidence and precision. He hardly stuttered at all. The slides were informative and to the point. But then the presentation ended with a one liner with a curse word in it. It made me disappointed.

Curse words in public writing and speaking is a curious thing. Its "shock effects" can make a weak presentation and a weak speaker appear more captivating. But at the same time, I believe it becomes a distraction and detriment for presenters whose skills and material are already convincing and interesting on their own. In effect, the use of such words "normalizes" speakers and presentations towards some median value. It might be a useful in some limited situations, but in general I believe that using this "crutch" puts an upper limit on the effectiveness one can achieve.

"Crutch" is an apt analogy, since a real world crutch helps an injured person move faster but causes healthy people to move slower than their full capabilities. There is a "crutch-user moving speed" that both the injured and the healthy converge to as a result. A completely healthy person would never use a crutch to move around, since that would only slow him down and make things cumbersome and annoying.

Just like how a crutch weighs you down if you are healthy, curse words weigh down the effectiveness of an otherwise convincing talk or article. But unlike real crutches, it's difficult to perceive this detrimental effect as the protagonist. You often have to rely on an observer to set you straight. I've been a victim to this in my own writing in the past, and it wasn't until I saw other profanity-laden posts and their critiques by others that I recognized my own folly.

I have nothing against cursing in the right setting, for instance in private with close friends. It might even have a place in public speaking and writing, in very limited circumstances. But most of the time, if we're anything resembling competent at our craft, we would do well by eschewing curse words.

Blog Redesign & RSS

Fri, 31 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I've finally updated my blog design so that it (1) has an RSS feed, and (2) future redesigns and changes can be scalable.

This was motivated by my exploration of rss feed (xml file) generators, which in turn necessitated a batch processible workflow, which obviated the need for a static blog generator, at which point I decided that for the time being this was beyond the scope of what I was capable of.

I had known of Cody Broscious's Benjen static blog generator. I liked what I saw, and though my links and directory structure would have to change, I decided to take that hit sooner rather than later. I first thought that putting all the files into the root directory was a strange choice, but then realized that the resulting structure was irrelevant since everything is linked together automatically. Since there is no cognitive overhead to organize the resulting files (though the source files still have structure), this one directory form can simplify the generator code instead. This was a fascinating realization: that design decisions are influenced so heavily by the tools available.

The generator also takes care of the rss feed, which is now properly connected to feedburner.

If you're the type of person who enjoys having control of your own server and want to have control over all your files, but don't quite have the technical chops to write all the code from scratch, I definitely suggest you check it out. Installation is straightforward, and reading the code definitely taught me a thing or two about Python, which I've been meaning to learn more about.

One Month with Dvorak + Kinesis

Wed, 29 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I've been using the Dvorak keyboard layout for the last month combined with the Kinesis keyboard. Here are my impressions.

Keystroke Balance

One of the touted benefits of the Dvorak layout in better balance between left hand and right hand use of the keyboard. Furthermore, the layout places the most frequently used keys (I assume for the English language) on the home row. This is meant to improve the ergonomics of typing.

As someone with RSI issues on my right wrist and right thumb, I can definitely agree that my fingers seem to move much less than when using Qwerty. My left hand also seems to have to contort much less than before. However, using the Kinesis keyboard has meant that I use my right thumb for the space key, and so that has been a nuisance.

Simultaneously Changing Physical Keyboard

I used to use a Qsenn DT35 keyboard prior to this past month of Dvorak. In hindsight, the DT35's key spacing was slightly too close for my hands, so the change has alleviated my hand-crampness (which tends to be exacerbated by my use of the emacs text editor).

The major benefit of changing to a radically different keyboard design has been the negation of my years of muscle memory built up using Qwerty + a traditional keyboard. Had I started using Dvorak on say, my Macbook Air keyboard, I would have had to fight against my muscle memory which would have essentially been "bad habits". This would have been akin to fighting bad habits in sports or in musical performance. It's often easier to start from complete scratch.

Speed

Another one of Dvorak's purported benefits is speed. Because of the even distribution of the keys between the two hands and the placement of commonly used characters is easy to reach locations, Dvorak is supposed to let you type faster. This was actually the original reason I was attracted to Dvorak, before I developed RSI. The verdict is still out, since I'm still only at about 20% of the speed I was at with Qwerty. I read a blog post by a programmer saying that it took him 3-4 months to get used to Dvorak, and that sounds pretty accurate to me looking at my rate of improvement. To be honest though, this is no longer really a priority for me.

Factors of Typing Speed: Physical Distance, Memory Map, and Character Grouping

Other than the physical layout optimization, I've noticed two other factors that improve typing speed.

One factor is the memory map of characters to the key locations on the keyboard. This is pretty straight forward, but it's surprising how badly my speed suffered when I (a) lost the ability to instantly know where a character is and (b) would need a lot of time to translate the "key location identification" to the actual movement of my fingers.

Another realization has been that much of our typing speed comes from recognizing familiar patterns of letters and being able to type those quickly as a group, without having to mentally seek out each individual key. There is a huge difference being able to type "that" in one go, versus "t-h-a-t" with slight pauses in between.

Kinesis

The Kinesis keyboard is typically used by programmers (the first time I saw one was at Stripe's office) but it's a worthwhile tool for anyone who types a significant amount. Not having to reach and twist for things like the backspace key or the CTRL key have been wonderful for me. Even compared to mapping CTRL to Caps Lock, the Kinesis layout is nicer for me since my thumb is much stronger than my pinky.

The columns of the keybroard are vertically aligned, which makes it easier to find the keys in the column.

The one problem for me is that I initially found that the keyboard was slightly too large for me. This has turned out to be less of a problem than I originally anticipated, but the -/_ and =/+ keys (the upperleftmost and upperrightmost keys) are still a bit annoying to reach. So far the benefits have outweighed this drawback though.

This keyboard also has a hardware between Qwerty and Dvorak inputs, and the non-alphanumeric keys don't move between the layouts (though they are already quite different from Qwerty), which is a very nice feature (software Dvorak toggle would remap these keys to different locations, making the mapping worse).

Total Confusion Using Qwerty + Macbook Keyboard

After a month with Dvorak + Kinesis, I tried using my Qwerty + standard keyboard setup on my Mac. The result was ugly, confusing some of the key locations (E in particular) and just generally being clumsy and being unable to remember the Qwerty layout on a subconscious level (which is needed to type quickly and accurately). This is a bit worrying since I may become completely inept on a standard keyboard even when using Dvorak, so I may need to "practice" using Dvorak on a regular keyboard and totally commit to forgetting about Qwerty.

Conclusion

Overall I'm happy to have switched to a Dvorak + Kinesis layout. It's probably not for everyone, but since I am a keyboard nerd (I own 6 or 7 keyboards) and have RSI, it's been an enjoyable process for me. The cherry switches on the keys feel nice (though those can be found on other high quality keyboards as well), and the feeling of banging out words quickly (where I had struggled before) is an awesome feeling. Many words alternate left and right keystrokes, and those feel particularly good when I'm able to type them out quickly. I'm afraid of becoming completely dependant on this keyboard, but for now I'm going to keep at this.

Design Talent vs Eye for Good Design

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Linux and fetchmail both went public with strong, attractive basic designs. Many people thinking about the bazaar model as I have presented it have correctly considered this critical, then jumped from that to the conclusion that a high degree of design intuition and cleverness in the project leader is indispensable.

But Linus got his design from Unix. I got mine initially from the ancestral popclient (though it would later change a great deal, much more proportionately speaking than has Linux). So does the leader/coordinator for a bazaar-style effort really have to have exceptional design talent, or can he get by through leveraging the design talent of others?

I think it is not critical that the coordinator be able to originate designs of exceptional brilliance, but it is absolutely critical that the coordinator be able to recognize good design ideas from others.

Both the Linux and fetchmail projects show evidence of this. Linus, while not (as previously discussed) a spectacularly original designer, has displayed a powerful knack for recognizing good design and integrating it into the Linux kernel.

from "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" -- Eric Raymond

This is pretty reminiscent of the now cliche "skills of Steve Jobs", who I generally consider to be a great product manager (arguably of epic proportions, though I am no fan of his personality traits). Also, considering Richard Stallman's shortcomings as the "project manager" of the GNU project in developing the HURD kernel [1], I guess this kind of willingness and enthusiasm for incorporating others' designs is a key attribute of successful project/product managers.

[1] "Stallman's growing stature as a software programmer, however, was balanced by his struggles as a project manager." -- "Free as in Freedom" Chapter 9

"Fear of the Internet" in Japan

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The National Police Agency of Japan is urging ISPs to block "abusive uses of Tor". This is essentially driven by the Japanese "cat hacker" incident, where hacked machines were used to send crime threats. The police arrested an innocent suspect and forced him into a false confession through heavy handed means (this is pretty standard so far). But after the false confession, the actual hacker announced that he is still out there, and this become a huge controversy and embarrassment for the Japanese police.

The Japanese police and other government bodies are not tech-savvy at all, so in light of this public shaming that they've gone through, are naturally flexing their muscles to shut down an avenue that makes it difficult for them to "carry out justice" (or something along those lines). It's certainly easier for them to shut down this "threat" than try to understand and harness its forces.

Through discussions on Hacker News, I was reminded of the latent "fear of the Internet" that persists in mainstream Japanese society. From the article:

So maybe Japanese national paranoia towards the Internet is not paranoia at all, but a slightly-overcautious but basically-accurate level of risk assessment. The problem, however, is that the mass anxiety — justified or not — has crippled the development of the Internet, which subjectively-speaking, resembles the English-language net in 1997, in terms of graphic design, corporate participation, and general cultural influence. The only difference is that everyone in Japan knows the Internet is supposed to be a big deal, instead of some freak side show for college kids and nerds.

The article provides quite a thorough analysis of how the Internet and Japanese society intertwine to create the current mess in the country, but I couldn't help but think of the contribution of the underlying lack of technological understanding of the Internet as one cause of this fear.

For a developed country, Japan is fairly unique in that the Internet proliferated through mobile phones in the 90's rather than through the traditional personal computer [1][2]. We (in the States) are currently having the "consumption vs creation" device argument with the penetration of iOS and Android mobile devices, but computing and the Internet became widespread through personal computers. These machines were much more open and also much more temperamental, making us more comfortable with computers and the Internet in general as we spent time attending to these computers' needs. Spending time figuring out what's wrong with our systems, searching online for fixes and workarounds, and just generally being in touch with the back pipes of computing made us "fear technology" much less than we otherwise would have.

Of course, not everyone is an expert or even merely computer savvy. But we typically have friends or acquaintances who are savvy, or perhaps work in one of those mega tech companies. I think we generally feel as society that technology is "on our side" and that it is something we can harness to great ends. Having a Diaspora of technical folks throughout the country has prevented technology from becoming an ivory tower that we look up to from a distance in fear and awe. It is not something that we fundamentally do not or cannot understand [3].

This is in stark contrast to Japan, where computers typically weren't owned by "normal people" during the 90's and were esoteric, highly geeky things to have. Honestly, the perception was that you were quite weird if you owned a personal computer in the 90's in Japan (those things were super expensive too! They cost $2~3k in the US, and $3~4k in Japan where people traditionally have less disposable income than people in the States). The Internet was something that was primarily accessed via cell phones (which were super advanced for their time), which naturally came with a great deal of abstraction, much more than what comes with smartphones today [4]. This abstraction and consumption-only interaction with the Internet would mean that there would only be a very very limited number of people who would become comfortable with the underlying technology of computing and the Internet, and thus lead to an overall nation wide lack of understanding of cutting edge information technology.

It's a cliche, but we fear what we don't understand. We're not sure how it works, and we're not sure what it's capable of doing. We flinch, and want this terrible thing to go away. Even when we do interact with it, we do so by poking it around with a 10 foot pole.

I think we're tremendously fortunate that this new generation of technology originated in our own country, and that we didn't develop a fear for interacting with it along the way. We "grew up with it" so to speak, and were able to spend time with it during the years when there was comparatively little at risk (Geocities pages were pretty innocent). These days, with so much information handled by technology and the Internet, I do empathize with those who simply aren't comfortable with how these black boxes handle some of the most vital functions of society. But on the other hand, if we don't keep up with technology, we are by definition obsoleted by those who are willing to make that emotional and temporal investment and commitment. Even the heavy handed quashing of technology inevitably gets circumvented by newer incarnations of technology. If legislation and control over infrastructure is used to unilaterally stimey the use of the newest technology, then the nation as a whole loses out in the global IT war (China will surely have a field day hacking Japan's servers if Japanese authorities go the route of putting up domestic technological walls).

Will Japanese authorities turn course and invest in understanding and harnessing technology? I'm putting my money elsewhere.

[1] Korea is also an interesting case, since access to computing and the Internet was primarily through PC cafes (PC bangs), since individual computers were too expensive for most families back then.
[2] Of course, many developing nations are using phones as the primary way to access the Internet, so it will be interesting to see how they develop societal attitudes in the coming decades.
[3] I fully admit that my views and perceptions may be horribly biased since I grew up in Silicon Valley.
[4] This is the main driver for Yahoo! Japan being the market leader in search in Japan rather than Google.

via Hacker News

Fluentd Meetup in SF

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

On March 7th, I headed up to San Francisco to attend the very first Fluentd (an open source log collector project) meet up in the US (there have been quite a few meet ups and casual talks in Japan already). As a non-coder, I felt a bit sheepish about attending, but my friends convinced me to head on up there, especially since I am technically one of the maintainers of the project.

The event was generously hosted by Slideshare at their new (Linkedin-Slideshare) office in the heart of the city. Slideshare was an incredible host for us, providing us with an accessible venue, food, drinks, and all the equipment needed to give talks.

There were two talks given. The first was by Sada, the creator of the project, whose talk explained the basic architecture and use cases of Fluentd.

Fluentd meetup at Slideshare from Sadayuki Furuhashi

Having been a part of the project for more than a year, I thought the presentation could have used a little more depth, but obviously the talk was meant for people who hadn't had any prior exposure to the software and so its relative lack of details was appropriate for the occasion. I was also thoroughly impressed by Sada's command of English during his talk. In just under a year and a half in the States, his composure on stage and narrative abilities have improved significantly (English education in Japan is notoriously bad).

The second talk was given by Sylvain, who was our "sponsor" on the Slideshare side in making this meetup happen for us. His talk was on how Fluentd is used within Slideshare's operations.

Skynet project: Monitor, analyze, scale, and maintain a system in the Cloud from Sylvain Kalache

Fluentd is typically used to collect application logs from applications (most typically web & mobile applications), so Sylvain's creative use of the project for server monitoring took me by surprise. I also took it as validation of how flexible the Fluentd code base must be to allow configurations and uses that it wasn't strictly "meant" to address when it was conceived.

This was the first Open Source meetup I had ever been to, and while I was pretty nervous and sheepish at first, in the end I found myself genuinely enjoying chatting with the engineers from various industries that had shown up for the event. In particular, I remember talking at length with a former Square-Enix London engineer, and also talking with Six Apart guys about @miyagawa (a former Six Apart engineer) as we were talking towards the kitchen to grab some drinks and Sylvain exclaiming, "Oh, the Perl Rockstar right?".

I guess I should end this post by mentioning that both Treasure Data (the company that Sada cofounded in creating Fluentd) and Slideshare are hiring! :)

N Years of Experience

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

"I have N years of experience in X!"

I've always been bothered by this phrase, since people obviously imply that having a certain number of years of experience in a given area must mean that their proficiency is proportional to said number of years. In most cases, it's practically an anti-signal for actual competence.

Golf

In my personal experience, the most egregious offenders are weekend golfers. Your typical weekend hacker with terrible mechanics and no course management is likely to say, "I've been playing this game for 20 years!" suggesting his supposed expertise at some point in the round. (Curiously, or perhaps naturally, the better players rarely make such statements) I wonder if these players actually know that they are terrible at the game (or at the very least are playing terribly at that time, and need to use their N years of playing poorly to prop themselves up in the face of embarrassment.

Job Descriptions

Virtually every job description you will see from traditional companies will ask for "N years of experience". This is the case for both technical areas like engineering (5 years of Java, 3 years of Ruby on Rails, 3 years of Verilog, etc.) and non technical areas like marketing (10 years of product marketing experience, 5 years of web product management experience, etc.).

Of course, this phenomenon is a side effect of the current broken state of recruiting. When a thousand people spam your Monster.com job posting, HR departments are coerced into using automated filters on resumes, which in turn promote the use of such "N years" based requirements. The fact that there are a small but significant number of excellent candidates who don't meet the exact criteria doesn't seem to matter [1]. If the cost of getting rid of the 900 genuinely unqualified candidates is passing over 20 great ones who don't fit the bill on paper, it seems to be a cost most HR departments are willing to accept. There must be a way to fix this sad state of affairs, since as we stand today, both sides of the table lose out.

(On the other hand, requirements along the lines of "experience actually shipping web applications" or "experience creating go-to-market strategies for hand held consumer products" does seem reasonable to me.)

Teaching(?)

Teacher compensation and retention based on seniority is an enormous point of contention that I don't want to get into here. I'm definitely not qualified to say to what extent teaching ability improves over the years. All I know is that some teachers, are terrible, some are decent, and others are truly wonderful and can be life-changers for children and young adults.

But I do think that teaching is an area where having a great number of years under your belt can help, in that your sample size of students, teaching methods and crisis handling is bound to be greater. That, while correlated with teaching "ability" to some extent, I think is a distinct factor that does increase with the number of years served [2]. So if the absolute quantity of "knowledge" in something or a concrete number of "things" one has experienced is pertinent to a role, then "N years of experience" may actually be an acceptable metric. (Though frankly, I'm hard pressed to give other areas where years of experience automatically impart relevant information like this.)

---

There are some cases (like job searches) where you really have no choice but to flaunt your 10 years of underwater snake charming experience. Sometimes you're in a position where you have to play the game, even though you know that the game is silly. If you find yourself in such a situation, go for it by all means, but try to maintain a certain cynicism about the whole charade.

If you ever hear me say "I have N years of experience" in anything, please do me a favor and call me out on it, so that I don't become "that guy".

[1] Of course, we can't forget about those job postings which ask for N number of years of using technology X when said technology has not existed for N years. (ex: Asking for 7 years of Rails experience when Rails had only existed for 6 years. Yes, this really did happen.)
[2] This thought was inspired by this post by aroberge on Hackernews.

Dota 2 on Linux: Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS, Radeon HD 4670

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Some notes on geting Dota 2 to work on Linux with ATI graphics.

In particular, there are two graphics related challenges using ATI Radeon cards: (1) Game crashes upon start, and (2) Red Screen after game start. I've listed the steps needed to resolve both of these problems.

System Details

Mother Board: ASUS ASUSRock 970 Extreme3
Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 Black (3.4GHz Quard-Core)
Memory: Corsair 3 16GB DDR3 RAM
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 4670
OS: Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS
MISC: Gnome 3 Shell

Installing Wine (Windows Emulation Layer)

Since Dota 2 is not available in the Linux Steam store, we need to install the Windows Steam client. As a prerequisite, we need to install Wine to emulate Windows

Install "Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layer (meta-package): Wine" from the Ubuntu Software Center. Site Link

Install Steam

Install Steam's Windows client through Winetricks or by downloading the installer. Only the latter option worked for me.

Using Winetricks, Open Winetricks -> Install an app -> steam -> OK
Manual Install
Download the Steam Windows Installer from the Steam store site.
Find the downloaded SteamInstall.msi file in your file system and navigate to Properties -> Permissions -> Allow executing file as program.
Right click on the SteamInstall.msi file and Open With Wine Windows Program Loader
Follow prompts to install the Windows Steam Client

Install Dota 2

Install Dota 2 using the Windows Steam Client (ask friends for an invite, sign up on the official Dota 2 page, etc.)

Resolve Graphics Issues

Next, we will resolve the two aforementioned graphics issues.

Enable S3TC Texture Compression (This is needed to resolve the "red screen" issue)
Using driconf under Image Quality settings (apt-get install driconf)
If unavailable in driconf, install the Texture compression library for Mesa through the Ubuntu Software Center.
Change Dota 2 Launch Options (This is needed to resolve the "game crash on startup" issue)
In Steam, navigate to: Library -> Dota 2 (in left menu) -> right click -> Properties -> SET LAUNCH OPTIONS
Copy paste the following: -novid -sw -nod3d9ex -noborder
- I believe -noborder improves switching focus between Dota 2 and other windows. At the very least, -nod3d9ex is required to resolve the game crash on startup

Play the Game!

That's it! The game should now be playable. I'd advise that you turn down your graphics settings in the top left menu as well.

Reference

WineHQ - DotA 2 Early Access - Steam. Particularly the post/thread by Marius titled "All red". Searching for "options" or "launch options" is useful as well.

Fav More

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

There are Zero-Sum games, and there are Positive-Sum games. Happiness, or feeling good, or whatever we might call positive emotions, are not Zero-Sum games. We don't become less happy by making someone else happy. In fact, we often feel good about ourselves when we make other people feel good.

This is most apparent in our face to face interactions, but it's also true online as well. And online, we have direct, text based interactions, and now with the proliferation of social networks, various indirect ways to interact. Most notable among these are Twitter "Favorites" and Facebook "Likes".

I used to think that Fav'ing or Liking a post was something that should be reserved, something that somehow detracted from myself. If you're sensitive about what information these Internet powerhouses have on you, then this may be a legitimate concern (particularly at the big-F).

But I think this concern is much smaller on Twitter, where the company has comparatively very little of our personal information. If we're okay with a service provider getting marginally more information about ourselves from our Favs and Likes, I think we should make an effort to give our friends' posts a thumbs-up as often as possible. It's a small effect, but each Fav or Like definitely has a positive effect on the recipient; they certainly won't feel worse for getting a star.

We don't lose anything (or trivially little, at most) by Favoriting or Liking a post. On the other hand, our friends' spirits will get a little bit of a lift for the day. I'm sure some of you are thinking this is absolute common sense and doesn't even deserve a post, but I for one certainly didn't behave in this way for a very long time. So I just want to say, "Let's Fav More".

N

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

N***er is undoubtedly one of the dirtiest, most despicable words in the English language. The only time I really ever encounter it is in print form: old prose, social commentary articles, or generic morons online.

I have been fortunate enough to have never witnessed the world being used in a direct, personal, derogatory manner against someone. I do think I've seen it be used in jest, in fraternal terms amongst young men and women of color, but even that kind of use always made me feel uneasy.

I had never actually mouthed this word myself in my life (I have all my wonderful childhood teachers to thank, who instilled some decency in me through those years) until sometime last year. I can still remember the occasion, since I debated in my mind for a good 30 seconds whether I should say the word or not. You see, I was quoting a tongue and cheek passage from "Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut that I found very powerful. But even when I was direct quoting a literary passage, I had to think hard about whether I wanted to go through with this. This was the word -- the word I wasn't supposed to say, ever.

In the end I went through with it, quoting the passage to my fellow Vonnegut-fan friend. As soon as the word left my mouth, I felt uneasy and sick to my stomach, which I guess must be a good thing. I honestly don't think I can say this word again, even when quoting a book. It just feels terribly wrong even in this literary context when it's transplanted to my own vocal chords.

He came to work for him when the agency was right on the edge of the Nigger part of town. A Nigger was a human being who was black.

-- Kurt Vonnegut, "Breakfast of Champions"

WifiSLAM Acquired by Apple

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Apple Acquires Indoor Location Company WifiSLAM - WSJ

A college friend of mine was part of the founding team but resigned fairly quickly to return to his PhD program. Since he is the only one I know at the company, I just feel really bad thinking of what kind of hindsight / remorse he may be going through right now.

I know this kind of thing happens all the time where someone leaves and the company goes on to become a homerun (ex: Apple), but this is the first time I've had a close friend go through such a situation. I just feel terrible for him even though I haven't even talked to him about it. I guess there's a fiar chance that he may have no regrets regardless, but I strangely can't help but feel .... I don't even know how to say it... I just feel bad.

On Coding

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Coding (or programming) is a hot topic of conversation lately. MOOCs are offering programming classes [1] for free while industry titans are urging everyone to code [2]. On the other hand, others are objecting to the notion that everyone should become programmers [3]. I think the truth is somewhere in between these two extreme positions.

I personally think coding (or scripting) is similar to writing. Not all of us are good enough, motivated enough, or would even enjoy writing for a living. But because the written and spoken language drives much of the world today, it's important to have a strong grasp of language, be able see how it is being used for or against you and be able to use it to your advantage.

The ability to read and write code is similar. Familiarity with how code moves machines and software is the foundation to understanding how the most powerful man made forces in the world today are controlled and built. Being able to write even simple scripts or simple data filters can multiply your productivity or give you new perspective on how to frame problems and approaches to solutions. Without a basic understanding of code, one will be left behind in today's world.

Without a strong grip on the written and spoken language, we are at mercy of others who wield it better than us. Code is in many ways similar to this. I may never be a a master writer or a master programmer (or even a 'good' one for either), but knowing the basics is invaluable.

Of course, we should note that writing and coding will have "diminishing returns" for most everyone. We should exercise discretion in how far we should take our pursuit and have good judgment on what we expect to get from either discipline.

[1] Coursera, Udacity, Codecademy, etc.

[2] "What Schools Don't Teach

[3] "Programming is not for Everybody

Life in a Bubble

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I live in a bubble.

But by bubble, I don't mean a speculative bubble [1]. It's the cultural, stratospheric, insular kind of bubble that I'm referring to [2].

I live in the suburbs of the San Francisco peninsula (not SF proper), a vast expanse of upper middle class enclaves. Unlike metropolitan cities where people from all walks of life converge into a chaotic crescendo, these suburbs are numbingly uniform. Unlike metropolitan cities, the citizens of suburbia tend to stay local, sticking to their set of usual locales.

I go to and from work in the insulating medium also known as a car, which separates, no, protects me from other people. I work in a tech company, where I interact exclusively with peers with similar educational backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses to those of my own. I spend my free time alone, with my family, or with friends who again are from similar educational and cultural upbringings. I spend very little time in commercial establishments, since routine conspicuous consumption needs are fulfilled through Amazon. Meals are taken at home, at the office, or at eateries catering to other middle class citizens like myself. I don't go to bars. They're too loud. I don't go to clubs. They're too loud.

Seemingly every minute of my life here is spent in this mind numbing sameness. It is comfortable and pleasant, safe and serene. I should have nothing to complain about. I should have nothing to be concerned about. Yet I know. I know deep down that something is wrong. Something is desperately unnatural and unhealthy. It's a worriless, pristine, whitewashed life. It's artifically pleasant and safe, like a germ-free hospital quarantine ward. Ferm-free environments make us weaker and flawed against the real ecosystems by weakening our immune system. Similarly, culturally pristine and uniform environments must make me vulnerable and flawed against the true societal fabric of this country and this world.

Is there anything fundamentally wrong with a life of separatism and segregation? After all, even the so called "elites" in hyper-urban settings like Manhattan go out of their way to insulate and separate themselves from the totality of the cultural chaos in the streets of their own city. If even the upper stratosphere of our society, goes to great lengths to associate only with their kind, is it not natural that others will follow a similar course due to their own inherent nature? Or do we, the ones who have had the fortune of a stable family, a sound education, and a stable occupation, live a life lead by human nature that is logically optimal yet morally reprehensible? Do we, in naturally and understandably seeking comfortable, pleasant situations for ourselves, settle into a way of life that is inconsistent with our moral compass?

Is it right to black out all that is foul, ugly, unpleasant in our society? Is life in a bubble, a picture perfect life, really something to aspire to?

As well educated, upstanding citizens, how are we to live?

[1] Conincidentally I do live in Silicon Valley, whose startup financing arena is arguably in the midst of such a monetary bubble.

[2] Like many rural college towns.

Aaron Swartz, Read in Peace [1]

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Since Aaron Swartz' death on January 11th, hardly a day has gone by that I have not thought of the loss. Today I ran across a passage that reflected my emotions more clearly, more succinctly than any of the words I had put together until now. So while the context of this quote is nothing like that of the tragedy of Aaron Swartz, I will borrow Tom Wolfe's words to relate my sadness and ire.

"... Henry is . . . was . . . was . . . Lord, this is a tragedy. Henry is a fine young man . . . a fine young man, fine as you wanna meet . . . see . . . Goes to church, never been in trouble, about to graduate from high school, getting ready to go to college . . . a fine young man. And he already graduated from something tougher than Harvard University. He grew up in the projects, and he made it. He survived. He came out of it a fine young man. Heny Lamb is . . . was! . . . the hope! . . . see . . . the hope. And now somebody just come along and" --Whop! He slapped his hand down on the desktop-- "run him down and don't even stop."

-- Reverend Reginald Bacon
Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities"

Aaron Swartz personified the hope I have for myself and others, the so called leaders, the supposed 'elites' of our generation, that we can with time, metamorphose into incarnations of ourselves more noble than our current, less-than-what-we-had-hoped-for-in-our-idealist-adolescence, selves.

But this admittedly naive, holier-than-thou, insolent hope of mine, while not yet dead, has been gravely wounded.

Aaron, I never knew you. But you will be missed all the same

[1] EFF - Farewell to Aaron Swartz

Life without a Pause Button

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

You hear something off in the distance -- a fuzzy, monotinic, familiar sound. The sound continues, steadfast. The pulsating rhythm is slithering, writhing towards you. You know it. You know you know it. You know it like the face of the elementary school bully who'd hit you real hard in the arm and never got caught by the teacher. The injustice of it all! Suddenly, you jerk up. Your hair is tangled, sheets knotted. The pillow has made its seasonal migration to the foot of the bed. It's 7:30, read, flashing. It's morning. It's a weekday. Off you go! It's a workday! You bash the plastic box and let out a deep, morbid, existential groan.

Two hundred odd days in the year, forty odd years in our lives, we go round and round. Any respites are temporary by definition, brief by choice. The playback options to the tapereel of our lives consist of a "PLAY" button and a "FAST FORWARD" button. Someone has removed the "BACK" button, and the "PAUSE" button looks like one of those big, red, "DO NOT PUSH" charicatures, complete with plastic safety box and all.

We don't have to keep churning this giant, heaving contraption that is our lives. That big, red, plastic, protruding, monstrosity of a button is there, waiting. But when we inch our fingers towards it -- pointy finger, middle finger, pointy finger -- we notice something. The plastic casing is taped down with an unholy amount of scotch tape. Someone has scrawled all over the clear plexiglass: "DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING!?" We look closer, leaning in. It's our handwriting! No one else would bastardize the language by mixing cursive and print in this haphazard way. Then it hits us. We can't do this. We back off. We slide our chairs back so hard that we bump straight into the wall. We can't do it. We just can't. We know we can but we know we can't -- we shouldn't -- we mustn't!!.

What would happen if we took off all this tape, opened up the lid, and slowly, gently, pushed the crimson protrusion? If we took a break -- some serious, unadultered, brain-dead, vegitating, sublime, subbatical? WE HAVE NO IDEA! It paralyzes us, this, unknown. We ask our friends, and they urge us on, saying it's a great idea. Well if it's so great, why has she not taken a single break longer than ten days over the last five years!? We desperatey want to stop; look around; smell the roses; hell, plant some roses and tend to their finicky needs! We know! We know its' right! The logic is undeniable! And yet, the fear! It grabs all four of our limbs and slams us to the floor. Can we really stop chugging? When our peers keep turning their grindstones day and night? When twelve million people in this country are unemployed and will do anything to take our place? When we know we have it so good, and when others just like us have it so bad? If we take a seat, take a break, will we be able to get back up? The sure thing to do, the riskless option, the sickening, roiling, detestable choice, is to keep going, keep turning, keep grinding.

We live in the most plentiful era in history, in the most prosperous nation on the planet, and find ourselves slaves to it all.

Not based on a true story

A Quantum Leap

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner is a quantum leap in technology

-- Jeff Smisek, United Airlines CEO

Someone should tell him that a quantum leap is actually a very small jump.

Steve Wozniak, Courage, and Confidence

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

You know, it's strange, but right around the time I started working on what later became the Apple I board, this idea popped into my mind about two guys who die on the same day. One guy is really successful, and he's spending all his time running companies, managing them, making sure they are profitable, and making sales goals all the time. And the other guy, all he does is lounge around, doesn't have much money, really likes to tell jokes and follow gadgets and technology and other things he finds interesting in the world, and he just spends his life laughing.

In my head, the guy who'd rather laugh than control things is going to be the one who has the happier life. That's just my opinion. I figure happiness is the most important thing in life, just how much you laugh. The guy whose head kind of floats, he's so happy. That's who I am, who I wan tto be and have always wanted to be.

-- Steve Wozniak in "iWoz"

So much of our world is driven by money; by power; by trophies of metal and paper. Many of even the brightest and strongest of our peers seem blinded by the gleaming glamour of these tokens of accomplishment, unable to shake themselves away from the grip of greed. At times it even appears that the more capable a person is, the more these trophies enter her reach, and the more inescapable the pursuit becomes.

In such a world, it takes immense courage to defy the standard barometers of society. As creatures, we are evolutionarily predisposed to one upping the Joneses. Our chemical feedback loops grind against our capacity for reason, making sure that any deviation from this race is temporary. Even when we both instinctively and rationally know that this competitive, over-optimizing, and overachieving behavior runs counter to our overall happiness, we find it immensely difficult to "forfeight" the match.

In fact the most potent recipe is a person with great ability but without a corresponding strength of purpose and passion. With the way we promote competition and adherence to a standard curriculum for the best of our youth today, it is small wonder that our postsecondary academic pursuits and subsequent professional "aspirations" become dominated by the influences of our particular institution of attendance (how many of us actually considered the dominant industries that recruit at our college of choice when applying?). If a student attends Stanford, chances are she will study engineering and enter the tech sector. If a student attends Princeton, odds are that she will study economics and enter the finance industry. If we are accustomed to following our immediate surroundings' norms for academic and professional choices and priorities, then our long-term motives will naturally be defined by those of our peers as well.

It is only those with immense confidence in their desires, objectives, and self-worth, that can rebuff society's edicts for "what (supposedly) matters most". I have immense respect and admiration for those whose lives are an embodiment of their passions and interests -- those who radiate a unique aura of conviction and purpose with every word they speak and every step (both literally and figuratively) they take. They are, simply, rare.

But to those rare souls with the inner strength and conviction to defy the world's dogma: you are an inspiration.

New Years Resolutions

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

A belated declaration of my goals for 2013 (starting from January 15th).

Read at least one book per week.
Write at least one (meaningful) blog post per week.
Sleep before midnight.

Read at least one book per week

This is distinct from "read 52 books this year". The goal is to consistently be engaged in reading books throughout the year. I draw this contrast since last year, I had months where I read zero books and months where I read more than 10 books. (I read 48 books last year)

Write at least one (meaningful) blog post per week

Early last year, I experimented with writing one blog post every day. There were some benefits to this, but I was not pleased with the unoriginality and shallowness of many of my posts during this time. This year I want to spend time focusing on writing more thoughtful and meaningful posts, rather than striving for volume.

Sleep before midnight

I am quite productive in the morning, yet tend to defer waking up until the last possible minute. By sleeping before midnight, I aim to facilitate an earlier start to the day. I lead a rather hermit-like existence for someone my age, so I am fortunately (?) not frequently faced with the challenge of balancing a night out with this goal.

Parting words

All three goals are easily attainable for me. I don't have to move a mountain to achieve them; in fact, my existing routine meets these goals about 70% of the time. All that I need is a mild strengthening of my already rather disciplined lifestyle.