Second Reading notes, slowly building the habit. Turns out this one has a few related topics:

• product building,
• media/news consumption,
• self improvement.

Article: “France’s baby bust”

my work shows how the loosening of traditional religious moral constraints in Ancien Régime France drove the decline in fertility

Demography had a huge impact on France’s power.

but also allowed it to keep up with British living standards without an industrial revolution.

Growth in income per capita was made in England by increase the income, and in France it was made by decrease the “capita”. Something to think about in the era of climate change.

Article: “What I Learned At Stripe”

An idea to keep everyone align on the project outcome: Write a Shipped Email draft that you would sent at the end of the project. And then actually send (a revised) version of it when actually finishing a project.

summarizes the problem and context around the problem, describes the solution approach (usually with screenshots or screen recordings), and quantifies the impact with metrics. It usually ends with a “we haven’t won yet…” section where future phases or strategies may be laid out. It’s not uncommon for a project to begin with writing (but not sending!) the Shipped email, serving as a north star for understanding the scope and goals of a project.

Estimations are hard, this is a way to make sure other people understand that a feature can come with unknown.

The Atlas team does track date estimations, but those dates are always accompanied with a confidence level in that date.

Hear from your customers, it is that simple. I guess easy to say, hard to do in practice while in the weeds of building a product.

In this one-hour meeting, there is always a 20 minute section where an actual Stripe customer is invited to talk about their experiences with Stripe, with the entire company listening.

As part of new employee onboarding but also nice to remind ourselves to keep put ourselves into the people using our product shoes.

go through the Atlas product flow as that user, taking very detailed notes along the way of anything that was not perfect.

Discussion: “Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?”

People often think of ‘niching down’ as adding features, but I would argue it is often just as much about removing features. As companies grow, they must add more and more surface area to satisfy certain use cases. Side projects do not have this problem; they can be laser focused on one or two such use cases, and as such remove all the surface area that many users find to be detritus.

Niching down can be a good thing. Take a current product that is bloated, focus on one piece of it, and people might use it more because it does it well.

Video: “How to Get and Evaluate Startup Ideas | Startup School”

Questions to ask yourself when thinking about startup ideas:

• good founder market fit: are you the good founders to be working on this idea
• is it a solution that people want? or a made up problem
• do you have competition? it is good. It proves that there is a need.
• do you want this personally? or know people who wants it

Article: “The Tension Between Logical Reasoning & Illogical Creativity”

Programming is logical, true or false, organized. Applying this thinking into design will limit what comes out of it. Great designers have been working with were able to take the big picture, understand the technical challenge, and come up with a flow that makes sense.

This is why “design engineers” can be so valuable because they have developed a muscle for holding these tensions in balance: the need for logical reasoning at each step against the need for subversive ideation that bridges to unseen but plausible possibilities.

Article: “Why You Should Stop Reading News”

Some points from the article:

News doesn’t make you more informed; it just makes you more confident the information you have is all there is.

News reinforces what we already believe.

News substitutes the thinking of others for thinking.

Part of the answer is to spend less time consuming information and more time thinking.

Article: “Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket”

In the face of overload of news, one solution could be seen to:

become more efficient and organised, or better at prioritising, with the implied promise that you might thereby eliminate or disregard enough of life’s unimportant nonsense to make time for the meaningful stuff.

or could be formulate such as:

it’s about reducing the size of the haystack, to make it easier to focus on the needle.

but instead the other way of seeing it is to:

accept that there are simply too many rocks to fit in the jar. You have to take a stab at deciding what matters most, among your various creative passions/life goals/responsibilities – and then do that, while acknowledging that you’ll inevitably be neglecting many other things that matter too.

It relates to me since I switch to Arc as my “reading browser” and their “peek” which allows me to peek at the article, and either decide if it is worth my time in the future, or I should discard it right now.

Article: “When Americans Lost Faith in the News”

We say that we want the Supreme Court to be apolitical and to follow the law. But what we really want is for the Court to come out our way. In the end, we don’t care what the facts are, because there are always more facts. You can’t unspin the facts; you can only put a different spin on them. What we want is to see our enemy—Steve Bannon, Hunter Biden, whomever—in an orange jumpsuit. We want winners and losers. That is why much of our politics now takes place in a courtroom.

Reporters should “stop asking who the winners and losers are,” Sullivan says; they should “start asking who is serving democracy and who is undermining it.” The press is in the game. It has a stake.

Article: “3 Mistakes I Made as an Engineer, but Had To Become a Manager To See”

people problems are just as important as problems with the code itself.

Code can be crap but if you work with great people, it’ll be bearable.

Get to know your coworkers

Unless you work on a project alone, the project will be built by multiple people. Knowing how they are working, what is happening with the life will make the work more smooth.

Article: “On mindsets, mind shifts and wins”

Things I try to follow but are always good to have a reminder.

Leaving my phone alone

Taking regular walks

Doing things as they need to be done

In a work setting, that I need to improve:

Being straight and taking ownership

Saying my piece then moving on

Article: “1,799”

Meaning in work (in a broad term):

How many rooms do I walk into now and feel that familiar clunk of progress? How often do I sit at my keyboard and use each letter to the best of my ability? How often am I working on the right thing, a thing I can be proud of, a thing I want to brag about endlessly?

1,799 because the author has about 1,800 blog posts left to write in his life.

Article: “What is Temperature in NLP?🐭”

Interactive example to understand what “Temperature” is in NLP context.

Temperature is a parameter used in natural language processing models to increase or decrease the “confidence” a model has in its most likely response.