Ben Kuhn

I recently decided I should get over my learned helplessness at web design.

While updating my DNS for the redesign, I had to decide whether my canonical URL should be benkuhn.net or www.benkuhn.net .

In a course I’m taking on the sociology of medicine—Sociology 190, taught by Nicholas Christakis—we’ve spent a lot of time investigating “what is a disease?

A couple people have asked me why I’m taking a course on operating systems this term. Presumably they ask because I’m officially studying math and systems programming is very un-theoretical.

While TAing a linear algebra class last semester, I discovered that there aren’t many resources for good problems in linear algebra.

People often talk about how writing well is useful because it helps clarify your thoughts on a topic. This always seemed a little strange to me.

Toby Ord recently gave a talk about foreign aid to Harvard High-Impact Philanthropy , titled “Aid Works (On Average)”. It was really enlightening in many ways.

I have a lot of debates with people. If someone says something I don’t agree with, I think I’m less hesitant than most people to disagree and start discussing it.

Holden from GiveWell recently wrote a post outlining the difficulties they’ve had in finding more interventions that can be funded by small independent donors.

Although I tend to prefer David Foster Wallace’s nonfiction, one of my favorite things I’ve read by him comes from his first novel, The Broom of the System: “…a second-order vain person is first of...

Someone pointed out that my “fun linear algebra problems” post would be more useful with solutions. Here’s a solution to problems 1 and 2.

Thanks to Gautam Mohan for inspiring this post and providing massively helpful edits. A problem I’ve struggled with is the feeling that I don’t have a firm foundation for my moral beliefs.

When people first hear about the idea of effective altruism, especially from someone like Peter Singer, there’s one particular objection that is often raised.

I spent last school year (‘12-‘13) doing almost entirely things I was “good at.” This was a pretty novel experience for me. During middle school and high school I expanded my boundaries a lot.

Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex has an awesome post about a terrible argument : Recently, Alas, A Blog wrote an article saying that Democrats don’t really care about helping the poor, they only...

Recently the Washington Post’s Wonkblog had some in-depth coverage of a bunch of people who are earning to give. It’s really exciting to see effective altruism’s ideas hitting the mainstream.

I love it when I get to use computer-science metaphors to illuminate real-life processes. One of my favorite such metaphors was introduced to me by my algorithms professor last year.

Thanks again to Gautam Mohan for inspiration and edits!

About a month ago I attended a workshop held by the Center For Applied Rationality (CFAR), and it was one of the best decisions I’ve made. Here’s a review of the workshop and what I took away from it.

I celebrate most holidays with three immediate families and three more extended sets, so it’s always interesting for me to study their gift-giving habits.

Today I realized that Facebook’s newsfeed isn’t useful.

The effective altruism community somewhat frequently has outsiders come in claiming that one particular intervention is Definitely The Most Effective Thing Ever.

Soft skills can be trained. This seems silly, but apparently my previous model of the world was that you could learn how to do math and physics and programming, but “making good conversation” and...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about GiveWell’s difficulties finding opportunities for funding.

Author’s Note: These plans are no longer current. Many of my opinions and beliefs have changed between the writing of this post and now.

Occasionally, while talking about the etiquette of asking people to dance at contra dances, someone voices the opinion that if someone asks you for a dance and you turn them down, you’re obliged to...

A little while ago I learned about couchsurfing.org , in which people from the Internet visit cities and are hosted for free by other people from the Internet.

On Friday, Sep. 20, I sat down with Satvik Beri to talk about his perspective on how to maximize earnings, if I want to do a lot of good by donating a lot to highly effective charities .

Lately several people in the effective altruism community have mentioned that thinking about EA all the time can be pretty stressful.

Over the past couple years I’ve picked up a number of tools that are really useful during debates and discussions.

Brian Tomasik suggests , and many people agree , that keeping public records of your important conversations and correspondence is really useful: it makes them easier for other people to discover,...

In lieu of my semi-weekly post, today I have an article in the Harvard Crimson. I’m writing, as usual (sorry), about effective altruism. The Crimson is notable for the poor quality of its commenters.

I have a lot of opinions about ethics, and they tend to be different from other people’s.

Thomas Pogge recently gave a talk for Harvard High-Impact Philanthropy . I took notes on it, which I’ve summarized below. Note: the opinions expressed below are not my own.

I’ve written about exploration and exploitation before, but I realized recently that this may be more important than I thought.

I used to think that “networking” was completely bogus, i.e., basically people just trying to use other people for their own ends by being friendly and pleasant at them.

Trying to maximize your donation to charity, but worried that this requires you to give up lots of nice things for yourself? There are more purchases than you think that are justified.

You shouldn’t call everything that doesn’t optimize utility a failure. There are degrees of failure, and it’s actually important to calibrate how harshly you judge something to how bad it actually is.

I have a heuristic that you basically shouldn’t try to optimize for multiple things at once.

This Edge article has recently been making the rounds.

In the spirit of trying more things : the form at the end of this post operates by Crocker’s Rules .

On Monday I declared Crocker’s rules on a textbox for a day. The results were pretty interesting. Some observations: It was pretty painless.

As of today, benkuhn.net is open source! You can find the source code here .

One of my friends has earned a stereotype of “the naive one”. When we play Cards Against Humanity , he’s the one discarding cards because he doesn’t know what they mean.

November 2013 For my mom, who taught me to love words. For my dad, who taught me to love math. For grandma Jan, who always makes sure I’m having fun. For grandma Kay, who has great stories.

I recently ran across Nick Bostrom’s idea of subjecting your strongest beliefs to a hypothetical apostasy in which you try to muster the strongest arguments you can against them.

I recently had a conversation with Alice Yu about effective environmental advocacy.

Well, it’s been a heck of a semester! Following Peter Hurford’s excellent example, I’ve decided to start writing up reviews of how my life has been going every so often, for a couple reasons: It...

Epistemic status: needs empirical support. When people talk about starting businesses that provide social value, one point that often comes up is that you can’t trust market incentives, because...

A commonly-listed “core idea” of effective altruism is replaceability : it’s okay to take a job in an unethical industry because if you don’t, someone else will, so the counterfactual effect of the...

Thanks to Ruthie Byers for inspiring many of the points in this post and providing awesome feedback on a draft.

As head of Harvard Effective Altruistm I’ve recently started to send a lot more email than I previously did.

Week 1: we picked a central passage of the book and drew a picture. Week 4: we pretended to start a business based on the book.

Lincoln recently analyzed the St. Petersburg Paradox . Let’s consider the following gamble: I pay you a fixed amount up-front. Then, I flip a fair coin repeatedly until it comes up heads.

For about four weeks over winter break I interned at GiveWell , a nonprofit that evaluates charities to figure out which ones do the most effective work.

An interesting article up at Fast Company, Hugh Whalan’s “Hip Gadgets For The Developing World Won’t Solve Global Poverty: Stop Making Them” : Every time I see a gimmicky product hailed as the “next...

Or, “how not to make a fundamental attribution error on yourself;” or, “how to do that thing that you keep being frustrated at yourself for not doing;” or, “finding and solving trivial but leveraged...

Vernor Vinge Highly recommended, especially if you’re interested in the intellectual history of the Singularity. Reading it made some of Eliezer’s worldview became a lot more understandable.

Okay, I’m hopping on the “posts full of links” bandwagon.

The fundamental divide in communication styles is the divide between synchronous and asynchronous communication.

My radio silence for the past month or so was due to the end-of-semester crunch time. But I’m safely on vacation now and hope to get back into the rhythm of regular blogging soon.

Many effective altruists want to spread EA ideas. As co-president of Harvard Effective Altruism for the last two years, I have some experience in this area that I thought might be helpful to share.

You are a plant. You have a stem, and you can sprout off leaves from the stem in various directions. You want to maximize the amount of sunlight that hits your leaves, i.e.

A bit over a year ago, I attended CFAR’s May 2013 rationality workshop. Someone asked me recently whether I think it had any lasting effects.

On her excellent new blog, Sarah Constantin wonders: to what extent are there people of extraordinary ability to avoid typical human cognitive biases?

So you’ve decided to donate a lot of money. Perhaps you have a particular cause or organization you’re really passionate about; perhaps Peter Singer convinced you that you had an obligation to;...

Update 2019-02-01: the 2018 tax code changes have changed the calculus substantially due to a higher standard deduction of $24,000 and a higher donation deduction limit of 60%.

At my work I’ve been writing a lot of machine learning code.

So you’ve decided to donate to effective charities, and figured out how you’re going to do it .

In a previous post I explaind how hard it is to prevent, or find and fix, bugs in machine learning code via conventional strategies. In this installment, I’ll go over some strategies that do work.

Some people have been asking me how my job search went—how I found out about and decided on the current company that I’m working for.

I have an interview by the excellent Pablo Stafforini that just went online at the EA blog ! We talked about my EA origin story, pretending to try, EA’s blind spots, and planning for the future.

So your friends have been bugging you about this thing called “effective altruism” and you finally decided you want to learn more.

This is the second post in a series on lessons I learned while starting a student group almost from scratch.

Looking to start an EA student group? Please get in touch if you’d like! Starting a student group is a great way to improve the world and you’ll learn a lot doing it.

This is the first post in a series on lessons I learned while starting a student group almost from scratch. Far and away the most important factor in HEA’s success is that we had two co-presidents.

This is the third post in a series on lessons I learned while starting a student group almost from scratch. If there’s one thing that I’m proud of about my tenure running HEA, it’s our programming.

This is the fourth post in a series on lessons I learned while starting a student group almost from scratch.

This is the fifth post in a series on lessons I learned while starting a student group almost from scratch.

This is the sixth post in a series on lessons I learned while starting a student group almost from scratch.

This is the seventh post in a series on lessons I learned while starting a student group almost from scratch.

There’s a new effective altruism forum up! It has a bunch of awesome posts, including one by me on choosing a career/job . (Even though it’s on the EA forum, it should be of fairly general interest.

A little while ago, inspired by Paul Christiano’s post about various habits he found useful, I decided to put a bit more work into my email processing.

I recently started looking into dependency tracking in Python—determining which pieces of code and data are required to compute a particular function.

This is the first part of the Q&A in a series on lessons I learned while starting a student group almost from scratch.

Introduction When I took machine learning, one of the first learning algorithms we were taught was the ID3 algorithm for learning a decision tree from a dataset.

The standard way of thinking about using one’s career for effective altruism focuses a lot on narrowing down what fields you’re interested in.

Survival analysis is an interesting problem in machine learning, but it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as the usual classification and regression tasks, so there aren’t as many tools for it.

Reminder: if you live in the US and are planning to donate substantially (at least $3,000) to charity this year, consider bunching your donations by donating at the beginning of next year instead!

Someone recently asked on the statistics Stack Exchange why the squared error is used in statistics .

This post is my contribution to the December edition of Figuring Good Out , the effective altruism blogging carnival. This month’s topic is “blind spots.

Some of the ones in this batch are pretty old, but anyway. An interesting history of randomized controlled trials for neonatal interventions .

Note: in April 2015, 50% of the impact of this post was purchased by Paul Christiano and Katja Grace. In the effective altruism community, donation matches are becoming very popular .

I recently finished Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite , by Suki Kim.

I’ve been thinking about how people raise money for charity, and recently I’ve been wondering about how people perceive donation-matching offers.

People keep citing this statistic that only 1% of federal spending is evidence-based . In a way, this actually isn’t so bad.

A friend of mine who’s taking an introductory machine learning course recently emailed me with a bunch of questions about my experience doing machine learning.

Scott Alexander recently wrote about why you shouldn’t feel bad for not being as smart as other people .

A couple weeks ago I made a survey to try to figure out what people thought about donation matching.

This week I found myself at yet another dinner party that mysteriously contained only two people who were not involved with the tech industry in some way.

I originally posted this as a comment on another blog , but it recently came up again. I’m posting it here in edited form.

The New Development Economics If you, like me, think that randomized controlled trials of international-development interventions are the bee’s knees, you might be interested in reading The New...

Someone recently asked me what resources I used to learn statistics.

Today I’m excited to make available the code and downloads for two books of music I’ve collected for my periodic singing parties: one book of carols ( Github , PDF ) and one book of rounds...

Many communities have their own peculiar social norms. Effective altruism is too young to have them yet—which means we can still spend time optimizing them before they ossify.

Last post, I speculated on some alternatives to eating out for EA meetups. One such alternative is volunteering! If you’re doing some repetitive task (e.g.

At Harvard College Effective Altruism we ran a series of weekly dinners with our members. We quickly found out that people tended to cluster into a single conversation group.

Last July, I finalized my decision to go on leave of absence for my senior year at Harvard.

Almost a year ago, I started working full-time in machine learning after graduating from studying pure math in college.

Last week I blogged about alternatives to eating out for large social groups. This week I realized a great (SF-specific) one I missed earlier: San Francisco’s privately-owned public open spaces .

Suppose you’re writing a script to spin up servers for your web application. def deploy ( ip ): copy ( 'code/' , ip + ':~/code' , recursive = True ) write_template ( 'conf/config.

I’m excited to report that 50% of the impact of my donation matching literature review has just been purchased in the first round of Paul Christiano and Katja Grace’s impact purchase !

Like apparently every other startup in San Francisco, Theorem works in an open plan office. Not by choice.

After I published my review of the literature on donation matching , some people asked me, basically, how I did it.

No biased coins Andrew Gelman eviscerates that favorite tool of statisticians everywhere, the biased coin.

Argument culture Kate Heddleston has some interesting thoughts about tech companies’ penchant for “argument culture.” First, let me explain what I mean by an argument culture.

I recently started using the µBlock ad blocker. One advantage it has, in addition to blocking ads, is a nice interface for blocking arbitrary CSS elements from pages.

Every so often, I step back, take stock of what I’ve been up to recently, and figure out where I’d like to go next.

Note: this should probably not be the first thing you read about effective altruism. It’ll give you a pretty biased impression! If that’s you, try something from the reading list I compiled instead.

So my perfectionism totally got to me and now I don’t want to put low-quality posts on my real website . But I still want to write them because I think it’s helpful to me .

Recently Dylan Matthews got annoyed that someone donated $100 million to Yale to build their third performing arts center.

I started doing data science because it seemed super useful and highly general. It had applications everywhere and could solve all sorts of problems.

I’ve been reading Poor Economics , which I highly recommend.

Inspired by Poor Economics , here are some thing that seem like they might be helpful for development economics.

There’s occasional debate among effective altruists, and among people more generally, about whether working in the financial sector does harm, and if so how much.

Almost every time I’ve made a major decision about how to spend my time, I’ve later thought to myself, “Man, if I had done my homework better on this decision, I would probably have made a better...

Sometimes in Internet conversations, well-intentioned people with similar goals start to misunderstand each other in ways that make the other person feel attacked and hurt even when there isn’t that...

The Chicago Booth School’s Initiative on Global Markets takes opinion polls of economists on various policy questions, like school vouchers or the gold standard .

A while ago I decided that I wanted a cheap e-reader that could display PDFs reasonably. That meant most e-ink displays were out (most screens were too small, and the larger ones were too expensive).

I somewhat often see people, during arguments, make remarks along the lines of: “I think that many people who hold <opposing position> do so because they’re biased.

TL;DR: blogging frequency may decrease here; higher-variance, lower-mean blogging at scraps.benkuhn.net . I’ve noticed lately that I’m becoming more of a perfectionist about blogging.

Here are some statistical interpretation anti-patterns: This study found no significant evidence that X had any effect.

People like to talk about avoiding bias. Witness the large literature on cognitive bias , the blog Overcoming Bias , Less Wrong’s front page , etc. Reducing bias is useful.

Selection bias. Probably most self-made billionaires took a lot of crazy-seeming risks to get there.

There are a surprising number of ways that you can effectively get permanent, low-effort, fairly large discounts on everyday spending—especially if you have the spending habits of a typical EAer (i.e.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies recently put out this paper.

Some folks think that effective altruist organizations “spend already too long evaluating and not enough time growing.

A recent Vox article puts together some criticism of the Gates foundation . Their main points: Poor accountability.

Now that EA Ventures has announced it , I’m excited to publicly disclose my donation to Effective Altruism Policy Analytics !

Investment in tech startups is rising very rapidly; a few reports have it roughly doubling since 2013.

People often do statistics using linear models, which assume that the thing you’re trying to predict ( Y ) is a linear function of some set of covariates ( X ).

Starting next week, I’ll be moving from Theorem to Wave ! I’ll be working on all parts of their app, which provides instant, low-cost remittances to Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

Louie Helm recently got worried that “Asparagus Metabolizes Into Neurotoxin Over 5x More Powerful Than PCP” . Eliezer read his post and got pretty worried too : Yikes.

Here are more examples of civilzational inadequacy overreaching.

Ruthie argues that US music education could be hugely improved by de-emphasizing performance and large ensembles .

I just got back from their most recent research event .

I recently decided it had been too long since I taught myself a random obscure programming language. (Something like five years, in fact. Yikes!) So I started to pick up J .

I recently finished this on the suggestion of about eight different people. Feynman has entertaining stories, and the book’s conversational style is fun.

Original post here . I’m sensitive to the charge that divestment petitions are just meaningless sanctimony, a way for activists to feel morally pure without either making serious sacrifices or...

I recently finished it. Thanks to Holden for the recommendation.

Dustin Moskovitz thinks it’s often more financially rewarding to try and be an early or mid employee at a really good-looking startup than start your own.

The Boston Review recently held a forum on The Logic of Effective Altruism , with an initial piece by Singer, responses by a bunch of people, and a final counter-response by Singer.

Post your suggestions in the comments! Backstory: I realized recently that I had pretty much stopped consciously trying to spend time getting better at my job.

I recently read Coders at Work by Peter Seibel, which is a collection of interviews with famous programmers.

Peter Seibel (the author of Coders at Work ) asked all his interviewees how people could become better programmers.

On debugging The most striking thing here was how many people just used print statements: [I assume you use symbolic debuggers.

While reading Coders at Work it was interesting to note the diversity of points people emphasized about how they would start working on projects.

OK, last Coders at Work post: I spent a lot of time worrying about edge cases. That’s something I learned from Trenchard More and his array theory for APL.

Some tech companies seem ridiculously large proportionally to what they do. To pick some random examples: Dropbox is 800 people, and their major product hasn’t changed since ‘09.

A few people in a row recently asked me for this, so I thought I should provide some in linkable format.

It’s a common misconception that we recommend all EAs “marry to give,” or marry a high-net-worth individual with the intent of redirecting much of their wealth to effective causes.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately dealing with SQLAlchemy, which is an object-relational mapper for Python. As you might guess from the title of this post, it makes me kind of sad.

This morning I started to play around with sloccount and Git’s commit graphs for the Wave repositories.

People think a lot about abstractions and how to design them well.

Last time I wrote about the idea of abstraction escape hatches .

I’m at a Wave company retreat right now in a rented-out townhouse in DC, and my room was freezing last night.

Emacs projectile and helm for quickly navigating files/projects.

I recently upgraded to Emacs 24.5 and my Powerline started looking crappy : After dealing with the crappiness for about a month, I finally got fed up and tried to figure out why.

A while ago (because I’m slow at blogging) Zach Groff attempted a quantitative estimate of the impact of participating in collective action on the Effective Altruism Forum.

Many computer systems offer autocomplete : the ability to guess what you’re about to type based on the first few letters you’ve typed.

A short note: Larissa MacFarquhar’s book Strangers Drowning is coming out in a few days and is up for preorder now on Amazon .

I decided having two blogs wasn’t actually accomplishing my goal of having an outlet for lower-quality writing, because people kept submitting the lower-quality stuff to Hacker News too.

…by spending 50% more time on the important parts instead of Slack/email/busywork/things I do when I’m unfocused.

Scott Kupor of Andreessen Horowitz recently suggested an alternative structure for employee stock options: But, a way to truly compete for the very best and long-term oriented employees would be to...

I finally decided to drop my aging and probably vulnerability-riddled Django 1.4 app and use a static site generator instead.

I’ve decided where (and how much) to donate for 2016!

Red Plenty (Francis Spufford): This book is a sort of hybrid—a chronicle of the economic life of Soviet citizens, plus an intellectual history of Soviet attempts at non-capitalist ways to solve the...

In Python and a lot of other dynamic languages, there’s no distinction between loading a module and executing a script. When you write a file named main.

Originally written for some coworkers at Wave who were thinking about early exercise. Most employees at startups get some of their pay in stock options.

I travel a lot for work. Wave is a distributed company, and we have week-long company retreats once every two months, often in Africa.

People often make several complaints about how employment works at startups: They don’t pay well.

Conceptual background: stock option , strike price , post-money valuation . Suppose you get a job offer for a senior engineering position at Square in November 2014.

Reading recently: The Globalization Paradox by Dani Rodrik.

95% of the feed is crap, because 95% of everything is crap. But sometimes there are good things in the feed. You want to see the good things in the feed. You can’t miss out on the good things.

While deciding how much to contribute to my 401(k) this year, I looked into how easy it would be to access the funds in an emergency.

Previously: 2016 This year, I met my goal of donating 50% of my income.

Someone recently asked me if I had any updates on my 2014 post on job hunting .

My favorite cold treatment used to be zinc , the only medicine I know of that’s been clinically shown to actually reduce symptom duration.

Here are some facts about venture capital that might surprise you if you’ve learned some economics: VC firms’ returns tend to persist over time ( Kaplan and Schoar 2004 ).

Somehow I never worried about this particular failure mode (in either component): Edit: while publishing this post, my git push was rejected because I hadn’t agreed to GitLab’s updated Terms of...

“If you’re not paying, you’re the product!” People love to repeat this complaint : We pay, for example, for the awesomeness of Google’s free array of services by helping Google build an enormous...

Most code editors color different pieces of your program in different ways. For instance, they’ll make keywords like if bold and bright so that you notice when you’ve misspelled them.

Famous physicist Murray Gell-Mann is supposed to have suggested that Richard Feynman solved problems with the following cutting edge technique: Write down the problem. Think real hard.

A friend doing a job search recently asked me: A choice I will likely have is whether to work at a larger company… or a startup… I was wondering if you had any particular feelings on this question.

If there’s one thing that obsesses self-improvement junkies, it’s actually sticking with their regimens.

Previously: 2016 , 2017 This year, I met my goal of donating 50% of my income.

I really enjoy using RSS to get updates from my favorite writers . But recently I noticed that my RSS feed was starting to get the same distracting pull as Hacker News.

As of the last couple years, every popular dynamic language has optional static types .

A friend of mine was looking at some job offers from startups recently and asked me for advice on how to think about the equity awards he was offered.

Within the effective altruism community, people often talk about “long-termist” vs “short-termist” worldviews.

Wave is a for-profit, venture backed startup building cheap, instant money transfer within various countries in Africa.

This is my first winter in Boston after coming back from Senegal. The sun sets at around 4:15 now, and it’s suddenly become extremely salient how hard it is for me to focus after dark.

Epistemic status: deliberately provocative title. Caveats: “in the relevant age group,” “according to back of the envelope math,” “with some assumptions about severity definitions,” “if the...

When I started dating my partner, I quickly noticed that grad school was making her very sad .

College, 2012 —Internship recruiting season. “What are you looking for in your internship?” the recruiter asks. “I’d like to solve hard technical problems,” I reply.

TL;DR: The limited public evidence suggests Boston has likely failed at containing the coronavirus.

Massachusetts’ coronavirus numbers appear to be less concerning than the other three states with over 100 cases (California, Washington and New York)—they are lower and growing more slowly.

A lot of people have recently started doing most of their work via video calls instead of in-person meetings.

It’s college decision season! To celebrate, I’ve been thinking about what I would have told myself in 2011 when I was deciding where to attend.

People sometimes tell me that they want to join a startup, so that they can learn how it works, and eventually start one themselves.

I used to be an anti-wire crusader. I hated the clutter of cables, and my tendency to unconsciously chew on them if they got anywhere near my face.

(Attention conservation notice: only useful if you have a static site that you’d like to remove the Javascript from.

Every Saturday morning, I take 3-4 hours to think about how my week went and how I’ll make the next one better.

Many large companies today are software monopolies that give their product away for free to get monopoly status, then do the most horrible things once they’ve won . ( Previously , previously .

Every so often I read an essay that I end up thinking about, and citing in conversation, over and over again.

June, 2017: my partner Eve and I are stuck at the visa-on-arrival desk in the domestic transfer wing of Bole International Airport, Addis Ababa.

Like many people, I have most of my best ideas in the shower.

Once I realized that my attention was even scarcer than my time , I became an anti-distraction fanatic.

I spend a lot of my day on video calls. Wave is a distributed company, so they’re the main way we communicate.

Sometimes people ask me what they should learn to become a better programmer.

source A common piece of interacting-with-people advice goes: “often when people complain, they don’t want help, they just want you to listen!

I start each of my weekly reviews by re-reading one of my favorite essays of life advice—a different one each week.

I’ve been too busy with work to write much recently, but in lieu of that, here’s a batch of links to other stuff I’ve been doing elsewhere.

Shortly after I started blogging, because I was a college student and had nothing better to do, I set a goal to write every week.

People have big arguments over whether “10x engineers” exist or not. Pro : The differences are not minor—it is rather like Salieri and Mozart.

When I was deciding whether to work for Wave , I got very hung up on the fact that my “total compensation” would be “lower.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how all my favorite people are great at a skill I’ve labeled in my head as “staring into the abyss.

Recently I noticed that most existing “why you should write a blog” articles ( e.g.

Last Friday was my last day as CTO at Wave , capping an incredible ~8 years filled with more professional and personal growth, joy, and meaning than I could have hoped for.

This post was adapted from a “management roundtable” I gave at Anthropic .

This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Wave .

This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic . I’ve been noticing recently that often, a big blocker to teams staying effective as they grow is trust .

This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic . Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams.

My few most productive individual weeks at Anthropic have all been “crisis project management:” coordinating major, time-sensitive implementation or debugging efforts.

This post was adapted from an internal doc I wrote at Wave . Welcome to being a manager! Your time-management problem just got a lot harder.

I’ve been thinking recently about what sets apart my coworkers who’ve done the best work.