This is just a quick post on one way that I’ve realized I think about my commitments. This model works best with the tasks you select for yourself, but there are plenty of variations to which it also applies, including assignments from your school or place of work.

In a nutshell, the Over-Under Model states that what you want to do and what you’ve committed to affect you in different ways psychologically. Specifically, you place things that you want to do beneath (under) you, and you place what you’ve committed to (either to yourself or to someone else, tacitly or verbally) above (over) you. (more…)

Linked lists, sometimes simply called lists, are a fundamental data structure in computer science. Languages such as Java and C# do an admirable job of abstracting away the details behind lists, but understanding them is absolutely crucial when building efficient programs.

The way in which linked lists are structured varies, but we will consider a doubly-linked list with external data. By that, we mean that each link in the list will refer to the previous link and the next link in the list, and that the data type that represents the list itself will not contain the data itself, but instead each link will contain a reference (pointer) to its corresponding data. In C++, a naive implementation might look like this:

struct LinkedList
{


LinkedList *prev;
LinkedList *next;
DataType *data;

};

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I bill myself out as a “software developer.” This is fair, I think, since I’ve written a lot of software over the past ten years, and this combined with my college education has enabled me to develop solutions to rather large and difficult problems.

Sometimes, though, we all need to reminded of the basics. It’s been a couple of years since my basic data structures and algorithms class, and it’s now gotten to the point where the difference between a red-black tree and a leftist tree is pretty fuzzy. Fuzzy to the point that I’m not sure I ever really grokked the difference.

So, it’s time for a refresher. I don’t have a copy of Leiserson/Rivest/Cormen handy, so I’m just going to use what’s on the shelf. Here’s the rubric for each topic: (more…)

This post has been redacted due to an illuminating discussion with a member of the Grooveshark team.

So, it turns out Paul Graham was right: the problem with going through tough times is not that they directly spell failure, but that they rob the momentum you have, which in turn leads to stalls and ultimately to failure. Within minutes of hearing about our rejection, I was so turned off by our project that I just picked up something else to work on, something I could still believe in. Call me fragile.

But let’s rewind a bit. (more…)

The number of readers and inbound links for this blog will probably double this week (which isn’t saying much), so it’s probably time for an update.

First, though, a preface: if you’ll be in Orlando for BarCamp or Stanford for Startup School, drop me a line(direct e-mail link).

As of one week ago, I had just gathered the courage to tell my family that I’d be working freelance in Atlanta after I got my degree (in August). The future has been looming large for a long time, and it felt better to make an executive decision and start shopping it around than simply maintain the que-sera-sera attitude I’d been nervously holding out to everyone who asked up to that point.

Making one choice for independence seems to start a cascade of successively more challenging and more tempting possibilities. Knowing that I wanted to work for myself was a certainty; getting there would take a little more thought (since my freelancing so far has not been fabulously lucrative). But really, honestly starting a company, with a co-founder and all the legal shenanigans required to get legit: that was a long-shot.

Then I got pitched by a friend on an idea that was just too outstanding to pass up. Then, that very same night, I was notified that I was accepted to Startup School. I just booked the flight to San Jose. Come Wednesday, we’ll be in the pool with a wide range of other brilliant startups, looking for seed capital and hoping to get set up in a startup hub where we can grow this thing into something valuable and excellent.

What does that look like? I don’t know. But I do know that things are moving along fast enough at this point that I won’t have time to slow down and think about it before it’s too late.

And that’s an attractive prospect.

If you haven’t seen it, this might be the best use of statistics to give a persuasive presentation I’ve ever seen: Hans Rosling on the democratization and analysis of world statistics on health and wealth.

This talk is good throughout, but what strikes me most is the inhomogeneity in homogeneity in each cluster of countries. By that, I really mean the spread in the economic strength among these groups, specifically the continent of Africa. Considered as a continent, Africa is in poverty, but contrary to the opinion of the average American, there is much wealth in Africa as well, and not just in the form of blood money for diamonds.

Wealth that comes from trade, that comes from countries exchanging on even parity in the global market with every other nation.
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Productivity expert and jet-setter extraordinaire Tim Ferriss has a proposition for you. Work four hours a week, he says, and you’ll find that you can become wealthy while still having time to do all the things you want to do.

Ferriss emphasizes the idea that (i) reducing information overload and (ii) outsourcing tasks, combined with (iii) remaining-results oriented will result in a tremendously liberating situation where the practicing individual has copious free time on a weekly basis in which they are free to travel the world, or even have multiple, parallel mini-careers. This sounds excellent, and I was enraptured by the notion at first (as were, seemingly, the millions who have firmly planted FHWW on the New York Times best-sellers list). I was especially turned on by the inspiring presentation Ferriss gave with Marci Alboher for Authors@Google.

Shortly, though, I became aware of an insidious side-effect of this kind of workload reduction, which was initially veiled by my selfishness and my entrepreneurial sympathies.
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A very noteworthy shift occurred in the world of physics in the early part of the 20th century, and I’m not talking about Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis. In fact, much of Einstein’s work was diametrically opposite what I’m talking about: use of statistics as a foundation for physics.

I have to note a quotation from Niels Bohr, which shines with uncommon insight:

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.

I think many scientists before the Modern era would have disagreed with this. Einstein would almost certainly have disagreed, because of his unusual obsession (shared with Newton) with mathematical beauty. It is explicit throughout his work that Einstein believed (and this rings out in Hawking, too) that the “mind of God,” or absolute reality, must be able to be inferred from physical observation.

After 1905, though, things turned ugly. (more…)

Over the last couple of days, I’ve put together a little program I’m calling RabidRead*. RabidRead was conceived when I read a forum post by someone about how he was able to achieve very high comprehension at very high speeds by using a piece of software he wrote.

Programs of this sort are called “serial readers,”and they work by presenting a single word (from a long text) at a time, in rapid succession (say, between 200 and 1000 words per minute).

Read more here!