pystack

In chess, amateurs play for tricks, masters play for position.

Amateurs assume competitors will fall for the tricks, but that is dangerous in business. Competitors could be sandbagging, and there's no ELO based on many prior games. You're also threatening their business and livelihood, not just the loss of a 2 hour game.

Masters assume competitors can see all the tricks, so they play for better pawn structures and piece placements. It is grinding out slight long-term advantages and converting it to a win in the end game. Grinding is the only way, because the players are so equally matched in the short-term: their pieces have similar powers, and they are limited to one move per turn.

In software, businesses can build only so many features per month due to the mythical man-month. Businesses are building on top of more or less the same technologies and mathematical techniques. Businesses understand what is important to customers and how customers use the features. Businesses watch each other's product demos and talk with each other's customers, so nothing released is hidden for long. Businesses also poach talent from each other.

Scholar's mate won't work here, there's no silver bullet features, and anything you build can and will be copied. You'll have to grind it out, fighting for better pawn structures, bishops on long diagonals, network effects, brand, and talent. And in the long-term, you come out ahead.

The easiest way to build a big business is to solve the hardest and most important technical problems. The market position would be defensible due to hardness, and the market size would be big enough due to importance.

There's many other approaches to build a big business though. While Apple's workers and investors believed in Apple's approach, Nasty Gal's workers and investors believed in Nasty Gal's approach. Capitalism is the judge and redistributes capital to the approach that works.

Apple's workers and investors now have more capital, so they can start more hardware tech companies, while Nasty Gal's workers and investors have less capital, so they can start fewer online clothing store companies. It's inefficient, but it works out in the end.

In hunter-gatherer times, I would hunt so my family could eat. If I hunt from 9 to 5 and didn't catch anything, I would have to keep hunting, or my family would go hungry. Nature is not a fair employer, it does not give meat to me because I worked 8 hours. I only get the meat if I catch it.

Today, society built many layers on top of nature. Big business bureaucracy guarantees food if you work for 8 hours. But at the edges of society, it is still very rough.

My business isn't going to grow just because I worked 8 hours. It only grows if I solve my customers' problems, regardless of how many hours it takes. I think this applies to the common "rich people" positions as well.

There's reality, and there's the interpretation of reality. Reality is the location of atoms. It's the hard cold facts that all observers can agree on. The interpretation of reality, on the other hand, is fickle. If I am sad, I can listen to happy music, and I'm happy again.

I try to affect reality, not the interpretation of reality. I write software and sell to customers. This is reality. My software exists, my customer relationships exist, and the software is solving my customers' problems. There's really no good answer on whether my business is mediocre or not, so I try not to think along those lines.

The entrepreneur pits his willpower against the entropy of nature. Nature is huge and moves randomly, while the entrepreneur is small and moves purposefully.

There is definitely luck in nature's random movements. But the entrepreneur small purposeful movements add up over time and overcome nature.

From a first principles perspective, it's me and the computer, and I want the computer to do something. My laptop has the following input devices: keyboard, mouse, webcam, and microphone.

I mostly use the keyboard and mouse. There are some places where the mouse is better than the keyboard. I was playing online chess today, and I like to drag and drop the pieces. It feels more natural and not that much slower than inputting the coordinates.

But when I was coding today, I needed to navigate through my code quickly. The mouse would have been much slower than vim's CTRL-D, CTRL-U, and /search_keyword, so I used the keyboard.

For the non-professional programmers, Project Bloks might be more like chess's drag and drop. It's more natural and not that much slower for simple tasks. I can see why non-professional programmers may like it.

As someone who is awful at Pictionary, I hope so as well. Just today, I defined a class with 4 functions. I had another function that created an instance of the class and called one of the functions. It changed a variable that would show up in the web browser formatted by CSS. And I can't even draw a dog in Pictionary...

Once I figure out the difficult specific and rigid details, I just want the most productive way to communicate these details to the computer. Writing code is the most productive, because it is more exact and I am faster typing than drawing/dragging/clicking. For example, with Vim, I can do a quick "Ack def function_name" to find the definition of a function.

For learning purposes, Project Bloks looks great. But when it comes to real work, I'd happily learn the syntax, as it lets me be more productive.

HIPAA compliance is a good checklist even if you don't need the certification. It covers the administrative and physical safeguards in addition to the technical ones.

Check it out: http://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/security/laws-reg...

You have to maintain the current, while pushing forward on the new. Accounting is important, because the incoming money has to pay for the outgoing money (food, clothing, rent). Calculating everything down to the dollar is pointless, however. Just be within 80% of the right number, build in a buffer, and push forward on the new.

The new is much more exciting than bean counting the current, but you still have to maintain the current. Just like how refactoring, testing, and debugging code are just as important as writing new code.

Society has a limited amount of resources and manpower. Your capital is your share of society's resources and manpower. The capital can either be used on yourself or to build new products and services. Some people are better than others at building products and services people want. The free market attempts to redistribute capital to the people who are better at building products and services people want.

Most people use their money for themselves. They use the money to pay for food, clothing, and cars. If they get a pay raise, they use the additional money to pay for better food, better clothing, and better cars. They don't see the money as capital to build products and services people want.

When I code, headphones block out distractions and music gets me in the right mentality.

When refactoring or debugging code, I like fast paced with action-packed lyrics. Dragonforce Through the Fire and Flames, Darude Sandstorm, Linkin Park, Eminem Til I Collapse

When writing new code, I like slow paced with thoughtful or romantic[1] lyrics. Joni Mitchell, Mozart, Carpenters

I've also started to put the song on repeat on the background. I recommend ListenOnRepeat.

[1] http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/psy-methoden/methodenlehre/Lov...

Facebook, Walmart, and Ford Motor Company were built through hard work and perseverance, not through their founders' socioeconomic background. Building a successful business is so difficult, that the founders' socioeconomic background is an infinitely smaller obstacle to overcome. The self-made person is real, but there's so few of them that they are lost in the noise of this study's data.

I've realized there are things I can change and there are things I cannot change. I try not to feel too strongly on the things I cannot change, because it distracts me from the things I can change.

For politics, I try not to feel too strongly about Trump and the electoral process. I would still vote, but I know it would have a minimal impact, no matter how strongly I feel.

Instead, I focus my energy on my business, which I can change.