Notices by Logan Dice (logandice@mastodon.social), page 9

This hurts. This hurts a lot.
RT @mikeveerman@twitter.com Ah 2018.

Scrum means "Waterfall but we don't have time for analysis".

Kanban means "Scrum, but we don't have time for sprint planning".

Agile means "We have no process, but we do use JIRA extensively"

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/mikeveerman/status/1028891397972287493

Why you should, and shouldn’t, join a startup
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17757485
#hackernews #tech

The goal of B2B companies is to make some common business process less expensive, the goal of B2C companies is to develop new habits among consumers.

The key defining factor of a startup is growth. This is what investors invest in when they fund your company, because tech startups are one of the very few sources of growth you can purchase.

Don't be afraid to charge more:

- Most founders severely underprice their products/services. If your product is valuable - people will be willing to pay for it.

- Higher margins will allow you to invest into improving your product. It's better to compete on quality than on price.

- It's easier to sell 10 $100 products than 100 $10 products.

- Higher prices filter for better customers.

- If doubling your price won't lose you more than half of your customers - that's free money.

#startup

Worried about the dominance of big instances? No, really, this is quite natural.

As an emergent and self-governing system, it could be expected that the size distribution of #Mastodon instances roughly follows Zipf's law.

Does it?

At first you see the top 6 instances, and then the rest. But on a log-log scale the size distribution is close to a straight line, which would be expected from an emergent system.

#statistics

1/

Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset .

People with a 'fixed mindset' believe that abilities are mostly innate and interpret failure as the lack of necessary basic abilities, people with a 'growth mindset' believe that they can acquire any given ability provided they invest effort or study.

Our abilities are shaped both by our decisions and by our genetics/environment, but people who believe they have more control end up sticking with their goals for longer and are less likely to give up.

Don't be afraid to charge more:

- Most founders severely underprice their products/services. If your product is valuable - people will be willing to pay for it.

- Higher margins will allow you to invest into improving your product. It's better to compete on quality than on price.

- It's easier to sell 10 $100 products than 100 $10 products.

- Higher prices filter for better customers.

- If doubling your price won't lose you more than half of your customers - that's free money.

#startup

The 10:1 rule of writing and programming
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17749750
#hackernews #tech

Lenovo Launches Ultra-Thin ThinkPad P1: X1 Carbon Meets Workstation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17748776
#hackernews #tech

AKA is also known as also known as.
#comedy #jokes

Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Once you pick a metric to evaluate human performance, increasing it becomes an incentive, and people will immediately start to game it. They'll ignore it's intended purpose and take any short-term shortcuts to maximize the number.

Founders may grow vanity metrics, raise more money, or increase number of employees whether or not this benefits the company, just because these numbers turned from metrics into goals

Prioritization of your tasks is one of the most valuable skills you want to get good at. Doing it poorly and working on low-leverage tasks is just wasting time.

Compile the tasks you could be doing into a todo list, and rank them by leverage. If it's hard to figure out which task is more important, just pick one and then ask yourself "Is there something else I could be doing that's more high-leverage?"

When I'm trying to meditate, my mind often gets distracted and resumes mental chatter until I catch myself doing that and stop.

I used to think of these moments as fuckups that devalue the meditation session, making it worse.

Instead, it's better to think about them as exercises, like reps in the gym. Meditation is a skill of noticing mental noise, stopping it, bringing attention into presence, and holding it here.

View distractions as opportunities to practice this skill.