My two cents on this important article from @David_Philipps. I've been trying to tell people for years now that SOF has absolutely no special ability to resist attacks on their cognitive spaces. We have no special training to deal with

A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

Fun going down this list and thinking: "Hmm, plausible at a well-run modern software shop", "Hmm, possible, but requires implausible tradeoffs", "Literally disallowed by languages", and "If you were to attempt doing that our test suite wouldn't let you merge."

I think we as an industry celebrate (not quite the right word) failure too much and don't celebrate success nearly enough. There is no DailyWTF for competent execution, word of which generally stays pretty local to the source while incompetence passes into legend.

Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:

Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f.

🛠️ OPEN BUSINESS IDEAS 🛠️

Below a list of business/product ideas I had or read about.

They are worthless if they remain ideas and if you don't overcome the challenges in building them, so feel free to copy / tweak / implement them!
👇

Better: use one and make a MVP during the #24hrstartup challenge!

😻 Product Hunt Time
A clock that displays the time it is @ProductHunt
Also displays what you should do and where you should post, at each specific time during your launch

🚧 IndieCrunch - VC free tech news
Techcrunch but only for bootstrapped companies

🎧 Kickstarter for audiobooks
A lot of awesome books are not available as audio.
Crowdfund the money to buy the audio rights + a voice actor

Did you know?
Ahilyabai Holkar was one of India's
greatest women rulers of all time.

Ahilyabai was Born on May 31,1725 in the village of Chondi,Jamkhed distt,Maharashtra to a man named Mankoji Shinde,who was the Patil(Chief) of a village and a member of proud Dhangar Community.

Despite the fact that girls' education was a farther dream in those days, Ahilyabai was homeschooled by her father.
Ahilya didn't belong to any royal family but in a twist of fate she is still remembered as one of the most revered Queen in the history.

While they were living their humdrum lives, one day Malhar Rao Holkar, commander of the Peshwa Bajirao & Lord of the Malwa stopped in Chondi on his way to Pune, where he couldn't help but notice a young 8yrs old Ahilyabai in the temple service feeding the poor & hungry.

He was so impressed by the sheer innocence&beauty with simplicity character of Ahilyabai dat he asked her hand in marriage for his son Khanderao Holkar.Just like that she got married to Khanderao in 1733 at a tender age of 8&became a bride of esteemed Maratha community of Holkars

But destiny had something else in store for her as her husband died in the Battle of Kumbher in 1754 leaving her widow at 29.Distressed Ahilyabai was to commit Sati when her father-in-law Malhar Rao refused to let it happen.

👇Thread.

Published a new essay: The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics – 80 slide deck included!

This was a deck that I created on my (longish) interview process with @a16z. It was a long path, starting with meeting folks at the firm 10 years ago. But the purpose of the deck was to explain how I would use my superpower in an investing context

Here's what I explain in the deck. As investors (whether angel or VC) we're often confronted with an up-and-to-the-right graph. Is it going to go up? Or down?

One solution to forecast these growth curves is the Growth Accounting Framework, where you add up New+Reactivated and subtract churned users. In each time period that gives you the difference in monthly actives.

The problem with this is that it's a lagging metric, not a leading one. We need to go one level deeper and look at the underlying loops that drive these numbers, to understand the quality.

[THREAD: HISTORY OF THE HINDU TEMPLE]
1/102
Four hours south of Aswan in Lower Nubia, right by the Nile, is a region dotted with temple complexes built more than 3,000 years ago. Some like the temples of Amada, Derr, and Beit el-Wali go as far back as 1500 BC.

2/102
A little further south, not far from the border with Sudan, is another complex dedicated to Ramses II, Hathor, and Nefertari in the village of Ipsambul, better known locally as Abu Sunbul and internationally as Abu Simbel. These go back to the 13th century BC.

3/102
Djeser-Djeseru, also known as the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut in Upper Egypt also dates to 1400 BC. Over 500 years older is the nearby Mentuhotep II, also a mortuary temple. Both were dedicated to the cult of Amun Ra, besides their respective pharaohs.

4/102
Far older is the Ġgantija complex of Malta. Going as far back as 3600 BC, this one comprises of two temples entirely made of stone and enclosed in a stone wall. From the figures therein, it's understood to be a site of some kind of a fertility cult worship.

5/102
Dating from the same period are the limestone megaliths of Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra, both said to have once hosted ritualistic sacrifices as part of the same fertility cult worship as found in the Ġgantija complex. Malta has some of the oldest temple complexes in Europe.