If an employer is willing to be abusive to you prior to hiring you, when you have maximum leverage and they are maximally incentivized to play nice, I think that gives you *extremely actionable* signal as to how they'll treat you when you're working there and dependent on them.

For candidates: evaluate prospective employers accordingly.

For startups employing e.g. engineers: given that your candidates should evaluate you accordingly, be *extra special* careful to operate like professionals with regards to e.g. interviewing, offers, and negotiation.

"Can you be more explicit about 'abusive' here?"

Not without violating a confidence, but as someone who has been on hiring side of table and is a capitalist, there are *clearly* things you could do which would be "sharp operating, but we're all sharp operators" in some contexts.

Hiring employees is often not one of those contexts. The nature of the relationship, the asymmetry in power, and the social contract strongly counsel you to be a lot better there than you are minimally required by law / contract.

A thing which aesthetically frustrates me is that a lot of the things I've heard companies do here serve *no legitimate business purpose.* In some cases it's getting tens of dollars of advantage. TENS! On an engineering candidate!

Why did I leave Google? A thread.

This thread is going to include quotes from Wired's "Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech" because I'm not a professional writer

When I joined Google, I fell in love with the company immediately. I was excited to come to work, not just for the technical challenges, but because I really felt I was making a difference and working for the good guys.

I spent 20% of my week working on an app that helped people find lost loved ones after natural disasters. I spent more free time speaking to students about technology and diversity. For an entire school year, I taught CS classes twice a week at a local low income high school.

The company was open. We had a weekly meeting called TGIF where anyone in the company could ask questions of, and raise concerns with, the execs. We got real answers.

🔥 I got 2000 new subscribers from my Product Hunt launch

THREAD...

Last week I launched Marketing Examples to Product Hunt.

✔️ 1,500+ upvotes
✔️ Product of the Week
✔️ Email list grew from 1,300 to 3,300

This is the step by step account of how I did it

Step 1 - Don't launch straight away

23rd May 2019 Marketing Examples v1.0 went live. The site had a few case studies, several bugs, and an email box which didn’t convert well.

The old version of me would have thrown it on Product Hunt straight away. But I decided to wait.

Why?

1) I didn’t want to waste my “turn” with the very first iteration of my site.

2) I didn’t want to launch in a vacuum. Product Hunt multiplies current momentum. Having a small following of “fans” on launch day goes a long way.

So I set myself a target.

✔️ 1000 email subscribers
✔️ 1000 twitter followers

And then I would launch. 70 days later I hit my target.

It was showtime.

Tips for AI writers:

1. Spend 30% of your effort on skimming all student ML papers (e.g. Stanford NLP CS224n) the past 3 years and prototype your favorites

The idea is everything. Pick an area you are interested in and ideally something that has a visual aspect to it

Most of my 'on the top of my mind' ideas were bad in retrospect. Skimming 100s of student papers will give you an overview of what's interesting.

Student papers are overlooked, easy to understand, and have good compute constraints.

2. Spend 30% on your effort on coding

Create an edge to the project. Apply it to something new and use FastAI or Keras to improve the accuracy with 5-30%.

3. Spend 30% writing an in-depth article

Have a north star article in terms of structure and quality. Find something that stretches you to your utmost capability. I used @copingbear’s Style transfer article:

4. Spend 10% marketing your project

Invest a week in studying the strategies to rank on sites like HN and Reddit, then use them. If you have an interesting result and a great article, you've done the hard work.

Too much intellect without a sense of self can inflate your ego.

This is why a lot of high IQ people lack social intelligence.

They talk to humans like robots & are baffled when they are resented for it.

This is why the charismatic person who knows less often rises up quicker

'What you smoking bro?? My IQ will be the biggest factor of my success!'

Incorrect.

That's a limiting belief.

I'm gonna shake up your paradigm real quick 👇

You have been conditioned your entire life to believe that IQ score alone will dictate success.

And like most people, we were like 'yea, sure!'

But there's few incorrect thought patterns here

1. Success is subjective.

2. IQ exam insinuates intellect is fixed.

3. Your high IQ won't make others give a fuck, your communication will.

Let's go thru each one

1. Success is subjective

What I consider success may not be success for you.

Success it's a mirror image of where you are & where you want to be.

Aka sense of self.

So measuring success starts from looking within, not an exam.

Rio de Janeiro, 1920. 🇧🇷

São Paulo, 1910. 🇧🇷

“Arpoador”, Rio de Janeiro, 1900. 🇧🇷

“Avenida Paulista”, São Paulo, 1902. 🇧🇷

Recife, 1885. 🇧🇷

Can we control the output of neural generation systems?
Can we build a better chatbot using this control?
And what makes a good conversation anyway?

Check out the blog post for our NAACL paper:

https://t.co/UAAUxSeA0L

#AI #NLProc #DeepLearning #ConversationalAI @facebookai

This post got a little delayed since the paper's publication, but the intervening time has given me an opportunity to reflect.

So this post has some extra thoughts regarding more recent NLG developments - e.g., pretrained models like GPT(2), and the suitability of beam search.

An amazing new project from @bearpelican was just released: https://t.co/DBov6sZTVS . A beautiful design; you can auto-generate a melody from chords, chords from a melody, and more.

It's technically brilliant, combining BERT, seq2seq, and Transformer XL
https://t.co/jF3mO5aXiu

It's also a wonderful example of leveraging and customizing the fastai framework in a deep & thoughtful way.

Here's the full set of blog posts diving in to this

Social Intelligence 101:

If your friend is telling you about an accomplishment, do not try to one-up them by sharing an accomplishment of your own.

Tame your ego.

Sit back and actively listen.

The best way to honour Toni Morrison is to continue her legacy by celebrating and supporting Black female writers. So here’s a thread of fantastic women whose work you should read.

.@yomiadegoke is one of the most interesting and exciting writers I know. Her commentary is always spot on, and has a way of getting you to think deeply about things we’re encouraged to take for granted. She co-authored Slay in Your Lane with the phenomenal @lizuvie.

.@salenagodden’s poetry nourishes the soul. She’s brilliant at recognising inequalities without ever being defeatist. There is so much joy in her words. And Salena’s autobiography is luminous from start to finish.

.@LawrencePatrice has written some of the most gripping YA fiction going in modern day Britain. Her characters are compelling and full of complications - their stories remind readers of how important compassion is.

I always recommend @JackieKayPoet - not just because she gave a blueprint for life as a Black Scottish lesbian, but because there is so much delight and generosity of spirit in her work. Every word counts. She’s also really funny. Proud that Jackie is our Poet Makar.

Just finished @ryanckulp’s new course “How to Buy, Grow, and Sell Small Companies”

https://t.co/wcX0zFXHgL

Here are some main takeaways + my verdict 👇

(1) Acquisition is the easiest path to entrepreneurship

Don’t have an idea? You don’t have to have one. Buy one.

Don’t know how to code? You don’t have to. Use revenue to outsource development.

Don’t have money? You don’t have to have any. Bring in an equity partner. Leverage a debt from family/friends, tech lender, or even the seller.

Capital is not an excuse.

(2) Acquiring has a few distinct advantages to building

Namely:
- Validated demand
- Leverage debt/equity partners
- Focus on going from 1-10, not 0-1

Validate demand:

Acquiring a business that has paying customers saves you the time and energy you would have spent trying to figure out if there was demand for it in the first place.

Acquiring skips that step altogether.

Rules of Happiness

💖 Have friends around you
🌳 Have freedom
🎨 Do meaningful work
💳 Spend $ on experiences, not things
🤝 Help others with what you're good at
👇 Lower your expectations
💪 Exercise + eat healthy
🤔 Reflect on thoughts

via

Today is my 3 year anniversary of being a nomad!
🌏 20 countries
🤓5 side hustles & 1 salaried remote job
👫2 relationships
🇰🇷fav nomad country
🧠top lesson: every country's best quality is also its worst; this applies to many things in life
(thread)

The best moments weren't the 'big things' but rather the small moments:
🌧️ Listening to the rain pour outside in Taipei
🍗🍻 👯‍♂️Chimaek and laughter with friends in Seongsu
🌸Strolling under cherry blossoms at night in Nakameguro

On my 3 year nomadiversary, I'm looking at 1 yr apartment leases.
It's a whole new level of culture shock being home in 🇺🇸 again. I'm ready to be in one place but also feel like a part of my identity and community is being stripped away.

I'll spend the rest of 2019 rediscovering magic.

Travel took up so much of my energy that now that I'm done, I'm not sure what else brings me a sense of wonder. I need to relearn who I am and what feels right.