Unschooled - Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock

Understanding the "this" keyword in JavaScript

2012-03-20T00:00:00-07:00

Many people get tripped up by the this keyword in JavaScript. I think the confusion comes from people reasonably expecting this to work like “this” does in Java or the way people use “self” in Python. Although this is sometimes used to similar effect, it’s nothing like “this” in Java or other languages. And while it’s a little harder to understand, its behavior isn’t magic. In fact, this follows a relatively small set of simple rules. This post is an explanation of those rules.

But first, I want to give some terminology and information about JavaScript runtime environments which will hopefully help you develop a mental model to better understand this.^[1]

Execution contexts

Every line of JavaScript code is run in an “execution context.” The JavaScript runtime environment maintains a stack of these contexts, and the top execution context on this stack is the one that’s actively running.

There are three types of executable code: Global code, function code, and eval code. Roughly speaking, global code is code at the top level of your program that’s not inside any functions, function code is code that’s inside the body of a function, and eval code is global code evaluated by a call to eval.

The object that this refers to is redetermined every time control enters a new execution context and remains fixed until control shifts to a different context. The value of this is dependent upon two things: The type of code being executed (i.e., global, function, or eval) and the caller of that code.

The global object

All JavaScript runtimes have a unique object called the global object. Its properties include built-in objects like Math and String, as well as extra properties provided by the host environment.

In browsers, the global object is the window object. In Node.js, it’s just called the “global object.” (I’m going to assume you’re running code in a browser, however, everything I say should apply to Node.js as well.)

Determining the value of this

The first rule is simple: _this refers to the global object in all global code._ Since all programs start by executing global code, and this is fixed inside of a given execution context, we know that, by default, this is the global object.

What happens when control shifts to a new execution context? There are only three cases where the value of this changes: method invocations, functions called with the new operator, and functions called using call and apply. I’ll explain each of these in turn.

Method invocations

If we call a function as a property of an object using either dot (i.e., obj.foo()) or bracket (i.e., obj[“foo”]()) notation, this will refer to the parent object in the body of the function:

var counter = {
  val: 0,
  increment: function () {
    this.val += 1;
  }
};
counter.increment();
console.log(counter.val); // 1
counter['increment']();
console.log(counter.val); // 2

This is our second rule: this refers to the parent object inside function code if the function is called as a property of the parent.

Note that if we call the same function directly, that is, not as a property of the parent object, this does not refer to the counter object:

var inc = counter.increment;
inc();
console.log(counter.val); // 2
console.log(val); // NaN

Here, this was not changed when inc was called, so it still referred to the global object. When inc ran

this.val += 1;

it was effectively running:

window.val += 1;

window.val is undefined, and adding 1 to undefined yields NaN.

The new operator

Any JavaScript function can be used as a constructor function with new. The new operator creates a new object and sets this to the new object inside the function it was called with. For example:

function F (v) {
  this.val = v;
}
var f = new F(“Woohoo!”);
console.log(f.val); // Woohoo!
console.log(val); // ReferenceError

This leads to our third rule: this in function code invoked using the new operator refers to the newly created object.

Note that there’s nothing special about F. If we call it without using new, this will refer to the global object:

var f = F(“Oops!”);
console.log(f.val); // undefined
console.log(val); // Oops!

In this case, F(“Oops!”) is a regular function call, and this doesn’t get set to a new object, because no new object is created since the new operator isn’t used. this remains set to the global object.

Call and apply

All JavaScript functions have two methods, call and apply, which let you call functions and explicitly set the value of this. The apply method takes two arguments: an object to set this to, and an (optional) array of arguments to pass to the function:

var add = function (x, y) {
      this.val = x + y;
    },
    obj = {
      val: 0
    };
add.apply(obj, [2, 8]);
console.log(obj.val); // 10

The call method works exactly the same as apply, but you pass the arguments individually rather than in an array:

add.call(obj, 2, 8);
console.log(obj.val); // 10

This is our fourth rule: this is set to the first argument passed to call or apply inside function code when that function is called with either call or apply.

Summary

That’s it! You can figure out what object this refers to by following a few simple rules:

By default, this refers to the global object.
When a function is called as a property on a parent object, this refers to the parent object inside that function.
When a function is called with the new operator, this refers to the newly created object inside that function.
When a function is called using call or apply, this refers to the first argument passed to call or apply. If the first argument is null or not an object, this refers to the global object.

If you understand and follow those four rules, you will always know what this is.

…Addendum: Eval breaks all the rules

Remember when I said that code evaluated inside eval is its own type of executable code? Well, that’s true, and it means that the rules for determining what this refers to inside of eval code are a little more complex.

As a first pass, you might think that this directly inside eval refers to the same object as it does in eval’s caller’s context. For example:

var obj = {
  val: 0,
  func: function() { 
    eval(“console.log(this.val)”);
  }
};
obj.func(); // 0

That works likely as you expect it to. However, there are many cases with eval where this will probably not work as you expect:

eval.call({val: 0}, “console.log(this.val)”); // depends on browser

The output of the above code depends on your browser. If your JavaScript runtime implements ECMAScript 5, this will refer to the global object and the above should print undefined, because it’s an “indirect” call of eval. That’s what the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox do. Safari 5.1 actually throws an error (“The ‘this’ value passed to eval must be the global object from which eval originated”), which is kosher according to ECMAScript 3.

If you want know how this works with eval, you should read Juriy Zaytsev’s excellent, “Global eval. What are the options?” You’ll learn more about eval, execution contexts, and direct vs. indirect calls than you probably ever wanted to know.

In general, you should just avoid using eval, in which case the simple rules about this given previously will always hold true.

This is a somewhat simplified view of things to make developing a basic mental model easier. For a more detailed explanation, read the section starting at page 37 of the ECMAScript Language Specification. I’ve based this post in large part off of that document, however, my understanding of it is far from perfect or complete, so please let me know (me @ nicholasbs.net) if I’ve misunderstood or misrepresented anything.↩

The Path to Hacker School

2012-01-06T00:00:00-08:00

This is a post to explain what Hacker School is. That is to say, to tell our friends and family what the heck we’ve been doing for the past six months and what we hope to do in the next couple years.

But first, some context. Dave and I quit our jobs in May 2010 to build “OkCupid for jobs.” That quickly turned into “video prescreens for hiring,” (HireHive) which in turn begat “engineers recruiting engineers” (Hackruiter).

Sonali joined us just as we launched Hackruiter, and by six months in, we were (barely) ramen profitable and had learned a ton about recruiting and hiring. But there were a few problems: First, we were increasingly convinced that the biggest problem with hiring was that there simply weren’t enough good programmers and that was the high-order bit for continued growth and success. Second, being recruiters was (and still is) soul-crushingly awful.^[1]

At the same time, Dave and I were discussing the shortcomings of our CS educations and bemoaning the lack of a good programming community in New York.^[2] Dave started saying he wanted to start a new kind of school for programmers in a few years after we’d built Hackruiter.

We reached a tipping point in late June and asked ourselves, “What would be the simplest experiment we could run to help make people better programmers?”

We invited a handful of people we’d met through Hackruiter to be part of a 5-week experiment, Sonali got us free space at NYU (thanks, ITP!), and we went for it.

The experiment was comparatively easy to set up, because for the first time we were building something we wanted for ourselves: A good programming education. (It didn’t hurt that Dave had long been critical of Columbia’s CS program, Sonali had gone to art school and had experience with project- and portfolio-based learning, and I’m a life-long unschooler with unorthodox views on education.)

Some things were obvious: It’d be project-based, and we’d work on real software, in contrast to the fake stuff you write and then throw out in traditional schools. Code would be emphasized over products and prototypes. We’d only write FOSS. There would be no grades, tests, degrees or certifications.^[3] Saying, “I didn’t know that” or “I don’t understand, could you explain?” would be welcomed not mocked, and there would be no “well, actuallys.”

We knew we were better at starting side projects than finishing them, so we built friendly social pressure into Hacker School via morning checkins. We also knew our tendency to let scope and vision creep keep us from finishing or even starting certain projects, so we built an environment and culture to keep scope creep in check.

The result was Hacker School batch 0. Nine of us sat in a room four days a week working on free software projects, learning about continuations and concurrency, and bonding over burgers and burritos.

How’d it go? Three of our alumni from batch 0 now work at Venmo, one went to Photoshelter, another went to Tumblr, and the last is back at college building Angstrom. Dave, Sonali and I now consider every one of them friends.

Most important, we all had loved doing Hacker School and had grown substantially as programmers. We knew immediately we had to do it again.

We finished our second batch in December. We doubled the number of students, extended the program to three months, and got some great free space from Spotify (thanks, Pav!).

Hacker School has helped me rediscover my love of programming and to delight in code in a way I hadn’t in years. Last batch, Sam and I built an Apple II emulator in JavaScript; John, Jimmy and I read and worked through the first 150 pages of SICP. Dave worked on Eventless, his asynchronous, event-driven networking lib in Ruby. Others made significant contributions to Brubeck, submitted patches to jQuery and Sorcery, and built chat servers in Python, Node, Erlang and Go, in addition to starting or contributing to over a dozen other OSS projects in nearly as many languages.

We’ve also been lucky to have some amazing guests. Jeremy Ashkenas talked to us about the innards of the CoffeeScript compiler and language design. David Nolan wowed us with Clojure. Michael Dirolf showed what’s interesting about MongoDB. Patrick McKenzie (aka patio11) conducted a live A/B test.^[4]

What’s next? Batch 2, of course! We’re going to double the size again to 24 people (anyone want to give us space?), and keep using our students' feedback and everything we’ve learned to build the best place we can for programmers to flourish and grow.

We still don’t know where exactly Hacker School will take us, which is part of the fun. But more than a few people have told us Hacker School changed their lives. And for the first time in a long time it feels right.

Happy hacking,
-Nick, Dave and Sonali

When the idea first came up to become recruiters, pg warned we’d hate it. He said it’d be miserable grunt work, but worthwhile for what it’d teach us. He was right on all counts.

A few of the many reasons recruiting sucks: You spend all your time having meetings (on the order of dozens a week) and writing emails. You never code. Your meetings and emails consist primarily of either rejecting people or being rejected (or watching people you like get rejected, frequently for dumb reasons). Desperate people lie to you, companies ignore you, and even if you’re ethical and upstanding, most people (understandably) initially distrust you because you’re a recruiter. ↩
This was tightly coupled to frustrations with the New York startup “scene”: Clueless business people, an emphasis on funding rather than building, and an increasing number of people involved in “tech” solely because it’s trendy.↩
It baffles me that people think more certification is the answer to anything, especially solving the current shortage of good programmers. Of the hundreds upon hundreds of programmers we’ve worked or spoken with in the past year, I can’t think of a single time when the existence or absence of a degree made any difference. Anecdotally, we’ve seen little correlation between being a good programmer and having a degree in computer science (yes, even when it comes to understanding stuff like the growth of functions or tail-call optimization). There does, however, seem to be a strong correlation between writing lots of code, loving programming, and being awesome.↩
Even cooler, the heading suggested by Hacker Schoolers turned out to be better.↩

The most beautiful ideas I've encountered

2011-11-09T00:31:38-08:00

What are the most beautiful ideas you've encountered? By beautiful, I mean ideas that surprised you, were intensely intellectually satisfying, and changed how you see the world.

For instance, I was blown away when I learned about integration. I had been struggling to calculate the distance a ball traveled given its velocity and felt like it was impossible to do exactly. Then I learned about integrals and that there are exact, closed-form solutions to the problems I faced and was simply floored.

Here are the most beautiful ideas I've encountered, in no particular order:

NP-completeness and P = NP ?
Universal Turing machines
Decidability and undecidable problems
Countably vs. uncountably infinite sets
Proof by induction (and other methods of proof)
Calculus (differentiation, integration, and the connection between the two)
Fourier transforms
AM/FM radio
The connection between electricity and magnetism
Public-key encryption
General/special relativity
Evolution via natural selection
Emergence

These ideas all come from math and the hard sciences. This is likely at least partially the result of a bias, either in the subjects I've studied or the types of ideas I find intellectually stimulating.

It's also possible that many of the incredible ideas from other fields have become so pervasive in our culture that they no longer seem incredible. For instance, the concept of "consciousness" would be startling and beautiful if you learned it as an adult, but I don't know when I learned about it; I feel like I've known it forever. Contrast that with the math behind AM radio, which I can pinpoint exactly when I learned.

The most controversial explanation is that other fields don't have any (or as many) such ideas. Despite being a bit of a math and science bigot, I hope that's not true, because it would mean there are fewer beautiful ideas in the world.

I came up with the above list in about 10 minutes. Take a few minutes and come up with the most beautiful and significant ideas you've learned.

How to setup Emacs for Clojure on Mac OS X Lion

2011-10-22T18:50:02-07:00

These instructions should get you going with an Emacs environment for writing Clojure on Mac OS X Lion. (This should work on older versions of OS X, but I've only tried it on 10.7.)

Install Homebrew. Homebrew is an awesome package manager for OS X. You can obviously skip this step if you already have it installed. Otherwise, you can install it by reading these instructions or simply running:
$ /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/gist/323731)"
Install a newer version of Emacs. Lion comes with an old version of Emacs (22.1.1) by default. You'll need at least version 23. Run emacs --version to see what version you have. Homebrew currently has version 23.3.1, which you can install by running:

$ brew install emacs

Run emacs --version to make sure you've got a newer version now. (If not, try running brew update to get the latest package information and then brew upgrade emacs to install the latest packaged version.)
Install Package, an Emacs package manager

Create an .emacs.d directory if you don't already have one and a folder to store packages in:
$ mkdir ~/.emacs.d $ mkdir ~/.emacs.d/packages
Create (or edit) your ~/.emacs.d/init.el file and put the following in it:
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/packages/") (require 'package) (add-to-list 'package-archives '("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/")) (package-initialize)
Put package.el in ~/.emacs.d/packages/.
Install clojure-mode and paredit. Open Emacs and run:
M-x eval-buffer M-x package-refresh-contents M-x package-install clojure-mode M-x package-install paredit
Install Leiningen and swank-clojure.
$ brew install leiningen $ lein plugin install swank-clojure 1.3.3
Finally get a Clojure REPL in Emacs. You can create a Clojure project with Leiningen with the following command (replace myproject with your project name):
$ lein new myproject
When editing a .clj file in Emacs you can run the following to get a REPL:
M-x clojure-jack-in

You should now have syntax highlighting, proper indentation, file navigation, and an enhanced REPL for Clojure in Emacs. You can learn more about using the REPL here.

Apple, Facebook and Emotional Engagement

2011-09-30T23:03:44-07:00

At the core of Apple's success is an experience. It's the emotional bond people have with their products, an oft-ridiculed love that can border on obsession.

Apple has achieved this by making products that delight or, as they say, feel like "magic."

Few companies have ever reached this level. It's extremely hard and it takes considerable time. But there's one company that I think has a shot: Facebook.

This might seem ridiculous, particularly as people are starting to say that Facebook has jumped the shark, but I think they can do it.

I don't think Facebook will reach Apple's level by trying to become Apple. I think they can do it in their own way. The great opportunity Facebook has is that they deal directly with our most intimate data: Our memories and the people and experiences that define our lives.

I got a glimpse of this when I tried out the new Timeline. My Facebook account dates back seven years. It spans colleges and friendships and girlfriends. It's chronicled the lives of my friends, from births and deaths to weddings and breakups and everything in between.

Looking at my the earliest days of my timeline, I couldn't help but feel a tinge of nostalgia and think of Don Draper's Kodak presentation. My next thought was immediately: This is only the beginning.

Facebook has the potential to reach the same level of emotional engagement Apple has.

Facebook has taste, talent, vision, and a giant mote. It also has an incredibly young CEO who controls his board and has been smart enough to surround himself with people who complement his weaknesses.

The tech market is ridiculously dynamic, and predicting the future is a fool's game. But it's one I nevertheless like to play.

Facebook will be a $200B public company someday.

Netflix and the future

2011-09-18T17:56:29-07:00

People are talking about how Netflix is "doomed." Most of the arguments boil down to them being killed by increasing licensing costs or loss of high-quality content. These are both serious threats to Netflix and things they absolutely have to deal with.

But before you get convinced that Netflix is over, ask yourself this: Will we ever live in a world where all movies and TV shows are available on-demand, anytime and anywhere, for a flat fee?

My guess is yes: It's inevitable that we'll get there someday. It's what people want, and no amount of stupidity or short-sightedness from the studios will stop that. They can delay it for sure, but it will happen.

The key questions then are when will this happen, and what company will finally make it a reality?

Given that nobody wants to go to half a dozen sites to stream video, it's unlikely any of the major networks or studies will own this. That means it will be a tech company. It could be a big one (e.g., Netflix, Amazon, Apple, etc) or a startup.

But looking at the current landscape, my gut says it will be Netflix. They have a fantastic product, and a clear vision of what people actually want. They've relentlessly expanded their content and the devices you can consume it on. They've reinvented and cannibalized their own business model and have a CEO with the guts and foresight to do it again. And they already have over 20 million paying customers.

Any company that streams movies and TV faces the challenges Netflix faces. Saying that Netflix can't survive solely because of licensing issues is nearly the same as saying the future of video will never come.

The cofounder search fallacy

2011-09-13T14:22:48-07:00

People frequently ask how to find a cofounder. My first response is always that their cofounder should be someone they get along with and know well, like a friend. They usually respond by saying they've already tapped their friends and extended network, and everyone who's good is already doing something else, so they need to meet someone new.

This can work but assumes something that's almost certainly false. Namely, it assumes that it's easier to convince someone you don't know to join you than someone you do know. That would only be true if people like you less as they get to know you, which hopefully isn't the case.

You should assume the good people you don't know are much like the ones you do, and they all have other things they are or could be doing.

You'll need to convince them that throwing their lot in with you is better -- more profitable, more fun, more world-changing, whatever -- than doing something else. You're more likely to succeed at this if they already know you're a smart, hard-working and dependable person they respect and get along with.

An Independence Day Challenge

2011-07-04T23:24:56-07:00

America was founded on ideas. All of us hold a great deal of beliefs: Beliefs about how the world works, about which government policies make sense, about what is right and wrong, about what makes people tick.

Which of your beliefs have you ever changed? How long have you believed the set that's currently swirling about in your head?

The challenge is this: If your ideas haven't changed in years, ask yourself: Why? Is it because you're right about everything? Or because you haven't been exposed to new data or arguments? Or because you're suffering from confirmation bias, and ignoring everything that doesn't fit your current worldview?

It's extraordinarily unlikely that any of us is right about everything, particularly when you consider that so many of the things we believe are inherited from how we were raised (which is to say, at least semi-randomly). Odds are it's one or both of the other options, which is scary, but solvable.

How I nap

2011-05-30T23:15:44-07:00

Over the past seven years I've gotten good at napping. By "good" I mean I can consistently fall asleep inside of two minutes and wake up 20 minutes later feeling refreshed. I've even developed the ability to nap in a desk chair in a room with music playing and people talking. Here's what's worked for me:

1. Seize the moment. It's important - particularly when you're just starting out -- to nap right when you start feeling drowsy. Your goal should be to go from whatever you're doing to asleep in as little time as possible. Environmental factors, like how far you are from your bed or sofa, make a difference. If you have to climb a flight of stairs to get there, you're likely to loose the "edge" of your drowsiness.

The most helpful thing for me is having a dedicated nap button on my alarm clock. I press one button and my alarm is set to go off in 20 minutes.

2. Build up gradually. I couldn't always nap sitting in a loud train car, I gradually built up to napping at this level. When I napped my first semester of college, I napped in my bed in my quiet dorm room with the lights off. Then I learned to nap easily with the lights on. Then in the library, with my head resting on the desk. Then on the hard linoleum floor of the computer lab. Then sitting on a noisy bus.

3. Don't nap too long. I've found my ideal nap time is 20 minutes. Less and I don't get REM sleep (I actually dream!); more and I wake up groggy rather than refreshed.

4. Figure out your natural time to nap. For me this is between 3 and 5pm, with the peak around 4pm. If I nap too late in the evening, it can disturb my normal sleep schedule. If I nap too early, I may have trouble falling asleep immediately.

5. Don't have shame. Like with many things, people avoid napping because they're embarrassed to do it, particularly at work. It makes you look lazy and unproductive. In reality, I've found it's a huge net productivity increase because my mind is so much more crisp after I nap. I've found that I feel better taking a daily power nap and shaving an hour off my nightly sleep than I do without the nap and sleeping for an extra hour.

The next peak

2011-04-15T12:56:13-07:00

Doing a startup is like climbing a mountain. You usually only see the peak you're currently scaling, and it's rarely the summit. These sub-peaks are the milestones along the way. They're things like finding a cofounder, having hypotheses tested, launches, raising rounds, getting paying customers, and making important hires.

Before you hit each milestone, you'll tell yourself that when you reach it things will be different. That's true, but in reality, the victory felt when you scale a peak is fleeting. It's quickly replaced with the realization of the enormity of the next peak you face. As you ascend, the pressure increases.

Enjoy the vistas from the peaks you reach, look back over the terrain you've traversed, and then take pleasure in the challenges that lie ahead. They're your future, and startups would be boring and pointless without them.

How to ask for things

2011-03-23T20:19:42-07:00

When starting a company you frequently have to ask people for things -- introductions, advice, a meeting, sponsorship, money, etc. As you progress, you'll also have more and more people asking you to do favors for them.

Here's what I've learned about how to do this well:

Be concise.

Be nice and use pleasantries but not too many (if you're too obsequious or indirect it can be hard to figure out what you actually want).

Be appropriately selfish. It's ok to ask for things. It's ok to ask for things from someone who can help you more than you can help them right now. The startup community runs on people paying it forward. Just stay within reason, and don't ask people to do things that seriously puts their reputation on the line.

Always have a one sentence summary if you're passing something larger along (like a description of an event you want sponsorship for). You might think your three paragraph message is short, and it might be if the person you're emailing happens to get no other email. More likely she's got hundreds of messages in her inbox and your message feels anything but "short."

Be specific. Don't ask to meet for coffee or to be introduced to someone who can "help your startup." Those things are too vague. I might know someone who I'd be happy to introduce you to and who could really help your company, but the set of people I know is large, and if you're nonspecific in your request, you're offloading the effort to figure out who'd be helpful onto me.

Include the relevant details. If we're meeting, include your cell. If we're Skyping, include your username. Include specific days and times you're available; don't just say "I'm free whenever you are" (especially if that isn't true).

Remember: You can maximize your odds of getting what you want by minimizing the work the other person has to do to help you.

The value of symmetric social connections decays

2011-03-10T00:30:44-08:00

A trend I've noticed is that the value of my average social connection on networks where the connections are symmetric -- i.e., bidirectional, like friendships on Facebook -- tends to go down over time. That's because as sites grow and become more popular, a more varied assortment of people friend you. And there's a social pressure to accept these requests, particularly when you have some real-world connection with the person.

Six years ago my Facebook friends were primarily my real friends. Not all my real friends were on Facebook, but nearly all my Facebook friends were real. Today, I'm "friends" with plenty of people I've never met nor even had much communication with. Two years ago all my friends on Foursquare were people I was genuinely happy bumping into on the street (and thus sharing my location with). Today, that's not the case.

What's interesting is that this isn't a problem on asymmetric networks, like Twitter or Instagram. The average value of a person I follow on Twitter has if anything gone up in the last four years (I have no idea if that's true of my followers, but the great thing is it doesn't matter). My following someone on Twitter is a true assessment of whether I care about what they're saying. My being connected with someone on Facebook or LinkedIn carries no such significance.

I don't think the answer is just that I should be more discerning about whom I accept. That works to a degree, but when the predominant social norm is that the connections are cheap (as is the case with Facebook), it gets harder and harder to decline people's requests. It's even tougher on Foursquare, where you can have people you know quite well whom you simply don't want to share your location with.

The network that figures out how to scale into the mainstream without sacrificing the value of its symmetric connections is going to be insanely valuable.

What Sam Altman taught me about risk

2011-03-04T00:55:55-08:00

Sam Altman once told me that nothing is ever as risky as you think it is. That comment struck me as true and got me thinking about why.

I've concluded that the reason is that our perception of risk is really a combination of two things: objective risk and subjective risk. By objective risk I mean the likelihood of objectively bad things happening. Riding a motorcycle without a helmet is objectively risky. By subjective risk I mean the potential of things that feel bad, like asking someone out and being laughed at.

It's easy to just see something as "risky" and not examine why that is. There could even be an evolutionary advantage to it -- better to think more sticks are snakes than to accidentally step on the one that bites you. We overweight certain bad outcomes instinctively.

But getting laughed at isn't like cracking your skull on pavement. They both suck, but you can train yourself to not let rejection bother you. This is the value of rejection therapy: You can immunize yourself against certain downsides.

What's incredible is that lots of things pose largely a subjective downside but have an objective upside. That means that if you can get past caring about those downsides, you can leverage yourself heavily and can repeatedly expose yourself to risks with big objective upsides with little effective downside. This is why good founders don't let the possibility of looking silly or failing publicly stop them.

Next time you're afraid to do something because it's too risky, take a moment and reflect on why you think it is. You might be surprised by what you realize.

Looking for a cofounder? Reverse the order of operations

2011-03-02T00:33:32-08:00

People get too attached to their ideas. When you think about something for a long time it becomes "yours." That makes it hard for someone else to also feel ownership over it. But if you want a true cofounder, you need someone who feels like he owns an equal portion of the idea.

That's why I think people should try to find cofounders before they develop their ideas. Even if you already have an idea, I think you're better off throwing it out and then looking for a cofounder.

At a minimum you shouldn't make working on your current idea a prerequisite for someone being your cofounder. If you do, you're taking a really hard problem -- finding someone you can start a company with -- and replacing it with an even harder problem -- finding someone you can start a specific company with. That's probably an order of magnitude harder to do.

Look for a cofounder before you seriously develop an idea, or at least keep yourself open to completely different ideas. Find someone you gel with, and then develop an idea together.

Live without regrets

2011-02-09T14:39:52-08:00

I got to attend an Apple shareholder meeting in 2000. I was a total fanboy and had bought a bit of stock in the late 90s with money I made doing Mac tech support. My mom suggested that it'd be fun and educational for the two of us to go to the annual shareholder meeting. It was the first time I went to the valley and in fact the first time I went anywhere in California. Visiting 1 Infinite Loop was literally a dream come true.

Jobs had returned to Apple a few years earlier. Apple's comeback was still in its early stages; they'd launched the iMac and the iBook, but there were no iPods or iPhones or iPads. They hadn't even shipped Mac OS X Public Beta. The tech bubble was bursting, and despite their recent successes, many pundits still considered Apple a niche player, if not "beleaguered."

The room for the shareholders meeting felt like a theater at a small liberal arts school: Cozy and a bit modern, with a low ceiling and a small stage not more than a foot or so off the ground. I don't think there were more than 100 people there.

Jobs was characteristically mesmerizing. Apple wasn't exactly killing it at the time, and many of the shareholders asked pointed and even adversarial questions. Apple's next-gen OS plans were unproven and they'd recently suffered some public embarrassments, like reducing the clockspeed on the latest round of PowerPCs. People were frustrated. What was remarkable was that even when Jobs dodged the question or told the shareholder something he didn't want to hear, he did it in a manner that left the shareholder feeling happy and satisfied. I've never seen anything else like it.

After the meeting was over, the Apple execs stuck around on stage, and people walked up to chat. I was a shy and awkward teenager, so I held back until I had the guts to approach Fred Anderson, who was CFO at the time. I don't know if I said anything beyond "Hi." Then I talked to Avie Tevanian, VP of Software Engineering. I remember asking him if OS X would ship with a terminal app. He said yes.^[1]

But I waited too long and there was a swarm of people around Jobs. I was nervous, and chose not to try to talk with him.

I have very few regrets in life, but that is one of them. I should have met Steve Jobs when I had the chance.^[2]

When opportunities present themselves, take them, even if it's uncomfortable.

It probably sounds odd that this is the question I chose to ask the guy in charge of Mac OS X, but it was actually a hotly contested topic at the time, at least in some circles. All the folks coming from NeXT were certain that OS X both should and would have a terminal app. The classic Mac OS guys were certain Apple would never do such a thing, since it would inevitably lead to software that relied on a command line (the thinking went something like: "can you imagine if tech support people told Mac users to type commands at a prompt to resolve their problems? It'd ruin the Mac's ease of use!") Like with so many things, the NeXT camp won. ↩
Luckily that's my only regret from the trip. I'm so glad I went, because my mother passed away just a few years later. ↩

Another advantage of specialized apps

2011-01-21T12:45:22-08:00

It just dawned on me that one of the reasons I started using Foursquare and Instagram is that their specialization means I can feel less narcissistic. This is distinct from the other advantages they have from being specialized (e.g., doing one thing really, really well), because it's mostly a psychological advantage.

They did this by giving me places where I'm expected to post my location and pictures. There's no technical reason why I couldn't have posted more pictures with Twitpic (the experience posting from Tweetie was actually pretty good), but I didn't because doing so somehow felt weird.

Put another way, my Twitter followers didn't sign up for a long stream of pictures or a bunch of checkins. Putting too many of either on Twitter feels spammy and presumptive. By starting new networks for these things, I can do them with impunity.

What if something you're certain of is wrong?

2011-01-12T19:10:21-08:00

If you want to think new thoughts, try this: Take something you think is true, and then assume it's false. This is like having a mental teleporter, because it has the neat consequence of transporting you to a point in idea space that you're by definition not going to get to otherwise.

To give it a try, think of a list of things you think are true. They can be anything really, from philosophical beliefs ("people have free will") to policy positions ("the voting age should be at least 18") to personal opinions ("Jane did that because she's jealous of me"). It can take a bit of time to get the hang of this, so stick with it and try to generate a long list. It might help to start with basic facts ("the earth revolves around the sun") just to get yourself going.

Once you've got a list of at least a dozen, choose one of them. If none jump out, choose either the one you're most or least sure of and assume it's false.

What follows? Start with the obvious things ("I don't have control over my life," "there are huge numbers of people in our country that are wrongly disenfranchised," "Jane did that thing for some other reason") and then dive deeper and think of the less obvious logical consequences.

That's where the real value is -- the things two hops away from your initial assumption. Those are the thought-provoking ones, because you can't easily see them from where you're used to thinking.

Thoughts on why writing is valuable and how to do it

2010-12-29T23:14:48-08:00

I like the idea that essays go places even the author doesn't expect.^[1] Essays are like expeditions where you set out with a destination in mind, or maybe just a general direction. You might never get there, or you might wander down a path in a new direction, because along the way you'll notice something you didn't expect to see. The challenge is to get distracted by genuinely interesting things, and then not too many of them that your writing becomes incoherent. The other challenge is to set yourself off in a direction that's likely to include something of interest.

The latter is easy to do: Just go in the direction of something you're curious about. Even if you end up on a path well-worn and known to others, it will probably be new to you. An essay that reveals insight only to its author is still valuable, at least to its author. And it's a rare path that all but one person in the world has traipsed through.

Another trick I've learned is to write for a specific audience. If you're writing a blog post, pretend instead that you're writing a letter to a friend. This helps in the same way that having a real user in mind helps when writing software: it lets you focus on what matters. It also has the benefit of making your writing more conversational. A lot of writing is bad because it's written in a way that nobody would actually speak.

It's easy to start writing for stupid reasons, like trying to impress people by showing how clever you are. As soon as you let your writing become about that, it's less likely you'll convey the ideas you want to.^[2]

You can also write as though you'll be the only person to ever read what you write. This also helps keep you from trying to sound smart, since there's no chance you'll ever impress anyone with your writing.

Writing for a specific audience and writing for only yourself map nicely to the two primary reason I think writing is valuable. The first is to make an argument or convey some idea or emotion. In this case writing with a friend in mind helps because you'll write more like you would if you were trying to explain something to him. You'll focus on being clear rather than clever.

The second reason to write is to discover something new. In this case you should write for yourself, because knowing that nobody else will see your writing will not only let you forget about style but also make you less inhibited. This means you'll be more free to explore ideas that you're unsure of or that exist in uncomfortable or unconventional places.

I'm pretty sure Paul Graham wrote something about this, but I can't find which of his essays it was in.↩
I think this is true even if what you're ultimately trying to convey is how smart you are, because odds are your writing isn't exactly about that, so your best strategy is still saying something smart about something else, and letting people draw their own conclusions. ↩

Don't fool yourself

2010-12-29T20:47:07-08:00

One problem with having lots to do is you can trick yourself into always switching to the next thing without ever really doing anything. It lets you be lazy, since if you're working on something and it gets even moderately difficult, you can think to yourself, "Oh, I need to respond to that email from John," and then switch to Gmail. Then after writing a sentence to John and not knowing exactly what you want to say, it's easier to think, "Oh, I need to plan that event," and switch to thinking about that, than to put in the effort to think clearly enough to finish your email to John.

The same thing happens for me with writing. I sit down to write something, but I'm always just a command-tab away from checking my email (just to make sure nothing really important has come through in the past five minutes). You can train yourself out of this, and you can put up road blocks, but the more things you legitimately have to do, the easier it is to convince yourself that you're not being lazy by leaving the task at hand to start the next.

Of course, in the moment you don't consider the cost of switching contexts, or that the other thing isn't really urgent (your email to John shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to write -- couldn't you put off planning that event until after you finished?) or that you'll use the same logic in another five minutes to jump to the next thing.

Even writing this I'm battling the urge to check Twitter, or Hacker News, or one of my half a dozen email accounts, or something that will give me a shot of information. It's actually even more insidious than just the habitual desire for an info-high; it's the lurking expectation that I should get pleasure on a regular basis absent hard work. That's what's terrifying. I get satisfaction after I write a blog post, but writing a decent blog post is hard. I have to delay all kinds of small pleasures, from having ice cream to learning some neat tidbit on Wikipedia to thinking about one of a dozen other problems I need to solve. And it's so easy to consume in this way, because you don't even need to be fully conscious. You can half-heartedly read a Reddit comment thread, but if you put the same amount of energy into writing you'll have trouble stringing coherent sentences together, let alone composing a worthwhile essay.

Can interview puzzles help find startup ideas?

2010-12-07T11:56:38-08:00

I think there might be value to those dumb interview puzzles after all. Let me explain.

Last week there was a Hacker News link to a post about a 140 interview questions Google supposedly asks. I read over some of them and was quickly drawn in. Not because I expect to be interviewing for a job, but because a puzzle like that is like a virus that infects my mind. It spreads until it's my top idea, and then holds up residence until I solve it.

After figuring out a few of them and being frustrated by how long they took me, I wondered if there were general strategies I could use to solve them.

One pattern quickly jumped out at me: Almost all of these puzzles exploit blind spots in our thinking. Their answers frequently lie in assumptions we don't even know we're making.

Have you heard the one about the four travelers who each walk at different speeds and have to cross a bridge in 17 minutes?

It's easy as soon as you realize you don't have to send the same person back right after he crosses, and that you don't just want to optimize for the return-trip time.

Or what about the one where you have to find which of eight balls is heavier than the others, using a balance exactly twice? It's straightforward as soon as you stop assuming you should use a divide-and-conquer approach and weigh all the balls in your first weighing.

Naval Ravikant and Andrew Parker both blogged about how many popular web services have sprung from challenging assumptions about privacy. This is a specific instance of what I'm talking about. We make certain assumptions about privacy without always examining why we've made them.

Frequently it's the case that the assumption was valid when we first made it, but technological or social change has rendered it invalid. We still have lots of those floating around our culture. How could we not? It's not like all of society is a giant decision-making machine that reevaluates every statement we hold to be true the second a new technology pops up. As a whole, society goes through this process gradually, as someone inevitably notices the contradiction or error in our thinking and a new order begins to spread. Jobs did this with the assumption that computers weren't for personal use. Gates did this with the assumption that the money was to be made in the hardware rather than the OS business.

If you want to build a company that changes the world, look for these assumptions. They're in our collective blind spots. Places we don't want to look or places we look past every day. They're buried treasures, because the first person to identify one gets first mover advantage and a window of time in which others haven't realized what they previously held to be true isn't.

First, know thyself

2010-11-12T10:18:42-08:00

I think the most important thing for being an entrepreneur is to know yourself. People say it's resilience or determination, but I think those are second-order attributes. You can't be determined to get something if you don't know what you really want. And you can be broken and pushed off your path if you don't know why you really want it.

Ask yourself what you really want out of life. Is it fame? Fortune? Respect? Love? To have a family?

Knowing what you want is the best way to make sure you get it. I don't mean wanting something like most people want to be rich. Almost everyone will say they want to be rich. What they really mean is, all other things being equal, they'd like to have more money. But that's not going to help you get rich, because most people who want to be rich also want to watch 30 Rock tonight, go drinking with friends, and start a family.

I'm the last person to tell other people what they should want.^[1] Different people want different things.^[2] I don't just think that's ok, I think that's one of the most remarkable things about the world.

What I'm saying is you should optimize for what you really want, and the way to know that is to know yourself.

Those who know me know that my personal philosophy is founded on trying to build a world in which as many people as possible can live the lives they want to.↩
Two examples: I'm thankful that other people want to have children, because if everyone wanted what I want, the species would go extinct. Another example are MDs. There's really no amount of money you could pay me to be a doctor, but I'm thankful every time I go to one that's not the case for everybody. ↩

Networking shouldn't be a dirty word

2010-11-07T23:06:52-08:00

When I was in college, I spent a lot of late nights in the engineering building coding and doing problem sets. Every Thursday night the business school had a networking event, which my fellow engineers and I would walk past on our way to the EE or CS lounge.

We'd joke that the MBA students were doing their version of "studying" as they stood around in their ties and jackets, drinking and mingling.

After graduation, I found myself at events where business cards came out of holsters and people tastelessly bragged about who they know. Experiences like this made me develop a revulsion to the word "networking." It felt like the domain of clueless MBAs and sleazy salesmen.

Recently I've been reevaluating this opinion^[1]. As I've thought more about it, I've realized that networking isn't inherently bad.

This has come from thinking about networking in terms of computer science and graph theory. You can think of your network as a set of nodes (people) and edges (relationships) between them. To network means to try to expand your network by adding new edges between you and other people. You can think of the weight of an edge as the strength of the relationship. An edge to a family member or best friend would have a large weight, while an edge to someone you just met at a party would have a small weight.

Being well-connected means having lots of strong direct and indirect connections to other people. This means that when you need to get to a specific person, you can do so quickly. It also means you can help others by efficiently routing their queries.

One reason I think some engineers feel uncomfortable with networking (beyond the fact that we're frequently predisposed to be introverted^[2]) is that it can easily mean using people as a means to an end. That is, establishing a "friendship" just because that person can do something for you. This is one of the cases where networking feels (and in most cases is) sleazy.

Another case is when the relationship is lopsided, i.e., the edge isn't bidirectional. It's a relationship where the person can help you, but you have no chance of helping her.

The good news is that this becomes less true the more you network. That's because as your network grows it becomes more valuable. Instead of being a leech sucking value out of others, you are better positioned to help people.

Think of the five best connected people you know. Are they jerks? For me, the answer is a resounding no. All the well-connected people I know are good people. This makes sense: by definition, people don't like jerks, and so are less likely to build relationships with them. Similarly, well networked people tend to be those who frequently help out others, and we rarely consider people who help others "jerks."

I started thinking about this when trying to write something else. I've wanted to write a post about my five months in Silicon Valley and what aspects of its startup culture we can bring to New York. After writing way too much with little insight, I realized a pattern: Most all of the advantages of the Valley could be summed up with the word "more." More startups, more investors, more engineers, more density, a more connected graph. When I thought about how I could help improve these things in New York, I realized that networking was a part of it.↩
Q: "How do you tell the extraverted engineer from the introverted one?"
A: "The extraverted engineer looks at your shoes when he's talking to you."↩

Carcassonne and when to pivot

2010-11-05T10:17:34-07:00

I barely eked past @cdixon and @lethys for the coveted second-to-last place in a five-team game of Carcassonne last night.

My strategy had been to make an early play for a central field, and then have a stake in one or two of the largest castles. Unfortunately, I didn't execute on this strategy well enough. I was one connecting tile away from getting two more followers onto the main field, which would have let me share the spoils of the biggest prize of the game.

What bothered me at the end was that I noticed that even if I had executed properly, my strategy wasn't a winning one. I'd have shot forward to second place, but I'd still have fallen short of victory.

It dawned on me when falling asleep last night that this scenario is exactly analogous to an instance of when you should pivot in a startup. If you're on a path that, even if you execute perfectly, you won't end up where you want to be, then you know it's time to pivot.

Starting a company is hard. So what?

2010-08-20T01:04:45-07:00

My friend Jonathan Wegener blogged yesterday about why he thinks young entrepreneurs shouldn't do business to business ("B2B") startups. My co-founder Dave and I are 20-somethings and our company HireHive is a B2B startup, so, unsurprisingly, I think Jonathan's totally wrong. Here's why:

1) Identifying Opportunities is Hard

Nonsense. Identifying opportunities is easy. When Dave and I decided to start a company we came up with dozens of ideas that solved tangible problems. Problems exist all over the place and as soon as you start looking for them you see them everywhere.

Don't believe me? Here's a list of juicy problems off the top of my head: eliminating wait times for call centers, helping people find good doctors and schedule appointments without wanting to gauge their eyes out (the entire healthcare industry actually is little more than a massive set of problems), local product search ("where's the closest place that has silver paint in stock that is open right now?"), making the airport experience suck less, helping people find compatible roommates, and making projectors that work more than 50% of the time.

2) Building the Right Product is Hard... it’s tough to get product-market fit from the position of an outside observer.

This is a silly straw-man argument. You're not an "outside observer" once you're building a product, working directly with customers and thinking 24/7 about your problem domain. How do you do this? Well, you can start by following Steve Blank's advice and get out of the building and actually talk to customers. Does that make it easy? No. But it's never easy. That's the nature of the game.

A related issue: anytime you’re solving someone else’s problem, staying motivated becomes tough. Will focusing on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow sustain the necessary passion to succeed?

This is a false dichotomy. Yes, plenty of founders are driven primarily by money or a desire to scratch their own itch. But those aren't the only two motivating factors for startups. Others include helping people, changing the world, gaining respect, defying your family, creating beautiful products, solving incredibly hard problems, a love of the risk and excitement of entrepreneurship, and dozens of others.

And if you're at all worried at the onset about whether you'll have the determination to keep going, you're already in trouble.

3) Sales, Marketing, and Business Development are Hard... Without industry experience, you won’t have the personal relationships to get your food [sic] in the door and close deals and you won’t know the right distribution channels.

These things are always hard. All other things being equal, sure it'd be easier to start with lots of personal relationships and business contacts in your field, but it's not essential. You can establish these as you go, through persistence and elbow grease, going to conferences and industry events, and doing a program like Y Combinator.

No founder no matter how well-connected will have enough connections when she starts. Aren't these relationships and connections a big part of what angels and other investors are supposed to bring to the table anyway?

Jonathan's right about one thing, though: It is an uphill battle. But everyone trying to start a business faces an uphill battle. That's by definition. Otherwise, businesses would just start themselves. Startups face tons of obstacles, and that's what makes them fun. I wake up every morning facing more challenges than I can count, but each one Dave and I overcome, we get to call a milestone and move on to the next one.

At HireHive, we don't have decades of experience as either job seekers or hiring managers. But we do have an intense passion to help people find jobs they love and companies hire more effectively. We also have a strong vision for the future and are absolutely determined to fix the mess that is the present day "hiring process."

That's a big, nasty problem for sure, but I wouldn't want it any other way.

How to hack your motivation function and stay motivated

2010-07-25T03:14:03-07:00

Determination and perseverance are essential to starting a successful company. Everyone will tell you that one of the key differences between successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs is that the successful ones don't give up, even when things look bleakest.

What people don't typically tell you is how to stay motivated. Many people assume that determination is innate -- some people are just naturally determined and others are not. There's probably some amount of truth to this. I don't know any of the science behind it, but it wouldn't surprise me if motivation levels were normally distributed across the population.

But I don't really care about innate motivation. What I care about is, regardless of our "natural" determination level, what can we do to increase it?

I've thought about this a lot over the years and I've learned two things. First, my motivation level is a function that varies with time. Second, and more important, it's possible to hack it, effectively making me more determined and motivated.

Two common recommendations for startups are I think actually indirect ways of how to hack your motivation function.

The first recommendation for startups is to have a cofounder. The idea is that your cofounder can help keep your spirits up when you're feeling down, and you can do the same for him when he's feeling down. This works because your motivation functions are almost certainly out of phase, so you're unlikely to both hit your lowest points simultaneously.

It might seem odd to hear that this actually works quite well. The reason you'd think that this wouldn't work is that you would assume both cofounders' motivation levels would be based on how well the company is doing and would thus track each other closely. This is partly true: Your motivation level is obviously effected by outside events. When a VC tells you he wants to invest or a customer raves about your product, you're both likely to get a strong boost. Similarly, when someone you respect tells you she thinks your idea is no good, you're both likely to feel lousy.

In reality, your motivation level varies frequently (and sometimes wildly) even when your company's prospects haven't changed at all. You can go from thinking you're going to take over the world to being in a total slump in a matter of hours. It's this type of swing that cofounders can help each other modulate.

The second common recommendation for startups is to have a greater vision. That is, it's important that startups have a story that they tell both to others and to themselves about why what they're doing matters in a larger sense. If you truly believe what you're doing is important to the world, you're more likely to stick with it even when the odds look awful.

Beyond these bits of common advice I've developed a few tricks of my own to make sure I stay motivated and never give up.

The first idea came to me after realizing that motivation is a function of time. I realized that sometimes I have an overwhelming amount of it and sometimes I don't have enough. This got me thinking that maybe I could time-shift some of my excitement and energy.

It turns out that I actually can do this by talking to my future self. When I have a surplus of energy and excitement, I write a letter to myself, with the understanding that I'll read it the next time I need to give myself a boost. In this way I can "store" excess excitement and motivation for future use.

The second way I've found to keep myself consistently determined and working is to know what factors help pull me back up when I'm feeling down. Again, I don't think what matters is how naturally energized you are, but rather whether or not you can quickly and consistently re-energize yourself when you need to. This is because no matter how naturally motivated you are, there's a chance you'll eventually suffer enough setbacks and run out of steam. But if you have a method for replenishing your motivation levels you can keep doing this ad infinitum, no matter how many obstacles you run into.^[1]

What exactly you need to do to re-motivate yourself depends entirely on the individual. It might be watching a favorite movie, reading a particularly inspirational essay, or jogging a mile. For me, listening to music and wandering the streets of Manhattan, taking in the people and architecture and all that humans have built is about as potent an energizer as I've ever discovered.

Have a narrative for your life. I debated including this one because it's both similar to the advice given to startups overall (have a greater vision) and also possibly just a special case of what I just said (know what gets you out of a rut). Despite this, I've included it because it's been incredibly effective for me.

As pompous and self-indulgent as it sounds, having a story about the arc of your life and a vision for where you're headed is an extremely powerful way to keep yourself on track. Firstly, this works because it means you have a track to actually stick to. You can't focus on and prioritize something if you don't know what it is.

Secondly, it works because it lets you make decisions based on a greater context. I'm frequently presented with things that I don't want to do because I'm scared or simply don't enjoy doing them. A greater goal lets me evaluate these things with perspective. It's much easier to get myself to do something right now that doesn't excite me tremendously if I can see how it's an important part of achieving one of my life goals.

Similarly, this helps me avoid doing the things that are fun to do in the short-term but detrimental to my long-term success, like watching TV or endlessly reading Twitter and Hacker News. Having a story to tell myself helps me resist temptations that bring instant-gratification but don't get me closer to what I really want.

I haven't done any research on this, but I'd be willing to bet that this is how almost all really motivated people actually function: It's not that they never feel unmotivated, it's that when they do, they know how to re-energize themselves. ↩

An abridged timeline of the past 15 years of my life

2010-03-29T03:34:38-07:00

1995 - I founded my first company, CoolMan Inc., releasing a GameMaker adventure game called "The Quest v. 1.0" on AOL. Despite being terrible in virtually every respect, a thousand people downloaded it at keyword:file search.

1996 - I founded my second company, Lightning Productions. And by "founded," I mean I started listing it in the optional "company" field when filling out forms online. I got junk mail addressed to Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock, CEO, Lightning Productions for years.

199? - Sometime in the late 90s, I decided I wanted to start a real company some day.

199? - 200? - I spend a bunch of time reading about startups and entrepreneurship.

2006 - I met Dave (previously known to me as "that guy who comes late to Signals & Systems").

2007 - Dave and I decide to found a company together and start tossing around ideas.

2008 - Dave and I start having business meetings (i.e., walking around New York talking). Some friends don't think we're actually serious about this.

2009 - Dave and I start evaulating ideas more seriously. We consider everything from peer-to-peer psychotherapy to selling ice cream. We spend nearly six months exploring medical software, only to find our favorite ideas existed.

January 30 - During a brainstorming session led by my father, we developed a few more ideas that we really liked, and decided to iterate on each to see where they went.

March 1 - We decided to create a jobs website to match people with jobs they'll love.

March 3 - While starting to write a business plan, we decided to fill out a funding application on a whim.

March 5 - I tell work that I'll be leaving this summer to start a company, regardless of if we get funding. Most people think I'm crazy to leave a job I love in the middle of a down economy to start a company without any funding.

March 6 - We submit our application late.

March 14 - We receive a delightfully concise email saying they liked our application and want to meet in person.

Today, 10:50am - We had a ridiculously fun interview.

Today, 5:35pm - Funded.

Living in 80 square feet

2010-03-13T11:11:45-08:00

For the past seven years, my personal living space has been under 100 square feet -- and sometimes substantially so.^[1] My current bedroom is under 80 square feet, and I don't have a closet. I grew up in the suburbs where space is cheap and I was accustomed to having quite a bit of it. Then I went away to college and had to share a room with another person.

Then I moved to New York. After living here in even more cramped quarters for a few years, I've come to see a small room as more of a feature than a bug.

That's because constraints breed innovation. Or at least fun problems to solve. Here are a few things I've learned living in small quarters:

You can find furniture that fits. When I moved into my current room, I needed a computer desk. I knew exactly where I wanted to put it, how big it needed to be, and roughly what I wanted the desk to look like. I went to Ikea and looked around. They had maybe a dozen computer desks, none of which fit my criteria. I considered having a desk custom-made but decided that was extravagant.

Then I remembered: We live in the 21st century. We no longer have to be content with choosing from only a few dozen computer desks. So I went to Amazon and searched for "computer desk."

Yes, you're reading that correctly: Amazon offers about six thousand computer desks!^[2] Eat your heart out, Barry Schwartz.

This means that, if you're willing to put in a little effort, you can find a desk that fits your room really, really well. At least, that's what I did, and I managed to find a desk that fits my needs just about as well as I could have asked for.

It's hard to see, but my desk fits between my armoire and bed with a half-inch to spare.

Get your cables under control. This one was so easy I don't know why it took my so long to do it. I just mounted my surge protector beneath my desk, added a few twist ties, and viola -- no more cable clutter. This also has the benefit of making cleaning around your cables much easier.

Grow up. While the horizontal space in my room may leave something to be desired, I'm fortunate to have gloriously tall ceilings. I've mounted a whiteboard, coat hooks, and two bookshelves on my walls. One of the bookshelves runs along the wall next to my bed. The other is mounted eight feet high, and there's still plenty of room for me to build higher. I like to think of my room as like Manhattan in this respect, except I get to look at exposed brick instead of New Jersey.

This shelf is mounted eight feet up my wall so it doesn't feel like it takes up space.

Stop putting things away. Every time I clean up and find myself "putting things away" I know it's only a matter of time until I have to clean them up again. The clue is right there in the saying: putting things "away." Not where they can be easily found, not where they're likely to stay, not where they're properly organized, but "away." Don't get me wrong, some things should be put away, like a Christmas tree stand, since you know you won't need that for another year. But other stuff almost by definition can't be put away, like books you're currently reading or mail you've yet to process. Next time you're putting something "away," ask yourself if there's a place you can put it that makes your room feel cleaner but is still accessible. Find an equilibrium state for your things.

Get rid of stuff you don't need. For someone who doesn't shop for clothes, I manage to amass an impressive amount of clothing. I also have a hard time getting rid of stuff, usually because I either tell myself I'll surely need it someday or I can't get rid of it because it has sentimental value. This is unsustainable, and luckily a friend taught me a trick for clothes that you're having trouble ditching: Go through your clothing and take out all the stuff that you think you should get rid of but can't bring yourself to. For anything that has sentimental value, take a picture of it. Then fold it neatly and stick it in a bag. Place the bag under your bed and go back to living your life.

If after a few weeks or months you haven't found yourself searching for that old X-Men t-shirt or pair of cargo shorts (why I was unsure about those I'll never know), take the bag out from under your bed and donate it to the Salvation Army, Second Mile, or Purple Heart. You already know you don't really need or want any of the stuff in the bag, since you've been living just fine without it, and you won't ever lose the memories of it because you've already taken a picture.

Bonus: Before you forget, record what you donated so you can be sure to write it off come tax time.

For my junior year of college I had a 235 square foot single, but I'm going to ignore that.↩
OK, the number is actually smaller than that because there are some erroneous results. Still, my point stands: Amazon sells a staggering number of desks.↩

An open letter to my future self

2010-03-06T11:43:55-08:00

It may already be too late. The rigidity of custom and the tyranny of experience may already make the point of this letter moot by the time you read it, but I write nonetheless in the hope that such is not the case, that your mind is still open to persuasive and something beyond self-serving rationalizations masquerading as unbiased reason.

Look around you. With each day, the new world progresses and those of the old world scream more about the base nature of the latest changes. How before -- it's never quite clear when this was, but assuredly not today -- Things Were Better. Television had a more wholesome approach, music was created by actual musicians and not greedy producers, shots in a movie lasted longer than 50 milliseconds, and everything wasn't commercialized. People had to communicate face-to-face, and they were patient enough to actually wait for things. Politicians had more of a sense of patriotism or honor or duty. Children obeyed their parents. Sex meant something.

Have I made my point? No? I'm talking about the perpetual love affair with the great past that so many people have. I used to just think that it was a personality thing; that there were some accustomed to dynamism who welcomed change with open arms, and that there were others forever wed to the status quo. And while I still believe that appreciation for change is a characteristic unevenly distributed across the population, I no longer think it's something we typically hold onto as we age. Its natural course is to be diminished in the aged, regardless of philosophy or politics.

Let me be blunt: With every passing day beyond some point in adolescence, humans tend to become less open to change. We are still, on the whole, comfortable with whatever changes that took place while we were coming of age. But the next round, the ones welcomed by those even just five years our junior, we greet with indifference, skepticism or outright hostility.

Why? I don't know. I have some hypotheses, united by their common lack of evidence, the most obvious of which I will here assert for lack of a realistic alternative. It may prove to have an evolutionary advantage to wish to keep the world as it was when we originally ascended into adulthood, for our skills will be best developed for the technologies of that time; our vocabulary most tuned to that day's vernacular; our worldly conceptions formed by that period's prevailing events and beliefs.

But none of the above justifies stemming the tide of progress. An affinity for traditional sex-based divisions of labor does not make denying women's entry into the workforce acceptable. Comfort with segregated schools doesn't legitimize their continued existence. And being accustomed to traditional conceptions of marriage is a vestige of the past, not a basis for denying gay people equal rights.

But, you are almost certainly thinking to yourself, surely there is a large difference between desegregation and the crass nature of today's television, right? And of course you are correct: Obviously not all change can be legitimately called social progress, and not all progressions are of equal importance. There are in fact immense differences. But the groundwork for the most significant social progress is laid gradually over time, much of it by supposedly "crass" cultural artifacts. When The Simpsons first hit the airwaves in the early nineties, many predicted the downfall of Western civilization. Twenty years later, the show has proven to be a groundbreaking and important piece of American culture. The fringe has a tendency to become the mainstream which with time can become venerated. Think jazz or rock music.

So why am I writing this letter? To encourage you -- no, to implore you -- to fight the all too natural tendency to become obstinate and stuck in your ways and to dismiss the culture and values of the day in favor of those nurtured in your youth. What terrifies me is that no amount of rational persuasion will be enough to convince you, my future self, to buck the trend and remain a friend of modernity. But I have never subscribed to the idea that we are not ultimately in control of our own fates, and thus still hold out hope that somehow, in at least some small way, this letter will have an effect, and that it will help you live a long life, waking each day with eyes open to wonder and a mind open to change.

Trading with friends for fun and profit

2010-01-25T21:28:12-08:00

Since I'm a geek and I live with other geeks, we spend a decent amount of time talking about how we can live more efficiently. Much of this involves clever and/or nerdy application of economic ideas. Below are a few of the ideas we've not just talked abut but have actually implemented.

Move money efficiently

The most wildly successful experiment -- which, after over three years of daily use has safely moved from experiment to necessity -- has been using a simple Google Docs spreadsheet to track household and inter-roommate expenses. The idea is to get rid of the hassle of moving money back and forth by having a spreadsheet that keeps tabs on how much each roommate has spent, what percentage of each transaction each is liable for, and how much each owes or is owed by the others. It's simple, easy to use, and works wonderfully.

Use local knowledge

This one dawned on me only recently, but in retrospect it should have been obvious. After hearing a friend complain about high interest rates on his credit card debt, I saw a golden opportunity. Right now, you're lucky to get 2% on your savings (e.g., with SmartyPig) and maybe 3% on a CD -- assuming you're willing to lock your money up for five years.

So, suppose a friend, whom you trust and whose earnings potential, intelligence, character, and more you can firmly vouch for, is paying three or four times the best savings interest rate you can get in credit card debt. By simply taking the average of the rate you're getting and the rate he's paying, you and your friend can both profit substantially. It is, quite simply, the very definition of win-win.

Price fairly and avoid free riders

A couple years ago I decided I wanted to buy a TV. My roommates had varying levels of enthusiasm for this idea. Further, two of them couldn't care less about the difference between 720p and 1080p. I, on the other hand, have some sort of disease, and not only couldn't stomach the thought of getting anything less than 1080p, but thought it would be practically wasteful to not get a PS3 with the new HD set for watching Blu-rays (I acknowledge this is a shortcoming of mine as a human being).

So, we were at a bit of an impasse: Both groups preferred not buying a TV over spending as much (or as little) as the other thought appropriate. Socializing the costs evenly across all the roommates would have been unfair, as would my paying for the entire TV, since it was to be placed in our communal loft, and all acknowledged that they would use and benefit from it.

Purchasing a TV as a group has other challenges, too. For instance, who takes it when one or more of the roommates moves out? Does one buy out the other roommates' shares? If so, how do you price a depreciated share of a television?

We side-stepped all these issues by devising a simple pricing structure. First, I found the entertainment system that I wanted to buy (i.e., the least expensive one that met my minimum requirements). Then my roommates determined how much they would spend on a TV, assuming we were all going in equally for a set that they actually wanted. Finally, we agreed that they would contribute a little less than this amount of money to the purchase and that I would own what we bought, since I was bearing a disproportionate share of the cost, and yet we would all have equal access to a better set as a result. Thus, I bought the TV and they essentially bought time-limited partial ownership rights to it.

In the end, we all got what we wanted, at prices below what we thought it was worth.

Exploit diversity

One of the reasons markets are wonderful is that there are a great diversity of human preferences and skills distributed throughout the population, and markets let people trade goods and services based on these differences for mutual benefit. So, some people find cooking after a long day of work relaxing. Others, like me, find it draining and would prefer to spend our precious free time doing other things, like blogging about how much they don't like preparing food.

My typical solution to this problem has been to go out to dinner. Every night. This is wonderful -- I get tremendous variety, excellent food, and there's virtually no preparation or cleanup time. It has one major drawback, though: It's expensive.

A couple of my roommates, on the other hand, actually enjoy cooking dinner. They spend time planning meals for each week, buying ingredients at the Food Coop, and doing a series of foreign tasks which result in tasty food in what I'm told is called our "kitchen" (I'm exaggerating a bit here, as I in fact made Indian food just the other night).

By now you should see where this is going. We're presently discussing how best to design a system in which I'll buy weekly meal shares. The marginal cost of cooking for an additional person will be small, and thus even after adding a (well-deserved) premium on top of this to account for the labor involved in preparing the food, I'll still be able to get high-quality meals at prices below what I'm paying in restaurants (and my roommates will have more money in their pockets).

I could go on with other examples -- for example, how we priced each of our shares of rent for our apartment (which is a blog post unto itself) -- but I think you get the point: There are a surprising number of opportunities to trade more efficiently with friends and which leave everyone better off.

But that's only half of my point. The other half is that trade brings people together and actually strengthens relationships.

But Nick, I hear you saying, the causal relationship runs in the opposite direction. It's not that you trade with your friends and therefore have good relationships with them, it's that you have good relationships that make such trade possible. I actually think this point is right, at least partly, because I fully acknowledge that what I've described above does require existing positive relationships. But I think the causal relationship and dependency go both ways. Trade requires trust, but it also builds it.

But there's another advantage of explicitly negotiating transactions like this: It puts everything out in the open and ensures everyone is aware of and comfortable with the terms. Much of the tension and conflict I see or hear about from others' experiences living with roommates comes from a lack of this transparency and clarity. Miscommunications and misunderstanding can slowly breed resentment, frequently about petty and trivial things.

The other retort I expect to hear is that reducing relationships to financial transactions is cold and cheapens the idea of friendship. This is nonsense. First, I'm not proposing reducing all aspects of friendships to defined financial transactions, just a few. Second, in all the cases outlined above, everyone involved was left better off as a result.

There's one more advantage to dreaming up and experimenting with these ideas: It's fun. And that's undoubtedly good for friendships.

Happy Birthday, Macintosh

2009-01-24T16:59:31-08:00

Today marks the 25th birthday of the original Macintosh. Ars Technica has a decent piece with various Ars editors reminiscing about their favorite Macs of all time. Reading the piece got me thinking about my own experiences with the Macintosh.

My history with the Mac goes back to 1988, when I was four years old. My father purchased a Mac Plus and, shortly thereafter, a LaserWriter Plus. I don't think I can actually remember the day he bought the Mac, but I have a distinct memory of the UPS truck stopping at the top of our driveway, and the deliveryman emerging with the rather unwieldy brown box that housed the LaserWriter.

I don't remember much about my first moments with the machine; my parents always tried to keep me away from screens at a young age. But I do know that I did manage to use it from time to time in my early years. I was probably six when I sat down with MacPaint and wanted to make a game. I wasn't sure how, until I discovered I could draw shapes -- what to my young eyes looked to be a helicopter -- which I could then select with the lasso tool. With monochrome pixels progressing clockwise around my drawing like digital ants, I could click and drag my creation and make it fly. I was hooked.

The next seminal moment came shortly thereafter, in the early 90s, when I raced upstairs with my oldest sister on her birthday to find a small and unremarkable cardboard box with a 3.5" floppy inside. She explained it was an online service called Prodigy, and that it allowed our Mac to connect to other computers around the world.

Flashforward to late '93 (or was it early '94?) and my father tells me that we'll likely be getting a new family computer (the Plus had grown rather long in the tooth, though he did continue to use it as his personal machine until late in the 90s when its 9" screen had a 3" viewable range). I was ecstatic, and felt like the day would never come. Finally, after a lengthy afternoon at Micro Center, we came home with a shiny new Macintosh Performa, a 6115CD, to be precise. This was the beginning of Apple's transition away from the 68k Macs to the PowerPC; it was also, despite ostensibly being a "family computer," the first machine I felt I owned.

I have countless memories from this point on -- of seeing Noah Wyle onstage as Jobs at MacWorld '99; of discovering HyperCard (oh, how I loved thee!) and sharing code with strangers on AOL message boards; of driving to Delaware with my mother to get the last blueberry iBook -- it may have looked like a toilet seat but it had a handle and no latch! -- from a CompUSA; of seeing New York for the first time with my dad, having an overpriced breakfast at 5am in midtown before getting in line for Jobs's keynote; of befriending the employees of my local Mac shop, who made me custom-length cables and copies of System 7.

Of flying to Cupertino with my mom for the Apple shareholders meeting, attended by a man from Dublin and another who had come from Nevada by way of his Harley and another that complained that the free apples provided at breakfast were not Macintosh apples; of meeting Fred Anderson and Avi Tevanian (who personally assured me that OS X would ship with a terminal application, despite the many rumors to the contrary) and Sal Soghoian; of seeing Woz speak my first semester of engineering school and getting to tell him that it was largely because of the Apple IIe that I was studying computer engineering; of starting my own private consulting firm to help people setup and troubleshoot their Macs and home networks.

Of analyzing every box on every page of every copy of MacMall, MacZone and MacConnection; of reading the monthly programming challenges in MacTech and wondering when I would be good enough to compete -- or even understand what the problems were really about; of upgrading to System 7.6, to 8.0, 8.5, 9.0, and then to Mac OS X Public Beta, and then 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5, and every single incremental version in between; of going to launch parties for 8.0 (with "I Break for 8" bumper stickers), 8.5 (Sherlock!), 9.0 (better Sherlock!), and at least a couple releases of OS X.

Of coding late into the night until my mother would force me off the computer; of The Macintosh Toolbox and REALBasic and FutureBasic II and AppleScript and HyperTalk and GameMaker and demo versions of CodeWarrior and the first C code I ever saw; of watching every single keynote and webcast of Apple events for the past decade; of reading Crazy Apple Rumors and As the Apple Turns and all the other rumor sites; of the famous (?) "Back in Black" cover of MacAddict; of watching the community drama at the AppleInsider forums, and witnessing the bitter fork that gave way to AppleNova; of thinking that the iPod looked neat but expensive and that I'd likely never buy one; of reading rumors for years -- years -- of an Apple PDA, and finally -- finally -- watching the release of the iPhone; of standing in line for hours at the Fifth Avenue store to actually get mine.

Of being ridiculed for being a Mac user; of reading of Apple's imminent demise and "beleaguered" status; of wanting to strangle Apple's board of directors on a regular basis; of zapping the PRAM and rebuilding the Desktop File; of extensions conflicts and SCSI ID problems; of SimCity and Fate of Atlantis and Full Throttle and Sam & Max and Marathon and Dust; of LAN games of Bolo and WarCraft II and StarCraft; of writing $5 checks to shareware developers; of becoming part of a rich culture with its own history and mythology and celebrities and traditions.

Of hearing that glorious startup chime, looking at the glowing screen, and seeing a small blue face staring back at me, smiling.

Happy Birthday, Macintosh. Thanks for all the memories.

Life Optimization, Or, Brief Thoughts On What Has And Has Not Worked In Improving My Day-to-Day Life

2009-01-10T14:03:28-08:00

Five minutes of cleaning is actually a lot. Long ago, I asked myself, "why does my room get messy?" I hypothesized a number of potential explanations -- the natural increase in entropy of a given system, when things are "put away" they are necessarily not available for use and this creates an unstable equilibrium, etc, etc -- and started an in-depth analysis of this problem. This was actually intended to be a full-blown blog post. As usual, I got distracted by something else and left the post in a half-finished state, where it remains nearly two years later.

A few months ago I decided to make a conscious effort to spend five minutes every day cleaning my room. I've found that this actually works remarkably well, to the point that my room is almost always in a clean or nearly clean state. This is partly because my room is small, but it's also because five minutes of "straightening up" -- e.g., making your bed, recycling old papers, putting books back on shelves, putting dirty laundry in a hamper -- is actually quite a lot. I still haven't finished my theoretical framework of orderliness, but my room sure is a lot cleaner.

Visible checklists are the only ones that matter. If you want to get yourself to do something, make it hard to ignore and even harder to forget. This is one of the many things I use my whiteboard for: My notes/goals/lists live as large letters on my wall, visible from my bed. A note on my computer or phone will quickly be forgotten or lost; a note on my wall will greet me when I wake. (Note that this doesn't mean every habit you put on a readily visible checklist will automatically be picked up. This worked great for making sure to floss every day without fail, but my results were less impressive for making sure to exercise -- perhaps my new taekwondo class will change things?!)

One (or two) habits at a time. When I come up with six or seven new habits to acquire, I'm likely to fail at most or even all of them. If you're serious about making changes, concentrate on one or two things; if after a week or two those are going well, add a third or fourth.

Don't be afraid to experiment. For those of us who spend way too much time in our heads, it's easy to forget just how powerful real-world experimentation is, or even that things can, like, be empirically verified. If you find yourself daydreaming about what the "ideal" method for doing xyz is, try to come up with something that you can try that might be part of that ideal system or which is simply good enough. If it succeeds, great. If it fails, you've an idea for your next hypothesis to test -- or at least more data to daydream about.

"I'd rather hang out with the liberals and argue about economics than hang out with the Republicans and argue about Darwin and stem cells."

2008-11-05T22:50:04-08:00

Reason, the best damn magazine you're not reading (assuming, of course, that you don't already read it), has a decent piece today about liberals and libertarians. This quotation by professor Jacob Levy from McGill University struck me as particularly important:

"If our core liberalism—if our roots in the struggle of common law against the absolutist king, or in Locke, or in Montesquieu, or in the American Revolution mean anything at all to us—then it means a four percentage-point difference in income tax rates is less important than removing the party of torture and detention without trial from power. That's morally so overwhelmingly important as to make my traditional arguments about libertarians leaving the fusionist alliance with the right seem kind of silly."

There's a laundry list of issues on which libertarians and liberals ought to share at least some common ground: torture, war, criminal justice issues, the drug war, gay marriage, immigration, the death penalty, government transparency, privacy, reproductive rights, and free speech.

The Democrats have proven to be a miserable opposition party these last two years, and their excuse seems to have been that they couldn't do X because the Republicans were running the show. On issue after issue, ranging from the Iraq war to FISA, they've proved to be not just incapable of stopping a Republican executive but all too frequently compliant. That excuse is now off the table -- they've got commanding leads in both houses of Congress and a President with strong popular support. The questions that remain to be answered are how much the Democrats really believe in these values, and how exactly they will prioritize them.

Early results (and by that I mean yesterday's election) are mixed. High Democratic turnouts helped pass bigoted, civil-liberties bashing state constitutional amendments in Florida, California and Arizona, while Democrats in Massachusetts decriminalized pot and Michigan voters legalized medicinal marijuana. This last issue is one on which President Obama has the potential to do some immediate good: If Obama stays good to his word and stops federal raids on legal, state-sanctioned medicinal marijuana dispensaries, perhaps we can stop ruining the lives of innocent citizens and throwing away tax dollars.

The results of half a dozen ballot initiatives clearly can't be used as a true gauge of how the new Democratic government will run things; only time can answer that question definitively. But if President Obama decides to prioritize traditional liberal and libertarian values -- equal protection under the law, social tolerance, privacy, constitutionally limited powers, and peace -- the next four years will be a breath of fresh air.

The atmosphere in New York City

2008-11-05T02:02:41-08:00

Less than an hour ago, walking from my office in the West Village to the Q train in Union Square, I heard constant shouts, cheers, and chants; passed a young woman singing the Star-Spangled Banner; and saw more smiling faces than I've ever seen on a New York street -- or any street, for that matter. My wait for the train was accompanied by still more screams and yelps of joy, as each new group of people descended the stairs into the station, giddy and enthusiastic.

I stepped onto a Brooklyn-bound Q train not long after 1am. There was a short, five-second awkward silence. Then a young woman screamed "Obama!" and the entire train car erupted into raucous applause.

This may be short lived...

2008-09-29T21:48:26-07:00

Our system worked today. The majority of the House of Representatives -- which was always intended to be the branch most responsive to the will of the people -- rejected what would have been a massive and disasterous government bailout.

I'm happy to say that I was wrong. Last week when I read about Paulson's initial proposal for the bailout, I thought that the backing of the White House and the leaders of both parties, coupled with an atmosphere of fear and the need to "do something quickly," would be more than enough to push it through. Instead, a coalition of far-left Democrats and the few remaining free-market Republicans, joined by many members of both parties worried about losing their seats in the upcoming elections, defeated the bill and came out victorious.

My gut still says the bill will resurface and will probably be passed, in some form or another. But today we won, and tomorrow, I'll be quite happy to be wrong again.

A triumphant return

2008-09-07T20:34:12-07:00

After months of delays, false promises, and distractions, Unschooled is back.

Since I last posted, dear reader (readers, even?), much has happened: I graduated from engineering school, started my first full-time job, and moved into a new apartment. There was more, of course, but this site has never been about the nitty-gritty details of my life, and just because I updated the banner graphic does not mean that is about to change.

For the curious, the resurrection of Unschooled was delayed in no small part by the fact that I spent more time geeking out than getting the site back online. I switched hosting providers twice -- from bluehost to VPSLink to Slicehost, where the site currently resides. I switched web servers twice -- from Apache to nginx back to Apache. And I switched blogging software three times -- from WordPress to Byteflow to Movable Type and back to WordPress, albeit a newer version. Needless to say, none of this was actually necessary in order to get the site back up and running.

So, despite my best efforts, the site is back, to which I can only say,

Welcome back.

Wow. Just, wow.

2008-02-21T14:19:52-08:00

It's hard to list all the things that are terrible about this idea:

A ban on the sale of cigarettes to anyone who does not pay for a government smoking permit has been proposed by Health England, a ministerial advisory board.
The idea is the brainchild of the board's chairman, Julian Le Grand, who is a professor at the London School of Economics and was Tony Blair's senior health adviser. In a paper being studied by Lord Darzi, the health minister appointed to oversee NHS reform, he says many smokers would be helped to break the habit if they had to make a decision whether to "opt in".
The permit might cost as little as £10, but acquiring it could be made difficult if the forms were sufficiently complex, Le Grand said last night.

The people behind this idea are surprisingly aware of (some of) its potential problems. Unfortunately, they don't really see them as problems:

"Breaking the new year's resolution not to smoke would be costly in terms of both money and time ... [This] would probably have a greater impact on poor smokers than on rich ones, hence contributing to a reduction in health inequalities."

Sounds like a great plan to me: Reduce inequality by introducing legislation that is systematically unequal in its effects. How could this go wrong?

The paper, written by Le Grand and Divya Srivastava, an LSE researcher, acknowledges: "Administratively it would require addressing the problem of the existing black markets and smuggling in tobacco; but this should probably be done anyway."

Translation: "Implementing this would make the black markets worse and drive more economic activity underground, causing more danger for all involved, and this will in turn require still greater militarism from our law enforcement and spending even more of the taxpayers' money, but hey, we were going to do that anyway!"

Mark my words: They're coming for our Krispy Kremes next.

(Full article at The Guardian)

It’s a Wonderful Machine

2007-12-24T13:20:03-08:00

I've been reading this story every Christmas for nearly a decade now. To properly enjoy it, you need to appreciate the historical context: When this was published in December of '97, Apple hadn't released the iMac, let alone the iPod or iPhone. A year earlier at Macworld Boston, Jobs had been booed on stage when he introduced the new Apple/Microsoft partnership. The clones had been killed. Apple's next-gen OS plans at least appeared to still be in constant flux and confusion. AAPL was trading at under $5 a share.

Now, sit back and enjoy, It's a Wonderful Machine.

Merry Christmas!

Vindicated by DNA, but a Lost Man on the Outside

2007-11-24T19:24:40-08:00

The New York Times has a tragic piece about what it's like to be imprisoned for 15 years and then be exonerated based on DNA evidence. The article is unsurprisingly depressing, but it serves as an important reminder for us to think deeply about how we treat and prosecute citizens suspected or accused of committing heinous crimes.

I took particular note of these two paragraphs:

After repeated questioning over two months, Mr. Deskovic confessed during a seven-hour interrogation and polygraph test, telling the police he had hit Ms. Correa with a Gatorade bottle and grabbed her around the throat. In the lawsuit, Mr. Deskovic contends that detectives fed him these details, and promised that if he confessed he would not go to prison but would receive psychiatric treatment.

"I was tired, confused, scared, hungry — I wanted to get out of there," he recalled recently. "I told the police what they wanted to hear, but I never got to go home. They lied to me."

What can be said?

2007-11-04T02:42:01-08:00

This piece by Christopher Hitchens is deeply moving:

I was having an oppressively normal morning a few months ago, flicking through the banality of quotidian e-mail traffic, when I idly clicked on a message from a friend headed "Seen This?" The attached item turned out to be a very well-written story by Teresa Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times. It described the death, in Mosul, Iraq, of a young soldier from Irvine, California, named Mark Jennings Daily, and the unusual degree of emotion that his community was undergoing as a consequence. The emotion derived from a very moving statement that the boy had left behind, stating his reasons for having become a volunteer and bravely facing the prospect that his words might have to be read posthumously. In a way, the story was almost too perfect: this handsome lad had been born on the Fourth of July, was a registered Democrat and self-described agnostic, a U.C.L.A. honors graduate, and during his college days had fairly decided reservations about the war in Iraq. I read on, and actually printed the story out, and was turning a page when I saw the following:
"Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says there was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him … "

(Found via Branching Between Towers)

I hope he’s right…

2007-11-03T01:07:01-07:00

Jim Harper over at the Cato blog thinks the anti-immigration opinions held by many in this country are in fact only "weakly held" and will fade if presented with the correct arguments.

Having watched this issue, and having heard from lots of angry people, I know that anti-immigrant views are a classic weakly held opinion. Angry as people are about the rule of law and “coming to this country the right way,” that anger melts when they learn more. Stuff like this:
"We haven’t permitted anywhere near enough legal immigration for decades. You can sit back and talk about legal channels, but the law has only allowed a smidgen of workers into the country compared to our huge demand. Getting people through legal channels at the INS has been hell.
"America, you’re going to have to get over what amounts to paperwork violations by otherwise law-abiding, honest, hard-working people. And that’s what we’re talking about - 98% honest, hard-working people who want to follow the same path our forefathers did, and who would be a credit to this country if we made it legal for them to come. Our current immigration policies are a greater threat to the rule of law than any of the people crossing the border to come here and work."

I sincerely hope he's right, though I fear he's not taking full account of the fundamentally irrational nature of xenophobia.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the House want to add a $3.1 billion tax burden for companies looking to hire high-skilled immigrants. Is there anything holding the Republican party together right now other than shared fear? It sure as hell ain't principles, ideas, or any respect for traditional American values.

Never prouder

2007-09-24T19:53:24-07:00

This afternoon, President Bollinger gave a speech that can only be called rousing and inspirational. Watch it here: part 1, part 2 (it's unfortunate that the video doesn't capture the response of the several thousand students who were watching out on the lawn; needless to say the atmosphere was electric).

Interestingly enough, just two hours later, Prezbo -- miraculously -- showed up to teach POLS 3285 Freedom of Speech & Press to thunderous applause. It was a good day to be in his class.

Today was a glorious affirmation of of the values my university and nation espouse, and I've never been prouder to be a part of both.

A sampling of the pictures I took throughout the day after the jump

Tomorrow should be interesting

2007-09-23T12:59:05-07:00

Seen just now while walking to the library:

Bwog coverage here, for those who don't know what's going on.

New design

2007-08-28T19:32:03-07:00

Even the exceedingly dull reader will note that I have made some changes to the site. The most obvious of course is that I've goofed around a bit with the site's general look, for no reason other than that I had a lot of important things to get done, and so I needed a way to delay doing them. Dinking around with Unschooled's CSS proved to be a nice distraction, and as a bonus I can even feel mildly accomplished because I have something to show for my effort. A special thanks to Six for helping sculpt the new look, and for debugging a few nasty CSS issues.

The slightly more subtle change is that I've integrated Twitter using Twitter Tools by Alex King. This means that whenever I post to Twitter, a post on Unschooled will automatically be generated. Similarly, if I post a new entry on Unschooled, a link to it will be posted to Twitter. (Thus if you want to always be the first to know when I post a new entry on Unschooled, you can start following me on Twitter.)

These changes were made largely as an experiment. I have developed a hypothesis that goes something like this: Posting a blog entry -- no matter how short -- is psychologically heavy, while posting a tweet is very lightweight. Think e-mail (heavy -- oh lord do I hate e-mail at the moment) vs. a Facebook wallpost (light -- who doesn't have time to post on his friend's wall?).

The result should be a significant increase in the number of (very) short posts, and business-as-usual in terms of the frequency of longer posts.

Let's see what happens.

This is not fiction

2007-08-11T17:05:30-07:00

I remember a time when when this stuff was only to be found in dystopian novels:

SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 — At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.
Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.
Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

More terrifying details await in the rest of the NY Times article.

Happy Independence Day

2007-07-04T23:13:51-07:00

This seemed like the best way to celebrate:

More photos of me looking bewildered after the jump.

For the curious, my quotation is from Jefferson's first inaugural address:

Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Now go read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Then read Frederick Douglas's chilling, What to the slave is the Fourth of July?, which has these still beautiful words in its final paragraph:

I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from "the Declaration of Independence," the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind.

iPhone first impressions

2007-06-30T11:20:10-07:00

Yesterday afternoon I took off from work early to go stand in line for four hours to get my grubby little hands on an iPhone, a device I've been waiting for in one form or another for nearly eight years.

Because I can't stand to stay away from it for too long, this post will be in the form of an off-the-top-of-my-head list of thoughts about this beautiful -- beautiful -- device:

Waiting in line and then purchasing two 8GB iPhones (one for me, one for my sister) at the Fifth Ave. Apple Store was perhaps the most pleasant and exciting buying experience of my life. I say experience because the entire thing felt like a spectacle: dozens of companies showed up to jump on the bandwagon and advertise their wares. I got a free fan, buttons, a keychain, slick info packets about everything from recycling your old phone to social networks trying to tie themselves to the iPhone, bottled water and lemonade.

While standing in line I watched a near pornographic campaign video for Giuliani be shot 15 feet in front of me. My guess is that if you google "Rudy girl" within the next couple weeks you'll see what I'm talking about. Also, listen for man in the background yelling "vote Ron Paul." That's me.

I was interviewed three times. Once by a young woman doing competitive market research for LG (she's going to call in a few weeks to see how I like my iPhone). Once by a Yahoo! Tech blogger (who said her press contacts put the number of iPhones at the Fifth Ave. store at 2,000). And once by a Fox News (barf) woman from the Geraldo show. They grabbed me right after I emerged from the store to the cheers and high-fives of dozens of Apple employees (they cheered everyone -- not just me :D -- but I suspect they may have sensed my enthusiasm).

Everyone in line was awesome. I lucked out and ended up next to a true Apple diehard and we reminisced about the days of the Apple II.

I was terrified walking home with two iPhones in tow and a beautiful Apple iPhone bag that screamed "mug me!" I stopped by the vendors at Columbus Circle and they were kind enough to give me some less inviting plastic bags to cover my loot up with.

I cannot explain how giddy I was and still am, though I imagine my roommates who saw my face when I walked in the door have a decent idea. My full experience was delayed a bit when the iTunes activation got stuck trying to talk to Apple's servers (which I believe were trying to talk to AT&T's, which according to the forums I read last night were hammered in the activation process.) I went to bed last night around 2:30 with a non-activated iPhone.

I naturally arose shortly after 6am this morning and immediately hopped out of bed and had my phone activated inside of a minute. Aside from the hiccups last night, it was a glorious activation process with no annoying salesperson in sight.

This phone is stunningly, achingly, painfully gorgeous. It is the single best designed piece of consumer electronics I have ever owned. This puts the all three Playstations, all iPods, Tivo, the Wii, the PSP, the DS and all the others to shame. Undoubtedly, the iPhone lives up to the hype.

The EDGE network is not nearly as bad as I expected it to be. Word is that the speed was bumped to 270 kbps in major metropolitan areas yesterday right before the launch. The wifi access I hawk from my neighbors is painfully slow sometimes, so right now my fastest net connection in my apartment is on my phone. Weird.

I browsed my favorite blogs, posted on a Facebook wall, checked Gmail. Everything just worked (though I was only able to view Google Docs -- no dice with editing them).

There are a million little touches that make you smile. If you get an e-mail with a link to a YouTube video, clicking on it doesn't open YouTube.com in Safari but instead starts streaming the video in the built-in YouTube player. Deleting e-mail messages is done through a "swipe" gesture that feels like "crossing out" the message. Visual Voicemail rocks. Text messages pop up while you're on the phone in a delightfully friendly and helpful manner.

Battery life. I've been running this pretty hard (browsing the web, e-mail, long phone calls, listening to music, watching videos) for the last 4+ hours and it still shows over half the battery remaining.

My ringer is set to "Old Phone," which sounds exactly as you would want it to. It's a pleasant, tasteful, traditional phone ring.

The keyboard, which I was more than a little nervous about, is I think ultimately going to be a non-issue. The first five minutes were frustrating. The next ten were a little better. After an hour, it started to feel decent. My prediction? Within a week I won't even think about it.

One revelation I hadn't really thought about before -- and which I still have yet to truly internalize -- is that I now have Wikipedia in my pocket. Take a moment to think about that. I suspect this is one of those things that seems cool at first but can't be fully understood until the ramifications begin to manifest themselves. And it's not just Wikipedia, I've got the entire web -- the REAL web, not some "junior" version -- in my pocket. I have near-instant access to the largest store of human knowledge ever compiled.

Too good not to post

2007-06-24T19:58:17-07:00

One of the better policy initiatives I've seen in recent months:

Steve Ahlenius, president of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce, sent out an e-mail to 140 media outlets nationwide Tuesday morning with the subject line: “McAllen, Texas calls for wall around Washington D.C.”
“We feel the need to protect ourselves from bad legislation, bad ideas and a waste of tax money,” Ahlenius wrote.
“A wall around their homes and businesses will give the legislators and Washington bureaucrats a better understanding of what kind of message this action will send.
“Let’s see if they decide to climb over it, tunnel under it, or walk over it.”

Link to complete article (Found via Cato @ Liberty).

Where’s the outrage?

2007-06-19T23:21:16-07:00

I don't know how long this has been around, but I just stumbled upon it recently. The market-liberals^[1] at the Cato Institute have compiled an interactive map of botched police raids. It appears to be both well-researched and thorough, and shows that the scourge of police invasions on innocents and nonviolent offenders is not limited to the years under the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, Cato's ideological brethren over at Reason have this video interview with Regina Kelly, who was wrongly arrested and jailed based upon a "tip" from a police informant. Ms. Kelly tells harrowing tale.

This is, I believe, the label they prefer. For an interesting read, check out How to Label Cato, where they explain why they shouldn't be called a good number of other things.↩

Caught in limbo

2007-06-10T13:43:33-07:00

What do you do after you have rounded up "enemy combatants" from around the world, imprisoned them for a few years, and then determined that they are, in fact, not terrorists at all?

What do you do if returning them to their "home" countries would most likely lead to their torture or even execution?

The New York Times today has a fascinating look behind the scenes of this whole nightmare:

The men, Muslims from western China’s Uighur ethnic minority, were freed from their confinement in Cuba after they were found to pose no threat to the United States. They have now lived for more than a year in a squalid government refugee center on the grubby outskirts of Tirana, guarded by armed policemen.

To make matters worse, the U.S.'s attempts to find safe countries to place former Guantanamo detainees have been thwarted by the Chinese government:

American diplomats said they had contacted governments from Angola to Switzerland to Australia. Increasingly, though, they have seen the shadows of their Chinese counterparts.
“The Chinese keep coming in behind us and scaring different countries with whom they have financial or trade relationships,” said one administration official, who insisted on anonymity in discussing diplomatic issues.

It's become almost a truism that China's global influence will continue to expand rapidly for the foreseeable future. The U.S. has caused untold suffering and destruction under the Bush administration, but those who cheer on the U.S.'s declining role on the world stage ought to take a good, hard look at who's most likely to fill the power vacuum.

The importance of environmental design (why whiteboards are awesome)

2007-05-29T00:47:53-07:00

By environmental design, I do not mean environmental engineering or anything related with environmentalism. Rather, I want to talk about designing our environment -- that is, the physical world in which we live -- to make our lives better.

I have not traditionally put much thought into designing my living space. Sure, I set up my room nicely (both functionally and to a lesser extent aesthetically), but prior to the last year, I had never thought about how much my environment impacts my productivity and happiness.

For example, last fall, a suitemate and I came up with the idea of purchasing a whiteboard for our suite's common area. We thought it would be a fun and useful way to collaborate on our many problem sets.^[1] The idea percolated in our minds until one day we broke down, went to Staples, and purchased a whiteboard and the necessary accoutrements.

To say that the board was a success would be an understatement. It worked out so well, in fact, that we shortly thereafter purchased a second board, and then a third.^[2]

What did we use the boards for?

First and foremost, they performed even better than expected at helping us with our original goal of collaborating on problem sets. The boards enabled us to offload our thinking into a shared space -- a commons -- which meant quite literally that multiple people could work on a given problem simultaneously. It also meant problems could be put on the board, ignored (or at least not actively worked on) for a bit, and then resumed.

Compare this to doing problem sets alone, on a piece of graph paper. With graph paper, when you're not working on your problem set, the problems are not in view -- they're in your backpack, desk drawer or, most likely, on your floor. In any case, you're unlikely to glance at them when you're eating or chatting with friends. But if the problem exists on a whiteboard just next to your breakfast/lunch/dinner table, in the room where you and your friends spend 75% of your time at home, you're bound to gaze upon it from time to time. Chances are also that at some point you -- or one of your friends -- will have a breakthrough. And when you do, there will be no delay before you can start working again.

That last point is key: Whiteboards operate in realtime and thus have no "startup time" -- i.e., there's no pause between when you want to start working and when you can actually start working. The few things that might actually slow you down, like not being able to find a marker, can be eliminated with a little thoughtful design.^[3]

The boards didn’t just give us a way to do our homework together, though. They actually helped us learn the material more thoroughly, by keeping our work visually in front of us, and by facilitating the social connections that helped cement our new knowledge. They also served as a mechanism for my friends and me to share information that was not directly related to our course work: My friend Spencer taught me some of the basic mathematics behind Western music, and the boards have been used more than once to parse Arabic and Latin sentences.

But the boards' usefulness did not end there. Over the past months, they have, among other things, served as an oversized message board (I'm at the library. Want to grab dinner at 7:30?); an ad hoc grocery list; and aided in the development of a theory of how best to pick up strangers.

As the above examples suggest, the dry-erase boards became wholly integrated into our daily lives.^[4] Here's why I think they worked so well -- and were adopted so quickly.

First, as I hope I have illustrated above, the boards were genuinely useful. This may seem painfully obvious but I still think it's worth stating: Things that are useful will get used.

Second, they were right there, so we didn't have to go out of our way to use them. How many times have you found a new website or downloaded a cool new program, only to find that a week later you've forgotten that it even exists?

I think there are two primary lessons to be learned here.

The first lesson is that our environments facilitate our thinking much more than we tend to think they do.^[5]

The second lesson I will sum up in the form of a new law:

Nicholas's law of technological adoption:

The rate of adoption of a new technology is directly related to its utility and inversely related to how much effort it takes to incorporate it into your established workflow.^[6]

I'm curious to hear what people think of all this.

Keep in mind that I am, along with all of the people with whom I live, presently in engineering school. We don't write response papers or essays; we do problem sets. For better or worse, we live and breathe problem sets. I should also note that for the majority of our classes, collaboration is not only permitted but actively encouraged by our professors.↩
In the interest of full disclosure, I should acknowledge that the acquisition of the third board was driven as much out of my near obsessive desire for symmetry as it was out of actual need.↩
Early this semester, with the purchase of the third whiteboard, I got an extra set of markers that were magnetized. A friend noticed that they stuck rather well to our rooms' metal doorframes. Ever since, I have kept a marker or two on my doorframe. Now, when I have a thought in my room and want to work it out on the dry-erase board, I mindlessly grab a marker on my way out to the lounge and I'm ready to go.↩
This has become something of a problem. I now frequently find myself looking for the nearest whiteboard (or reaching into my pocket for an erasable marker) when I want to explain something to someone. The problem is that this happens even when I'm places that rarely have publicly accessible whiteboards, like a restaurant or train station.↩
Variations on this theme have been studied for some time. The American psychologist J. J. Gibson wrote about the importance of environmental factors in shaping our thinking decades ago. I guess I'm more than a little late to the party.↩
As an example of this on a large scale, think about how quickly Facebook went from being non-existent to utterly pervasive. In a matter of months, it became part of the daily routine of millions of people and the sixth-most-visited site in the US. Imagine the possibilities if we could build a grassroots activist network with the same rapidity.↩

Do schools kill creativity?

2007-05-25T21:09:27-07:00

I just watched Sir Ken Robinson's speech from last year's TED conference. It's old, but definitely worth a look if you've got 19 minutes:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY]

First, I think his diagnosis is mostly right on target. Of course, this isn't much of a surprise given that I'm highly skeptical of traditional schooling and subscribe to Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, which Sir Robinson seemed to be advocating. In sound-byte form:

We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

One critique: It may sound pedantic, but I think he really should have said that we are schooling -- rather than educating -- children out of their creative capacities.

Second, his delivery method was fascinating. I can't remember the last time I saw humor blended so thoroughly and effectively into a speech. His talk is at heart an argument -- a somewhat radical one, at that -- against schooling as it is currently practiced. And yet he managed to avoid framing the issue in terms of "us" versus "them," or seriously antagonizing large groups of people. Too often when we feel even slightly attacked, our defense shields go up and we stop listening. By putting everyone at ease through his humor, Sir Robinson doesn't obstruct his message but instead makes it possible for us to actually hear it.

Lastly, I loved this:

If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.

I think I'll re-read that line every day for at least the next month.

These guys are crazy

2007-05-23T14:42:21-07:00

I only caught the last half-hour of the most recent Republican debate, and boy was it terrifying: Eight of the ten candidates came out in strong favor of "enhanced interrogation techniques," formerly known as torture. Mitt Romney wants to double the size of Guantanamo Bay. Only Rep. Ron Paul and Sen. John McCain argued that torturing people was perhaps not the best way to defend our values.

Rep. Paul pointed out that calling torture enhanced interrogation techniques was akin to Newspeak. Sen. McCain, the only candidate who has experienced the horrific reality of torture, gave an impassioned argument:

It's not about the terrorists, it's about us. It's about what kind of country we are. And a fact: The more physical pain you inflict on someone, the more they're going to tell you what they think you want to know.
It's about us as a nation. We have procedures for interrogation in the Army Field Manual. Those, I think, would be adequate in 999,999 of cases, and I think that if we agree to torture people, we will do ourselves great harm in the world.

The rest of the candidates appear to be morally bankrupt. They seem to think our moral yardstick is Al Qaeda, and as long as we're not as barbaric as they are we're doing okay. They're wrong. Our moral compass should be based upon our nation's founding principles, not the actions of murderous thugs.

Also frightening were the frequent allusions to 24. Rep. Tancredo said that in the (entirely contrived and 24-esque) ticking time-bomb scenario he was "looking for Jack Bauer."^[1] I was reminded of a scathing and rather apropos article from the American Conservative magazine. The entire piece is worth a read, but its thrust is summed up in its closing paragraph:

The devotion to 24 and its protagonist demonstrates what few may care to admit: in the war on terror, the conservative movement has become willing to sacrifice principle to passion and difficult moral reasoning to utility. As escapism, 24 is riveting; as a parable for our time, it is revolting.

Rep. Tancredo said that America is Western civilization's last hope and tried to justify the use of torture as a means of defending Western civilization. That's like burning down your home to defend against a prowler on the roof. When we start torturing fellow human beings, even under the assumption they have committed heinous crimes, when we "sacrifice principle to passion," we destroy the very values we purport to defend.

Complete transcript online via the New York Times here. If you don't have an nytimes.com account, try BugMeNot.com ↩

Launched

2007-05-23T00:46:59-07:00

This site is, in short, a collection of things that I think and care about. Those things include free culture, educational philosophy, design, current events, technology, and engineering. I particularly like it when these things overlap.

This site is also my formal web-presence. Given that I spend about as much time online as I do in meatspace, I decided it would make sense for me to formally exist online beyond the confines of Facebook.

I should probably take a moment to say a bit about this site's name. Unschooling is a liberal^[1] form of alternative education that falls under the ecumenical banner of "homeschooling" but, apart from the fact that it is an alternative form of education, shares virtually nothing in common with the traditional view of "school at home" (i.e., mom teaching biology to her socially deficient kids at the kitchen table). Unschooling philosophy is based first and foremost on the idea that children are naturally curious and should be free to learn about and explore the world largely as they see fit.

As you may have now guessed, I am an unschooler. This means that prior to going to college I lived without grades, tests, homework, formal curricula, and just about all the other trimmings of the modern-day American school-system. I deeply believe that unschooling is good both pragmatically and philosophically. Expect posts on this in the future.

It's taken much deliberation -- as well as a little inspiration -- to decide to finally start blogging. My reasons for not starting earlier are pretty standard: I worried I wouldn't have enough time to write and that the site would quickly stagnate. I feared the inevitable public judgement and criticism of putting my thoughts online for any and all to see. And I always had the lingering fear that the whole thing was more than a little narcissistic.

Those concerns may have faded a little, but they have certainly not disappeared from my mind entirely. What's changed is that the reasons I do want to blog have managed to surpass my trepidation. Besides, I need to find a new way to procrastinate, as I'm starting to suspect I may have actually seen all of Facebook.

Just recently, I remembered a quotation I hadn't thought about for nearly five years:

"Anything that I have ever done that was ultimately worthwhile, initially scared me to death."^[2]

My first regular entry comes tomorrow. Stay tuned.
-Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock

I use liberal here mostly to mean free and not in the political sense. Unschooling respects the freedom of children and young people and is thus strongly non-coercive but ultimately not strictly tied to a single political movement. For what it's worth, most of the unschoolers I know are politically left-leaning.↩
I have no idea where I first heard this. A little googling shows that it is attributed to Betty Bender, who, according to her search results, is famous for saying the above quotation.↩