Simplicity is a very powerful construct. Henry Thoreau recognized this when he said, “Our life is frittered away by detail . . . simplify, simplify.” Einstein also recognized the power of simplicity, and it was the key to his breakthroughs in physics. He noted that the five ascending levels of intellect were, “Smart, Intelligent, Brilliant, Genius, Simple.” For Einstein, simplicity was simply the highest level of intellect.”

• Why you stink at fact-checking. The Moses Illusion demonstrates what psychologists call knowledge neglect – people have relevant knowledge, but they fail to use it.

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Daniel Kahneman told his financial advisor he didn’t want to get rich. He just wanted to continue living like he had.

“She told me, ‘I can’t work with you,’” Kahneman wrote.

I asked Kahneman about the incident a few years ago. “She was very puzzled in the context of somebody coming to get financial advice and not trying to get richer,” he said. “I’m not sure that I’m all that unusual. Many people retired on pensions and are perfectly satisfied with it and they are not desperate to have more.”

• How Hedge Funds Get Rich. Nick, shows with his R program, that no matter what initial capital you give the hedge fund to start with, the hedge fund will become richer than you since its real talent is transferring your wealth into its coffers. And, one of the better ways to get rich is to pay lower fees.

The moral of the story is that fees matter, a lot. When it comes to investing, a little more in fees can go a long way (for those charging them). So though 2% (or 1%) might sound small now, within a short time frame it can add up very quickly. I recommend keeping your average fees below 0.1% across your portfolio. Thank you for reading!

• This is how Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked. The whole point of a dimension reduction model is to mathematically represent the data in simpler form. It’s as if Cambridge Analytica took a very high-resolution photograph, resized it to be smaller, and then deleted the original. The photo still exists — and as long as Cambridge Analytica’s models exist, the data effectively does too.

• Lessons for building AI-Driven Products. 1. Track how the market is using AI technology 2.Follow the trends in deep learning research 3. Cut through the AI hype — focus on practical use cases 4. Be obsessed with customer-centric data 5. Build a usable product with a simple model before exploring complicated AI models 6. Iteratively build use cases where AI directly impacts a metric 7. Build Breadth-first (Data/Pipeline/Model) instead of Depth-first (AI model) 8. Ensure your product fails gracefully 9. Insist on AI model explainability 10. Establish clear communication with your teams — know the fundamentals and language of data and ML.

The top HN comment, on this topic, summarizes as follows: As someone who is a product manager in the commercialized AI SaaS space, the most important pieces of feedback I would give a new PM here:

1. Don’t let your -brilliant- colleagues try to force their -brilliantly complex- solution of a problem - clearly define market problems, and don’t let the team try to go the route of trying to force fit a solution to a market problem. Market problems come first.

2. Frame the market problems appropriately for your ML/AI teams, and practice trying to frame the problem from a variety of angles. Framing from different angles promotes the ‘Ah-ha’ moment in terms of the right way to solve the problem from the ML side.

3. Don’t commit serious time to a model before having a naive solution to benchmark against. Always have a naive solution to compare against the AI solution. ‘Naive’ here may be a simple linear regression, RMSE, or multi armed bandit/Thompson sampling.

Techniques

• Don’t keep a schedule. By not keeping a schedule, you can always work on whatever is most important or most interesting, at any time. The idea came from A Perfect Mess book.

  If you have at any point in your life lived a relatively structured existence – probably due to some kind of job with regular office hours, meetings, and the like – you will know that there is nothing more liberating than looking at your calendar and seeing nothing but free time for weeks ahead to work on the most important things in whatever order you want.

• Keep three and only three lists: a Todo List, a Watch List, and a Later List

• Into the Todo List goes all the stuff you “must” do – commitments, obligations, things that have to be done. A single list, possibly subcategorized by timeframe (today, this week, next week, next month).

• Into the Watch List goes all the stuff going on in your life that you have to follow up on, wait for someone else to get back to you on, remind yourself of in the future, or otherwise remember.

• Into the Later List goes everything else – everything you might want to do or will do when you have time or wish you could do.

• If it doesn’t go on one of those three lists, it goes away.

• Each night before you go to bed, prepare a 3x5 index card with a short list of 3 to 5 things that you will do the next day.

• And then, the next day, do those things.

• People who have tried lots of productivity porn techniques will tell you that this is one of the most successful techniques they have ever tried. Once you get into the habit, you start to realize how many days you used to have when you wouldn’t get 3 to 5 important/significant/meaningful things done during a day.

• Then, throughout the rest of the day, use the back of the 3x5 card as your Anti-Todo List.

• And then at the end of the day, before you prepare tomorrow’s 3x5 card, take a look at today’s card and its Anti-Todo list and marvel at all the things you actually got done that day. Then tear it up and throw it away. Another day well spent, and productive.

• Structured Procrastination.

  The gist of Structured Procrastination is that you should never fight the tendency to procrastinate – instead, you should use it to your advantage in order to get other things done. Generally in the course of a day, there is something you have to do that you are not doing because you are procrastinating. While you’re procrastinating, just do lots of other stuff instead.

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

• Strategic Incompetence.

The best way to to make sure that you are never asked to do something again is to royally screw it up the first time you are asked to do it. Or, better yet, just say you know you will royally screw it up – maintain a strong voice and a clear gaze, and you’ll probably get off the hook.

• Do email exactly twice a day – once first thing in the morning, and once at the end of the workday. Allocated half an hour or whatever it takes, but otherwise, keep your email client shut and your email notifications turned off. Only doing email twice a day will make you far more productive for the rest of the day. The problem with email is that getting an email triggers that same endorphin hit I mentioned above – the one that a mouse gets when he bonks on the button in the cage and gets a food pellet. Responding to an email triggers that same hit.

• When you do process email, do it like this:

• First, always finish each of your two daily email sessions with a completely empty inbox.

• Second, when doing email, either answer or file every single message until you get to that empty inbox state of grace.

• Third, emails relating to topics that are current working projects or pressing issues go into temporary subfolders of a folder called Action.

• Fourth, aside from those temporary Action subfolders, only keep three standing email folders: Pending, Review, and Vault.

• Don’t answer the phone. Let it go to voicemail, and then every few hours, screen your voicemails and batch the return calls. Say, twice a day. Have two cell phones with different numbers – one for key family members, your closest friends, and your boss and a few coworkers, and the other for everyone else. Answer the first one when it rings, but never answer the second one.

• Hide in an IPod. People, for some reason, feel much worse interrupting you if you are wearing headphones than if you’re not.

• Start the day with a real, sit-down breakfast.

• Only agree to new commitments when both your head and your heart say yes. If you get that little adrenaline spike (in a good way) when you think about it, then your heart is saying yes. The corollary, of course, is that when your head says no and your heart says yes, your mouth should generally say yes as well :-). But not when your head says yes and your heart says no

• Do something you love.

• Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.

• Happiness is complicated. There are two components. One is strongly genetic; the second is a question of how you feel at any moment. I am pretty content, but I had a very pessimistic mother, and I’ve always been known as a pessimist.

• There is a powerful idea that we should want to be richer. I went to a financial advisor in the States and said: “I don’t really want to get richer, but I would like to continue to live like I do.” She said: “I can’t work with you.”

• Collaboration is not only more creative, it is more fun. Amos Tversky, my research partner, and I were better together than on our own. We sort of knew that. Mostly it was extremely pleasant not trying to work everything out yourself.

• Many people now say they knew a financial crisis was coming, but they didn’t really. After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.

• Motives are rarely straightforward. When the war started my father was chief of research for a company that was part of L’Oréal in Paris. The owner of L’Oréal was also a main funder of the fascist party in France, and antisemitic. But he protected my [Jewish] father during the war when he was taken by the Nazis.

• Despite 45 years of work in the field, I am still inclined to make over-confident predictions.

• System 1 and System 2.

Fast thinking is, I think, most of the way that we think. It’s what your memory delivers to you. You start talking, and you talk. You don’t have to deliberate about one word and then the other. You walk. You don’t deliberate and decide to put one foot in front of the other.

Most of what we do sort of comes automatically. Most of what we do is highly skilled and emotional – some of it is emotional, much of it is highly skilled – and all of that is automatic. There’s just an awful lot of automatic stuff that goes on.

Then there is System 2.

If I say, “2 plus 2,” a number came to your mind. That’s System 1. If I say, “The relationship between China and Japan,” now it’s not one word that came to your mind, but a whole set of words, a whole set of ideas. I mentioned that, you were thinking islands, you were thinking war, you were thinking navies.

You might have been thinking about the history of China and Japan. A lot happened that you were not… it happened at once. Those are not explicit thoughts, but you are ready for a whole topic, as soon as I mention something. That’s System 1.

I mention the word “mother,” “your mother” – you are having an emotion. That’s System 1.

There’s an awful lot that System 1 does. System 1 has judgments and opinions and attitudes and impressions that are generated – like when I said, “Think of China and Japan” – that a whole lot happened at once. You were not conscious of it all at once, but your mind was ready. It was getting ready with it.

That’s the idea, that there is that thing going on in our minds, silently. Then you have System 2.

System 2 is the effortful one. It depends on the allocation of attention. It’s what we are paying attention to, mostly. It’s involved in computations. It’s involved in difficult decisions. It’s involved in controlling yourself and not telling somebody to go to hell. That demands System 2. It’s all part of effortful system.

What’s the relationship between the two of them? That’s the interesting part.

One trick is to pull a little bait and switch on your own brain. It goes like this: When the urge comes to do the counterproductive thing, don’t resist. Instead, replace.

via @nytimes article

• Tools for converting Python code to AWS Step Function json
• HAL: AWS s3-sns based single-slack-command bot to handle your VPC

Podcasts

Startups

• This Week in Startups
• Acquired
• Masters of Scale
• Exponent

VCs

• Venture Studio
• Angel
• Syndicate
• Balderton Capital Podcast
• 20 Minute VC
• Ventured
• a16z
• Greymatter

Google Searching

• Google Advanced Search Tips from HubSpot

What do these people have that the rest of us don’t? It turns out “ability” is the key word here. Beyond their level of privilege or the circumstances they were born into, the luckiest people may have a specific set of skills that bring chance opportunities their way. Somehow, they’ve learned ways to turn life’s odds in their favor.

[Wiseman] He turned these findings into a “luck school” where people could learn luck-inducing techniques based on four main principles of luck: maximizing chance opportunities, listening to your intuition, expecting good fortune, and turning bad luck to good. The strategies included using meditation to enhance intuition, relaxation, visualizing good fortune, and talking to at least one new person every week. A month later, he followed up with participants. Eighty percent said they were happier, luckier people. *

• This Is How You Design Your Mobile App for Maximum Growth. A popular link at First Round. The agency website is Primer
• Google Apps Script that publishes a Google Sheet to Amazon S3 as a JSON file. Auto-updates on edit & maintains data types. Creates an array of objects keyed by column header. Similar tools - Airtable, Fieldbook and the recently popular sheet2site. Other open source related tools are sheetrock, http://douglasduhaime.com/posts/crud-operations-on-static-file-sites.html, https://www.johnastewart.org/coding/twine-game-data-to-google-sheets-via-javascript/, https://medium.com/@dmccoy/how-to-submit-an-html-form-to-google-sheets-without-google-forms-b833952cc175
• Where is Sci-Hub now?. Nice idea of using Sci-hub preferred tag from WikiData folks. A Node.JS Express app hosted on Heroku platform.
• The Missing UI for Elastic Search - DejaVu. Should be interesting to explore more on this self-claimed missing web UI. A good starting point would be to follow discussions at HN. The general argument against ES seems to be that it was designed for full text search but is popular as a log analyzer. Pilosa seems to be a new kid in this space.

• 17 productivity and focus apps/extensions from RadReadings. Looks interesting - StayFocusd, which is now redirecting to freedom; batchedinbox; Bookcision. Of the tools mentioned, I use Google Auto Advance, Evernote, keyboard expander (similar to textexpander but less powerful), onetab, instapaper (occasionally) and quitter.
• How I get work done by Marie Kondo. On the significance of things Ask yourself this, often: Is what I’m doing connected to the kind of life that will spark joy for me? By thinking through this, the steps required to have that kind of life become clearer. I really do recommend tidying. Make sure all the things in your home spark joy and that all the things have their proper place. Just getting your home in order can really make your life clearer. It can make your head clearer.