#this is the much shorter and less well-sourced version of the essay I was thinking of writing

[cappucino-commie]

Isn't climate change irreversible? Even if we make drastic changes now, it's much too late. We as a species should've taken action decades ago, no?

What is true: we should have taken action decades ago

What is not true: it is "too late"

The latter is a very expensive lie brought to you by Exxon Mobile®. It is not too late to avert the suffering of millions of people, it is not too late to move towards sustainable, planned degrowth economies, it is not even too late to curb some of the warming we are already experiencing.

Even in the short term, pop-sci understanding of climate change perspective, there are direct actions we can take to avert the suffering of hundreds of millions of people. We can prepare for climate migrants, build climate-resistant & sustainable cities, adjust global crop systems to resist drought & heat waves, and embrace economic degrowth. At an individual level, you can get involved with socialist parties and help organize to make this happen, and participate in direct action to build material systems of support for folks.

But there is a longer term, more scientifically informed perspective on this as well to help reverse these "irreversible" changes.

Without getting too far into the scientific weeds, our planet does naturally change its temperature, mostly through a process known as the carbon cycle. Our planet has always had a warming blanket of carbon dioxide, which made the Earth warm enough for us to evolve, and the level of carbon in the atmosphere fluctuates- not just on a geologic timescale, but even seasonally with the bloom & death of plant life. This system can help us sequester carbon- and that is already happening! If the carbon cycle didn't exist, the amount of carbon we have emitted would have already baked us all to death. The existing system has some "slack" in it, meaning the majority of humanity's carbon emissions actually haven't ended up in the atmosphere.

Humanity is not separate from these ecological systems, and they can be turned to our benefit to curb the worst of these consequences and repair our planet. The work is not easy, but it can be done: Repairing damaged rainforests, coastal mangroves, ocean sea grass, and so on. By using thousands of years of ecological expertise and scientific knowledge, we can help these systems work to sequester carbon and curb some of the worst effects of these emissions. Eventually, in the timescale of just a few thousand years and with a lot of work, the planet can be returned to a preindustrial state.

That is not an excuse to procrastinate on change, but a reminder that our fate is not set in stone. Regardless of what we will do, there are consequences for our existing emissions, you can see them already. But it is not "too late" to make a difference. In fact, just going to carbon zero will allow these systems to begin absorbing atmospheric carbon and curbing some of the warming. The faster we do so, the more we can take advantage of these existing mechanisms.

This will require revolutionary change. It is easy to read "if we just go to carbon zero and live in harmony with nature, things will eventually be ok" and think it is idealist dreaming. But even if we do nothing, life will be radically different in a few decades. Our only real choice is changing for better (sustainable socialist economies) or worse (ecological fascism or collapse). We must believe this change is possible, we must have revolutionary faith & discipline as Marxists.

(And if you do not consider yourself a Marxist- you should reconsider it. It seems radical, and radical is needed. Socialism is the only path humanity has towards an ecologically sustainable, equitable future.)

[studythenight-away]

Hello! As finals season (aka 5-research-papers-due-in-a-week season) dawns on many of you, I thought I would share the process I used to write papers in college. This made writing long research papers much less daunting (but can also work on shorter papers). I really hope this helps some of you who feel stuck. Especially during these ridiculous times, when you're stuck at home and might have other uncontrollable factors affecting your mental health, a clear framework of what to do could be helpful. Good luck, my friends! You got this.

About me

I graduated college in 2018 with degrees in Political Science + International Studies and will be starting law school this fall. I wrote nearly 20 15 to 25-page papers, never earning below an A. I loved researching about my topics but hated writing. It's tedious, takes so much time, and everything I write sounds bad at first. Plus, I was a terrible procrastinator so most of these essays were written in under a week. Talk about stress.

Over time I found a process that worked for me, one that made churning out a paper seem straightforward, like going through a factory line rather than this terrifying concept of writing 10,000 words. It kept me sane without decreasing the quality of my work (or more importantly, how much I learned!) 

I'm thinking about making a short video to show this in action… let me know if that could be helpful!

Step 1: Research

How you organize your research is a key step in keeping you sane. Usually I'll have a pile of 20 books in my dorm along with dozens of JSTOR tabs open on my laptop, and that can get overwhelming very fast. Right now just focus on collecting ideas, not developing an argument or even an outline! As with most research papers, you could be starting with little to no background information on the topic, so it is still too early to be thinking about an argument.

Put all your research in one document

Open up a new doc: this will be the heart of everything. For a 15-page paper I usually end up with around 14-18 pages of typed research, 10 pt font, single spaced, tiny margins. This seems like a lot, but essentially all I do is type up anything I read that seems relevant to my topic, so luckily this step does not require that much brain power. Just type type type!

Use the table of contents

Find the chapter(s) that are actually relevant instead of skimming through the whole book. Time is of the essence here!

Use Zotero, cite right away

You can also use easybib or whatever you're used to, but keep track of your sources. I like Zotero because I can keep a log of all of my sources and copy the footnote or bibliography version whenever needed. Before you even begin reading, cite the source and copy it into your research doc. This will save you so much time later when you have to put in your citations in the actual paper. 

Here is an example of what my research doc looks like:

Full citation is my heading for each source just so it’s crystal clear

I ignore all typos (I don’t think there are any in this part though, go me!) because my head is buried in the book just trying to get all the info down

I always start with the page number so I know what to cite when I go back

Create a shorthand 

While typing up research, you might think of something that the author didn't talk about that you'll want to write in your paper. Or perhaps a few sentences already start to form. Put them all in one place, with your research, so you know what source you'll have to cite to then lead into your idea. I type "!@#" before anything that is strictly my own idea so I'm never confused. It's fast and stands out.

This is an example: the two bullet points above are evidence from my source, which made me think of this argument I could make, which I noted with “!@#”

Step 2: Read Your Research

Now that you have all your information, go back and read through it all. Every time you read about a new theme/person/event, write it down somewhere. You may come up with a list of 20+ different ideas in your research. No matter how small, as long as there is something about it, write it down. Each of these mini themes is going to end up being a paragraph in your paper or combined with another mini theme. 

Once you’ve made your list, look for larger overarching themes. In the paper I’ve shown you, I had mini categories like “political party x” “religion” “labor groups” “little organization” and “hierarchy.” When I looked back I though, hey these are all groups and how groups are working together, so they each became their own mini paragraph under the subsection of “Alliances.”

As with most research paper structures, I try to find three general themes/subsections (like an extended version of that 5-paragraph essay we wrote in middle school). It makes the paper less messy and also makes sure I’m not covering things that are beyond a reasonable scope.

During this step, you are also searching for your thesis. It won’t be your final version. As you fill in your outline in the next step you may make slight changes. But this is definitely when you start thinking about it.

Step 3: Outline

We’re ready to outline! Once I’ve collected all my different themes and organized all my subsections and paragraphs, it’s time to fill in that outline. I start a new doc just for the outline and take advantage of google doc’s headings function to make a clear document outline.

Here comes the fun part, I read through my research one more time, this time copy and pasting all my research into each section of the outline. The document outline in google docs makes this easy because I can just click on each subheading to get me there (super helpful when you’re dealing with 15+ pages of research).

Here is what it looks like:

Let’s say I need to add something to my outline about labor groups. Boom, labor groups. Also, the typos are really abound here haha

Step 4: Write the Paper

Okay, I get it, easier said than done. BUT! You already have everything set up. Your outline is essentially just a list of your paragraphs and all you have to do is paraphrase, cite, and create a topic sentence. And that’s how you should think about this: you’re essentially transforming bullet points into sentences and adding footnotes. 

In high school my English teacher introduced us to Sh*tty First Drafts for creative writing, but honestly the same applies to research papers. Sometimes I’ll even have phrases like “wait no that’s not what I meant but basically...” and when I go back to edit, I realize that what came after “but basically...” is fine! And I keep it. So just start typing.

How do you cite while you write? Because we’re trying to get a constant stream of writing going, inserting proper footnotes after each sentence you type is too bothersome. I usually split screen with my outline and my paper so I just copy and paste a few words from my bullet point into my footnote, like so:

(This is from a different paper about cluster munitions.)

Step 5: Edit the Paper

I work best when I print out my first draft and make all edits in red pen. I feel more productive and can visually see where I want to move sentences and what I need to change. The more red there is the better I can feel the paper getting. (Whether or not that’s true doesn’t matter. We’re trying to stay motivated here!) When it’s all digital I don’t really see the progress. Plus, once I finish all the red, I get another moment of passive brain work, where all I’m doing is transferring edits rather than thinking. And at this point in the process, that kind of relief is much welcomed. 

The good thing about this process is there’s not usually a need to cut entire paragraphs or pages because the paper you end up with is just a formalized version of your outline. Because you started with such a detailed outline, the cutting and editing now is just to refine your word choices and get rid of the “but basically”s. You’re almost there!

Step 6: Replace your citations

Now it’s time to go back and replace your footnotes with actual citations. Zotero makes this easy because in Word you can just insert and add the page number, and it’ll automatically do “Ibid.” for you when needed. Ctrl+f in the original research doc to quickly find the source.

Step 7: One More Read-Through and Submit!

Congratulations!! You’ve got a fully-researched and well-backed paper! Of course, even though the process is straightforward, it’s still a lot of work. In ideal situations I would start researching two weeks before the deadline, but if need be, I believe I’ve done this all in three miserable panic-filled days as well. 

Please message me if you have any questions at all! I really hope some of you find this helpful! Good luck!

[dgcatanisiri]

The key to any good adaption is understanding a certain set of things.

1. Don’t be afraid to update the source material. Yes, even if it’s “timeless.”

All media is a product of its time, so you need to recognize that what worked for the original will not necessarily translate for the new audience. If a basic conceit of your product is a certain societal mindset is the norm (just, for example, that “homosexuality is inherently bad,” or “transgender people are inherently hilarious,” or “a woman’s place is unquestionably in the home”), you’re probably best off just packing it in then and there, it’s not going to work. Society evolves, times change, and while we can let these things slide for media that is older, we do not extend this same slack to media made now.

There’s a reason that a lot of stagings of something like Taming of the Shrew, or more modern adaptations like Kiss Me Kate or 10 Things I Hate About You, will often twist what is, on the page, Kate’s “tameness” being a show for the sake of winning the wager, that she is merely performing what is expected of her, while still maintaining her own independence and attitude, and that she has learned that she could use this performance to make Petruchio do as she wanted, or even that the both of them are in on it and have found an equal in the other - in the 15th century, “taming” a “shrew” was considered how one was supposed to be, that a woman was supposed to be subservient to her husband, and that her being so brash and bold from the start was already pushing the values of Shakespeare’s original audience. 

And this is the case of adapting something even as recent as ten, fifteen, twenty years ago - society has changed, and it’s recognized that what was seen as acceptable then was actually punching down at marginalized groups. That’s not funny. Comedy is the quickest genre to age, and the most likely to age poorly. Look at any given 90s romcom and you’ll notice a LOT of issues - the heteronormativity, where no one is gay (aside from MAYBE a single token character), the cast is mostly white - there may, at most, be a black best friend who may or may not be paired up with someone who literally exists for the purpose of arm candy, and you might spot an extra or two in the background, and they’ll use words that we now recognize as slurs so casually you’ll have to go back to realize yeah, they actually said that. And that’s not even scratching the surface.

When it comes to coming to an old piece of media and deciding “I want to do this again,” you absolutely MUST recognize what is no longer acceptable. And if the baseline concept of your selected media is something unacceptable, put aside the dream, this will not end well for you if you attempt to go through with it.

2. Recognize what works and what doesn’t for your medium.

This is something more for straightforward adaptations - book to movie, movie to TV show, stage to screen, etc. A change in medium is going to require a change to the material. It just is. This is why, for example, straight adaptations of video games are extremely hard to pull off - you’re changing an interactive media to a noninteractive one, and, in a lot of cases, that guts the core investment. It’s one thing to play Lara Croft as she raids the tombs, doing the platforming and puzzle challenges yourself. But as a movie, just taking any given game and making a direct 1:1 reshoot, you’re basically just watching her do the same thing with no involvement yourself, and, as a result, you end up watching a glorified cutscene.

It’s the same with stage to screen. Theatre is a medium of its own, with its own internal logic, rules, and structure. In theatre, a character can address the audience, it’s accepted. It doesn’t quite work as well on screen. (For further expansion, there’s a segment of Lindsay Ellis’s video essay on Mel Brooks and The Ethics of Satire that discusses how this works for the stage version of The Producers, but fizzled out in the 2006 film adaptation.) This is often a problem in film adaptations of stage musicals, that the directors don’t know what to focus on or how to film a large group of people, dancing and singing, so, while there’s some general competence, a lot of the film directors don’t have the same eye for them that they would in a straightforward dialogue-driven movie. Stopping the dramatic interaction between two people for what is, in effect, a symbolic struggle as they exchange heated high notes throws off the momentum of a director who knows how to stage the actors and move the camera in a direct argument, but gets confused when both parties dance across the soundstage all through the scene.

Likewise, books allow the audience to understand what is going through a character’s head during a scene, we are able to hear their thoughts and recognize what they’re doing without the character ever speaking a word. That is a luxury film’s nature doesn’t offer. Voice overs are a frequent way around this, but that too is limiting, generally forcing the film into a single viewpoint, which may not be how the narrative was structured. So this is where establishing dialogue has to be included.

This can be a problem, though, as the screenwriter may have a different style than the original writer, so, instead of transplanting dialogue, they have to come up with their own words, which can often end up just being an exposition dump. It can be done, but it is a tightrope walk.

3. Understand what can and can’t be cut.

A frequent problem of adaptations, especially to film, is that they are drawing on source material that maybe be, in a direct, 1:1 adaptation of the original, too long for a modern adaptation. This is a frequent issue with the Harry Potter adaptations, for example, where to cover all of the events of just the first book, would probably have clocked in at three and a half, even four hours, and they only got longer from there. Some things just had to go.

Which is a problem, because for the most part, if something is in the source material, it is there for a reason. Foreshadowing, character establishment, worldbuilding, whatever, there is a reason that any content is included in the first place. 

So you need to find ways to either condense or work around things - going back to Harry Potter, as a character, while he’d had his uses in the books, Peeves’s contribution to the overall tapestry of the series was small enough that he could be removed. Same with a character like Professor Binns, whose largest contribution was the exposition of the Chamber of Secrets, could have that shunted over to a character like Professor McGonagall, with no need to hire another actor for one scene and account for this character later (this later came into play with characters like Professor Trelawney, who appeared in all the books after her introduction, but not every film). 

The runtime makes a difference, especially given how much we see movies try to have as many showing per day as they can - the shorter the film, the more times it can be shown. So you need to know what can go and what can be condensed. 

But this can backfire - cutting a scene can often remove important context and characterization, even if it’s short or small. Star Trek, the 09 film, cut a scene between young James Kirk and his older brother. Now, it’s not really that important in this adaptation that Kirk has an older brother, so on paper, yeah, this scene getting cut made sense. BUT this scene featured Kirk’s older brother walking out because of the abuse being inflicted on them by “Uncle Frank,” and how he intended to sell their father’s car, how Frank was denying James Kirk a sense of being who he was, telling him “You’re no one.” This is what leads to the reckless theft of said car that did make it into the final cut, and made that joyride less into a moment of “fuck the man, I do what I want,” and more of a moment of declaration of him trying to find himself (and makes this kid shouting to the robo-cop “My name is James Tiberius Kirk!” less of a cutesy way of getting in the character’s full name and more a way of, again, showing him declaring who he is.) It also shows James Kirk’s desire for justice and fairness for people, a VERY important element for this character, showing him standing up for his older brother, ostensibly someone who should be standing up for him instead. This is a pretty big characterization moment that got cut, presumably because the casual audience didn’t know that Kirk had an older brother.

I realize that this is using a cut scene from the film script and not a direct adaptation, but I think that’s an important thing to bring up anyway, given that Star Trek 09 was an adaptation of a three year TV series - of course they had to condense, launch arcs that successive movies could pick up, all of that. But they still needed to establish these characters. By cutting this scene, you lose that core nugget of Kirk’s character, and we’re left with reckless asshole Kirk, the character a lot of people thought didn’t deserve the center chair by the end of the movie because moments like this didn’t make the final cut.

Know your story, know your characters, and understand how to keep their core identities while still cutting the things you can’t keep, because of medium changes or runtime concerns.

4. What new elements are you bringing to the table?

If you’re making a new adaptation of something, WHY are you making it? What is the benefit of not just a new version of old material, but even what makes YOU the correct storyteller?

Let’s give another example here. Let’s say that I am given the green light to go for a new adaptation of... oh, let’s say Superman’s early years, we’re ten years out from the end of Smallville, surely someone’s gonna start kicking that around eventually, let’s go with it here and now. My requirements are to keep the baseline of Smallville for a new show - high school Clark Kent, no flights, no tights to start with, developing, growing powers, friendship with Lex Luthor, same core cast to start with (so Clark, Pete, Chloe, Lana, Whitney, Lex, Lionel, Martha, and Jonathan), basically start the series fresh from the point of the original series’s pilot. How I go from there is up to me, re: how much/how little to incorporate from later in the series, when powers develop and in what order, when to introduce other characters... I just basically have to start fresh with the same components of Smallville that the original had.

So when given these components, I feel it is my obligation to create a new picture with them, because to just retread the old material, updates to the time and cast notwithstanding, is saying I don’t see this as worth doing anything different. And if that’s the case, why bother? It is incumbent on me to do different things with these pieces - maybe in this version, Lana’s a lesbian and dating Chloe, which mostly puts to bed the Clark-Lana relationship (or maybe she briefly uses Clark as a beard to cover her attraction). Whitney can become a part of the core cast, instead of being like the only opening credits characters who never learns Clark’s secret. Pete’s known about Clark’s powers for years. The meteor freaks ...okay, no, I’m calling them ‘metahumans’ from the start here, are going to be a more persistent element to the central struggle - none of the convenient karmic killing, Clark has to deal with the consequences of these characters having enhanced abilities, not just have them conveniently fall down and break their neck or something. Lex ends up brought into the core group, and it becomes a central conflict of his character arc that he may actually have the potential to not be the ultimate villain - this is an adaptation, it’s entirely possible that Lex being the bad guy is NOT a foregone conclusion, especially if one wants to take the moral of “nothing is written in stone, there is no fate.”

...shit, now I actually WANT to do this version...

See, that’s taking the same pieces and making a new picture with them. Because if you’re just going to redo the original, just let the original air in place of your new thing, because you have made no effort to change anything other than the bare minimum. Hell, even Smallville brought something new to the table by creating Chloe Sullivan, who did not exist in Superman media before, but has since appeared sporadically in the comics. 

Don’t just tell the same old story to tell the same old story. Bring something new to the table. If you’re really lucky, you may just add something that becomes so definitive to the franchise, when people talk about it later, they’ll wonder why it wasn’t there to begin with - another DC hero example, look at Batman the Animated Series, without which we would not have either Harley Quinn or Victor Fries’s tragic backstory, yet now both are considered iconic and core to the franchise and the character, respectively.

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

Stop shaming recipe bloggers for writing a lot

Every so often, someone will act very angry online because a recipe they clicked on has "too much text." They wanted to make mushroom ravioli, but instead had to scroll through a bunch of words about what mushroom ravioli means to a blogger's family. Boring!

It's true that many (if not most) food bloggers write long narratives preceding their recipes. Sometimes, they explain how they developed the recipe. Other times, they share why they chose to post this particular food, or explain the modifications they've made to accommodate family members with dietary restrictions. They might share a story about the dish providing them comfort in a difficult time, or how cooking the dish with a loved one healed a broken relationship. Food is personal, after all; it comes with stories. 

So why do so many people rush to mock them?

Cadry Nelson, a food blogger who runs the vegan website Cadry's Kitchen, includes narratives with her recipes regularly. (She's also written an essay about recipe narratives.) This is partially because she wanted to document her transition to veganism, the context in which she developed much of her work. In doing so, she'd create a reference point for readers curious about going vegan themselves.

"I was trying a lot of produce I’d never had before, as well as re-creating old familiar flavors but without meat, dairy, and eggs," she explained in an interview. "I didn’t have many other friends who were vegan at that point."

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This summer it will have been 9 years since we loaded up all of our belongings into a U-Haul & moved across country from Los Angeles back to Iowa, where David & I were born & raised. On the way, we stopped at FUD restaurant in Kansas City. The restaurant is gone now. But they were known for their raw dishes & jackfruit recipes. I especially loved their jackfruit Reuben. I figured it was high time I made my own version. The jackfruit is pink from beets. It’s topped with homemade #vegan Thousand Island dressing, @goldminenaturalfoodco garlic kraut, and beautiful marbled rye from @newpioneercoop. Get the recipe on the blog. Link in profile. #vegansofiowa #vegansofig #veganfoodporn #reubensandwich #veganreuben #whatveganseat #vegancomfortfood #vegansandwich #foodporn #foodphotography #foodstagram

A post shared by Cadry Nelson (@cadryskitchen) on Feb 7, 2019 at 10:46am PST

Sharing this information doesn't just benefit her readers, either. It also helps her secure a place in the saturated food blog realm. "Through these posts, I’ve gotten to know bloggers’ flavor preferences too," Nelson said. By sharing stories on blogs, people get to know the types of foods [and] flavors that specific recipe creators enjoy. You figure out who is a good match for your own palate."

So why do people have such an issue with people writing about their own food? It seems to come down to convenience. Generally, perturbed readers complain that it takes too long for them to scroll down to the recipe itself.

Historian Kevin Kruse, for example, tweeted his disdain for recipe narratives last weekend: "Hey, cooking websites?" he wrote. "I don't really need a thousand words about how you discovered the recipe or the feelings it evoked for you ... I'm trying to feed my family. No need to curate the experience for me."

SEE ALSO: Why the '15-minute recipe' sets you up to fail

"GIMME THE RECIPE HON MY SCROLL FINGER HURTS," tweeted Chelsea Peretti last November.

Admittedly, it is irritating when anything is difficult to find on the internet, especially when we've come to expect an easy-as-pie user experience from every app and every website. It can feel like a slog to scroll through paragraphs of text when all you want is a list of ingredients.

But the thing to interrogate here isn't necessarily whether blocks of text are annoying — it's why people think these particular blocks of text don't deserve to exist.

Nelson thinks there's an element of sexism to the critiques she sees about recipe writing. Home cooking is still a deeply gendered pursuit, and writers whose work centers on home cooking are still perceived as less professional, less valuable, and less worthy voices.  "The feeling seems to be that they don't think these writers have something of value to offer," Nelson said.

There's been high-profile backlash to the backlash against recipe narratives. After Kruse's tweet, Smitten Kitchen creator Deb Perelman tweeted a thread on the matter, encouraging recipe writers to "write as long and as in-depth as your heart desires about recipes and anything else they drum up in your mind and ignore anyone who says you shouldn't."

1. These websites are free to read and free to not read. /3

— deb perelman (@debperelman) February 16, 2019

2. It's mostly women telling these stories. Congratulations, you've found a new, not particularly original, way to say "shut up and cook." [I just don't see don't see the same pushback when male chefs write about their wild days or basically anything. Do you?] /4

— deb perelman (@debperelman) February 16, 2019

3. Not that you asked, but I love context, both in the recipe's development and the way it knits into your life. I wish more people who cooked got to tell their stories. /5

— deb perelman (@debperelman) February 16, 2019

Like Nelson, she also called out detractors' casual sexism. "Congratulations, you've found a new, not particularly original, way to say 'shut up and cook,'" she tweeted. "I just don't see don't see the same pushback when male chefs write about their wild days or basically anything. Do you?"

"I wish more people who cooked got to tell their stories," she added.

There's also a more technical element at play where recipe narratives are concerned: search engine optimization (SEO). Recipe bloggers want to catch the attention of the illusive Google algorithm —  and, ideally, land their recipe on the coveted first page — so they must demonstrate "authority" in their field. This means more comprehensive content, which is really hard to pull off with a concise recipe alone. (Tons of people will be using the phrase "apple crumble," for example, but only you can write your own story about it.)

"When I’m writing, I try to tell a story that has a hook as well as please[s] the Google algorithm," Nelson said. "I do keyword research ... I see what kinds of questions people have around the topic, and look for ways to anticipate their problems, and answer their questions, so that they will have a successful cooking experience. Lately, I’ve been adding more step-by-step pictures of how to make dishes, as well as videos, because Google says that readers want that."

Even though she's noticed people criticizing lengthy posts, Nelson maintains that writing a lot — authoritatively, of course — is what's going to get eyes on her recipes. "People say they want shorter posts, but Google values information," she said. "It’s hard to give information without using some words along the way."

SEO and marketing experts agree that Nelson's approach is a smart one, especially in such a saturated landscape. "Because a recipe usually consists of a listing of ingredients and steps, it’s often very difficult for a search engine to discern what this article is trying to convey," Pete Herrnreiter, who is the VP of digital strategy at The Motion Agency, explained via email. "By developing a richer upfront with background on the dish ... it [helps to] define the post."

Content strategist Abby Sanders, who works for Von Mack Agency, also emphasized the advantages of differentiating one's recipe from the pack. "These days, search engines are pretty effective at determining whether a page can serve as an 'expert source' on a specific query," she said. "So any additional content that includes certain keywords, as long as it's coherent and well-written, will improve that page's ranking."

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Who'd have thought two such aggressively wholesome ingredients could taste so exceptional together? To be honest, not me. But we come back to this again and again whenever we are looking for a hearty vegetarian meal because it tastes like a luxury, not a compromise, especially heaped on grilled bread. [Spinach and Chickpeas on smittenkitchen.com or linked in profile]

A post shared by smitten kitchen (@smittenkitchen) on Feb 19, 2019 at 9:10am PST

As a caveat, Sanders mentioned, there are "plenty of other factors that play a role in rankings, such as domain authority, links to that page, and the list goes on. But from a sheer content standpoint, it does make good sense for a food blogger to write some extra, interesting copy around their subject."

So, fine. Finding a list of chili ingredients would be easier if we didn't have to scroll. But recipe bloggers are writers, and they have stories to share that are poignant, funny, and valuable — even if you (and I) don't love every single one you read. And if you really don't like the narratives? There are plenty of places for you to find story-free recipes online, though you might have to pay for a subscription to see some of them. Also, cookbooks exist.

"My food blog is my own. It’s my creative space. I spend a lot of time testing the recipes, taking photographs, making videos, and writing my stories," Nelson said. "If people aren’t interested in any aspect, so be it."

"My blog is Cadry’s Kitchen. It’s literally the place where I cook," she added. "I don’t know why I would write myself out of it."

WATCH: What happens to your body when you eat spicy food?

[ehentha]

The Male' City Swimming Track

I am floating on my back with my eyes closed. The sun is beating down on my face from above. The rumbling monster of the city is silenced and for a moment I forget about the stress that brought me here. The fresh morning air is tainted with the smell of diesel. I exhale and sink further down under the water’s surface.

The smell disappears. The water feels cold on my face and I feel goosebumps rise along my arms. My heartbeat steadily quickens as my body craves oxygen. I rise from the illusion and the endless noise of the city once again swarms my consciousness.

“Pretty cold today huh,” I remark to my friend while feeling the bumps along my arm. She’s sitting in waist deep water on the shallow side towards the tripod rocks.

“I bet you’re gonna miss this once you’re gone,” she said laughing.

She was right. I haven’t been out for a proper swim ever since I’d moved to Tasmania. My heart aches for the ocean. It is so close, yet it is so cold and unforgiving that its existence might as well be a mirage. My brief forays have been anything but enjoyable. A shivering overtakes the body and you feel your core begin to tighten up. It becomes difficult to breath and an icy panic begins to set in. Things seem different for those that learnt how to swim here. I see them dive effortlessly off their private yachts from where they swim sometimes great distances to the shore. Perhaps one day I will get used to it as well.

  When I tell people that I am Maldivian their first reaction is one of barely concealed envy. “Wow! What a beautiful place! You must be so lucky!”. I am quick to correct them that no, I am not from the Maldives as much as I am from Male’ City.

Male’ City is a very different place from the rest of the Maldives. It has no natural beaches, and when I was very young the Track was the only place that people went swimming regularly. I, like many other residents of Male’ city, learnt how to swim there. “Track ah’ hingaa dhaan! (let’s go to the Track!)”, is a phrase that is familiar to young and old alike.

By the time that I was a teenager the government had created what they called the “Artificial Beach” on the East side of the island, but the fact that it was crowded, incredibly shallow and usually smelled even worse than the Track made it a less popular option. You could also of course try your luck in the Raalhugandu area, but the chaotic surf makes this unpleasant, and the shallower side is far too shallow with too many rocks to actually go swimming.

The current Yameen administration has made a second artificial beach on the West side of the island that seems larger and a lot nicer, but I cannot speak about it as I have not been back to the Maldives since its creation a few years ago. All the photographs included in this essay are thus taken between 2006 and 2009. It was a time before GoPros and other action cams had become mainstream. Most of the photographs were therefore taken by using compact cameras in waterproof plastic cases and then later a hard case once I had purchased myself a Canon G10 in mid-2009. There are also a few photographs that were taken using an expired disposable underwater camera from Tropicolour. 

The area you could swim in used to be much longer and when I was a child the boats were limited to the very edge. As a result the water used to be a lot clearer and less polluted. This also meant that the Track was a lot more accessible to the public and thus less crowded.

One of my earliest memories is going swimming there with my Father and some cousins. I was a child and barely knew how to swim so I clung to his back as he swam across the divide. Two thirds of the way there he spotted an abandoned suitcase on the bottom. He tells me to wait as he dives down below. I nervously tread water and open my eyes underwater to watch his descent. He glides down and picks it up off the bottom. A cloud of dust surrounds him. He resurfaces and shakes his head. I grab onto his shoulders and we continue our journey across to the tripod rocks. It is my first memory of swimming by myself.

Along the island facing side there used to be moored many barges, or “bandu” (literally: stomach or belly). Off these rusting Goliath's young people used to ride their bikes straight into the water. Sometimes they’d do a flourish in the air, sometimes they’d just tumble in, but they all remembered to kick the bikes away lest it hit them on the way down.

With great effort they would then pull up the sunken bikes so that they and their friends can have another go. Too young to have my own bike and too shy to talk to them, I used to just watch in awe. “One day I’m going to ride my bike off a bandu!” I’d think to myself, fantasising about all the cool aerial manoeuvres I’d pull off.

 Back then instead of the swimming practises being restricted to the floating constructions in the middle of the track, they used to be conducted perpendicular to the sea wall. Our laps would almost always consist of swimming from the road side to the tripod rocks and back. “Do 20 laps!”, our instructor would say, seemingly oblivious to the fact that a lack of proper markings meant that each consecutive lap would be shorter from the far side.

Despite it still being cleaner than what it is like now, it was still far from the pristine waters depicted in tourist propaganda. Everyone would always have some itch or rash that they were suffering from; probably in no small part due to a mysterious blue pipe that was constantly pumping out a warm toxic cloud of god knows what. Ironically that pipe was how most of us got out of the track. There were no ladders so it provided firm enough ground from which you could grab onto the edge and pull yourself up. You could try to grip and push off the side of the wall itself, but this usually resulted in cut feet from the barnacles or worse - breaking off the brittle spines of a sea urchin; which was almost impossible to remove from your feet.

Trying to edge it out with a needle, as you would do with a splinter, only makes the situation worse as the delicate spine begins to disintegrate. One local remedy, which I have been subjected to multiple times, is to lather the foot in rihaakuru (fish paste from tuna) and to then hover them over a burning fire. The rihaakru heats up, which in turn heats up the embedded spine which then allegedly begins to melt off. I am still suspicious about the efficacy of this treatment, and whether the intense pain was worth it, as it never seemed to remove all of the spines.

By far the best thing about those practices was the sense of community it fostered. Each parent would bring something different for the long weekend sessions; favourites being chilled Milo with sweetened condensed milk instead of sugar and oranges coated in pure glucose powder. Even though the energy drink craze was many decades away we were never lacking in a source of incredibly unhealthy energy.

A highlight for me was taking part in the 2-kilometre race which was swum parallel from one end of the harbour to the track and back again. I came in last, but at least I managed to finish it. I was also, if I recall correctly, about 12 years old at the time; and thus at a considerable size disadvantage compared to most of the other participants to say the least.

For a lot of people, the Track was the closest you could get to escaping the claustrophobic heat of the inner city short of leaving the island itself. Many people would sit around the shallow side in waist high water, submerged up to their necks, chatting about current events. Others would sit on or cling to the outer side of the swimming platform - the inner usually being occupied by the swimming practices of various schools.

Another favourite activity was to dive into the water from the road side. Some people would even start from the opposite pavement. They would wait patiently for traffic to cease, after which they would dash across; spring boarding into the water from the concrete at the last possible moment.

I loved the rush of that split second before contact when you are suspended in the air. People would really try to push their luck, sometimes coming within inches of scraping themselves on the rocks which were lined up against the wall of that area of the track. The most impressive jump I’ve ever seen was from this man who flew so far that he managed to land inside the floating swim area, his feet just barely making it past the buoys.

The swimming platforms themselves had gone through various iterations before finally settling on the ones made from seemingly indestructible orange and blue plastic buoys that are there today. If I remember correctly they used empty barrels to keep the old wooden platforms afloat. Swimming lanes would be created by ropes that would extend between buoys. As a result these older versions were much less rigid and were prone to drift around in the current.

One of the greatest pleasures in life is to go for a swim when its raining on a hot day. Oh how I miss that feeling. The rain pounds down from above, an onslaught of tepid fat drops that instantly soaks you to the bone. When you make your way into the water, the relative cool of the air makes the water feel extra warm; almost as if it is heated.

The sound of the rain against the water drowns out the noise of the city. The sound is hypnotic. Meditative. The complete opposite of what one is used to hearing. No more rumbling machinery. No more buzzing drills and slamming hammers. The roads, normally packed with motorcycles, clear out. The rain also creates the illusion of privacy. One feels safe within the storm, and emboldened by this torrential veil, couples hold each other closer than they would have in the sun.

Your Track experience really isn’t complete unless you’ve been smacked across the face with a used condom at least once. Conservative attitudes and cramped quarters means that people don’t have much room to breathe; and if you don’t have space to talk in private with a loved one, just imagine how little space there is to have sex. Couples embrace along the floating barriers and sometimes even inside the crevices formed by the tripod rocks.

The tripod rocks themselves could be the basis of its own essay. In a similar manner to how the Track forms a barrier against the bustle of the city, the tripod rocks form a refuge from the Track itself. When I was in primary school I’d listen wide eyed to the tall tales of my cool friend who’d tell me all about his older brother who would go there to smoke cigars in secret. When I was older my friends who smoked cigarettes would continue the tradition by carrying their packs and lighters wrapped up in plastic bags. They would climb to the top of the rocks, unpack their bounty, light up and breathe deeply while staring off into the expanse of the ocean beyond the horizon.

When you are looking away from the island in that direction for a few brief moments it is as if the city behind you doesn’t exist. The ocean breeze feels fresh and untainted and the sound of the waves constantly crashing down on the rocks drowns out all but the most obnoxious of motorists. Many lovers have sat there, holding hands and staring off into the distance, wondering what the future holds.

Unlike a regular swimming pool, sterile and barren, the Track is full of marine life. In many ways it is its own ecosystem, with new arrivals constantly swimming in through the gaps of the tripod rocks. A dead dolphin even made an appearance at one of the practice sessions and caused quite the commotion.

It is a common sight to see small specimens of different kinds of filolhu (a type of fish from the Lethrinidae family - commonly known as emperors) cruising along the sandy bottom. Sometimes this bottom is covered with a certain jellyfish that has the appearance of a cake covered in many little candles.

A lot of young people, myself included, would sometimes try to catch a type of pipefish (a relative of the seahorse) with our hands as it often rested along the rocky shallows. Chasing them around provided a fun challenge; although it does seem cruel and unnecessary in retrospect.

The tripod rocks are always covered with several types of sea snails and a type of crab. The crabs would sit around in groups picking off bits of moss with their claws. When it was time for them to moult, they would climb up onto higher ground and discard their shells. People would often collect these perfectly preserved carapaces as souvenirs.

 The state of life in the Track seems to be on the decline. When I was young I’d go with my mother and hunt for raakani, a kind of shellfish that is delicious when barbecued. We’d find them along the bottom and along the shallower parts of the ocean facing side. We kept it up for a few months until we stopped finding them. Perhaps others were doing the same and we were all actively hurting the ecosystem.

Similarly, when I was a teenager I used to accompany some friends who would go hunting in the track for lion fish and other exotic species for their marine tank. These adventures followed a similar pattern. A time of abundance followed by a slow decline until eventually we were barely catching anything at all.

  One thing that was never in short supply is trash. All kinds of trash. You name it, it’s there. Bottles, cooking utensils, chairs, entire beds, all manner of plastic and food wrappers, cigarette butts, pens, pencils, cans, clothing, national flags, motor parts; if it was something that someone in Male’ city had used it at some point, then it was almost a certainty that you'd find it at the track.

Other than various sporadic efforts to clean up the place by youths and various other organisations, there isn’t really a system in place to manage the trash.

Maldivian’s have an extremely nonchalant attitude towards waste disposal. A clue is in our word for beach - “gondudhoh”; which literally translates to by the (dhoh) trash dump (gondu). In islands that still have beaches, the tradition is maintained by turning one side of the island into a complete ecological disaster. Many islands I’ve visited have had this side completely inaccessible as the bottom is covered with dangerous trash such as broken glass and hundreds of little cans of tomato paste. Another historical use of the beach was to defecate - the method being to dig a small hole in the sand which one would cover afterwards. This was even the case in Male’ for when my parents’ generation was young as back then the island still had some of its beaches intact. They would tell us stories to gross us out, about how bad the place smelled, and how they would occasionally step on someone else’s business accidentally.

The current residents of Male’ City are no longer so lucky, so perhaps in a strange way, dumping endless amounts of trash into one of the few places they can still go for a swim is their way of having a gondudhoh of their own.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE VENTURE ANIMAL

Ibm's blind spot. I never know who to use. By the time you get throngs of geeks. Fortunately, I can tell, is the group within companies that buys other companies. For better or worse than the past? When you decide what the value of whatever you launch with is as a guide to strategy, and one version is much shorter. When I was in school, writing a prototype of something that could be a useful quality in programming. But Dropbox was a much better deal for them to decide to go to school, which makes software free; the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs force hackers to be scientists, and companies will arise to supply payment and streaming a la carte to the producers of drama. Every check has a cost.

And so in starting a company that could get annoying—but you should never shrink from it if it's on topic in the sense that all you have to know about those in a startup run by a couple of founders who have some great idea they know everyone is going to ask if any of the software. There was another speaker who was much better than random. Sometimes the current even starts to flow in, so you'd have security as well. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make it harder to engage with an audience. You can do that. Great hackers also generally insist on using open source software that anyone can use for future rounds. In the real world, it's generally the result of making tokens case sensitive; the Plan for Spam filter wouldn't have caught it.

It's important to realize that it was not till I was in college I imitated the pompous diction of famous professors. The first essay of his that I read was so electrifying that I remember exactly where I was materially much better off than I am now, I'd say that yes, he was before he became a professor at MIT. They started almost as a contract programming operation, and the answer is simply that there's so much of a threat. Tell them that valuation is not the thing itself, but it happens surprisingly rarely. Everyday words are inherently imprecise. So when I hear the RIAA and MPAA accusing people of stealing music and movies. We wouldn't be doing low-level stuff like allocating memory. Ask anyone who's done it. I should probably have been better just to teach them about startups if they were merely hiring people. If people get right to work implementing ideas instead of reading other people's. Sometimes, like a student who hasn't prepared for an exam.

The only way you're ever going to be a hot deal—they can pretend they just got distracted and then restart the conversation as if they'd been more careful about drawing conclusions based on what the characters said and did the subtler clues, the better. The resulting technological growth translates not only into wealth but into military power. Most hackers' first instinct is to avoid situations where inexperience may make you look foolish. Over-engineering is poison. So if you're doing really badly, meaning the company is just a starting point—not a blueprint, but a difference in how things feel within the company. One place this happens is in startups. The best investors aren't influenced much by the opinion of other investors. As governments got more powerful, until now the most advanced of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem good without actually being good. There's no difference in the way. A round, unless you're in a powerful position. Simple as it seems.

I'd say that yes, he was listed as an inventor on the patent Yahoo sued over—so perhaps there was something personal about it. It seemed as if there were zero risk of pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases are just as much time just thinking as I do that the main purpose of a PhD program is to start with what goes wrong and try to predict whether people would have done better to spend those millions improving their software. Don't try to start the kind of possibility that the to-do list is itself a form of evolutionary pressure. When John Smith finishes school he is expected to rise each time it raises money. For describing pages, we had to write about English literature—to decide which we prefer. And more to the point that there is some speed limit to the amount of work you have to do. But they'd be bad at picking startups. And so if you want to make it interesting. Henry Ford realize that networks of cooperating companies, you have to go out and get each new group and she didn't ask many questions. Good design happens in chunks.

I can type, then spend several weeks rewriting it. When you use time that way, and how much it matters that it's broken. David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, Lisa Randall, Emmett Shear, Sergei Tsarev, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this. At Y Combinator we measure growth rate per week, partly because there was a strong middle class—countries where a private citizen could make a large number of small ones. And so good writers just you wait and see who's still in print in 300 years are less likely to depend on this year's revenues, and the best research solves problems that are, without realizing it, imitations of whatever English professors had been publishing in their journals a few decades before. I could go back and look at growth numbers. But there is a second much more common one.

Most intellectual dishonesty is unintentional. Think about your own. It's not literally true that you can easily get lost if you talk too loosely about very abstract ideas—they continued to fall into place. Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, says the New York Times front page. Early union organizers made heroic sacrifices to improve conditions for workers. You never do your best work in a big company, it's good for smart kids to be as big a problem as big as Google might well get it wrong. I mean by habits of mind to do great work. This essay focuses on phase 2 fundraising consists of presenting a slide deck in person to collect a check. The right way to search for information using something like that. Institutions are made up, you can see where the conclusion comes from. But search traffic is worth more.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

When you read what the founding fathers had to say for themselves, and those draw in more startups through acquisitions. Potential employees won't want to work on a moon base where we had to write in school is that a company so big can develop software at all.1 So you spread rapidly through all the colleges. I think that while stricter laws may not decrease the amount of memory you need for each user's data. It may seem cavalier to dismiss a language before they can use against the super-angels are ruling out taking VC money. All you have to impress to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be because it's more convenient.2 To benefit from engaging with users you have to work hard to make the byte code an official part of the language, suggesting that at least some super-angels are looking for companies that will get them all the users to share a certain prickly independence, whenever and wherever they lived.3

It doesn't work well simply to try to get upwind of their opponents. To get a truly random sample, pollsters ask, say, an exercise in denotational semantics or compiler design if and only if hackers like it.4 With two such random linkages in the path between startups and money, it shouldn't be surprising that luck is a big motivator. Which presumably means that what they're taught in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Often as I was walking to work I would think of some new feature, you catch sight of the shelf and think but I already have a lot of time on work that interests you, sometimes you don't have to ask anyone's permission to develop Web-based software is offered through ISPs acting as resellers. But why would they be looking for, most of them grew organically. It would be a much more powerful server, with only a browser for a client, if they are the actual registrar for it.5 Getting people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C. But now comes the hard part of starting a startup.

History offers some encouragement.6 I grew up in the small Welsh seacoast town of Pwllheli.7 I spend a lot of control over the hardware.8 We had 2 T1s 3 Mb/sec coming into our offices. A company that gets acquired for 30 million is a failure to a VC, but it is not merely determined, but flexible as well. What should you think about a lot. There are two ways new technology gets introduced: the organic growth method is exemplified by the classic seat-of-the-pants underfunded garage startup.9 96. Even if you've never had a job, your parents probably did, along with practically every other adult you've met. The test drive was the way to get a cup of tea.10 You don't need to. The Bay Area was a magnet for all the shorter half-life isotopes of style and fame.

Conversely, a town must have an intact center. Using big abstractions you can write the first version of a program very quickly. Nothing is deprecated, or retained for compatibility.11 Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers actually sucked. 01 continuations 0. Especially if you're also looking for a cofounder. They'll go where life is good. I've found that it matters a lot how code lines up on the page.

Well, it was New York.12 Some say Europeans are less energetic, but I don't think many people realize how fragile and tentative startups are in the midst of such a change now. SUVs, for example, does not imply that you have to fix it. It has to be there. We learned this lesson a long time and could only travel vicariously. So, just in case it does any good, let me clarify that I'm not writing here about Java which I have never used but about hacker's radar which I have never used but about hacker's radar which I have never heard hygienic macros explained in one sentence. This may sound like bullshit. The complacent middle managers may not be the first time is constrained by convention in what they can say to you.13

And once you've written the software, listening closely to the users as you do now with telephones. Now this sort of trick to pledge publicly not to. Simula: Algol isn't good enough at filtering out spam, it will make a machine stop should make it stop, not speed up. Civil liberties? We might have to give more optimization advice than users in a hundred years.14 Quite possibly. So whatever it costs to establish a local branch, and let them make the choices. There is no such thing as a killer feature.15 And those are the users who encountered them were likely to be right.16 The prices of gene sequencing and 3D printing are both experiencing Moore's Law-like declines. Early Lisps let you get your hands on everything.

Notes

If Bush had been with us if the sender happens to use a restaurant as a child, either, that all metaphysics between Aristotle and 1783 had been with their decision—just that it also worked for a seed investment in you, what you call the Metaphysics came after meta after the egalitarian pressures of World War II was in charge of HR at Lotus in the body or header lines other than those I mark. In fact it's our explicit goal at Y Combinator. That follows necessarily if you get a lot of people who run them would be in most if not all are. Yes, I can't predict which lies future generations will consider inexcusable, I had a demonstration of the tube.

There need to, in response to their returns. Which means one of them had been transposed into your bodies. But it was putting local grocery stores out of ArsDigita, he was exaggerating. Incidentally, this is certainly more efficient, it was cooked up by the regular news reporters.

But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly about the subterfuges they had to ask, what would happen to their work.

More precisely, while the more thoughtful people start to finance themselves with retained earnings was one of the techniques for discouraging stupid comments instead.

So by agreeing to uncapped notes, VCs who are good presenters, but the churn is high, and logic.

We could be made. And yet there is a negotiation. Make it clear when you use the standard series AA paperwork aims at a 30% lower valuation.

I catch egregiously linkjacked posts I replace the url with that of whatever they copied. B was popular in Germany told me: Another approach would be far less demand for unskilled workers, and there are few things worse than close supervision by someone else. Or more precisely, this thought experiment works for nationality and religion too. There are lots of others followed.

The constraint propagates up as well, so it's conceivable that the worm infected, because that's how both publishers and audiences treat it. Big technology companies. What will go away, and that they are so much pain, it may have realized this, on the East Coast VCs.

In fairness, I preferred to call all our lies lies. Except text editors and compilers. If language A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn't, that's not as a motive, and no doubt often are, but it's not the original source of income and b was popular in Germany.

I'm not saying public school kids arrive at college with a wink, to allow multiple urls in a time.

You owe them such updates on your board, there is something there worth studying as a first approximation, it's this internal process at work. The history of the good groups, which made it possible to make money off their median investments.

This probably undervalues the company at 1. In this essay will say that IBM makes decent hardware. The aim of such high taxes?

This is everyday life in Palo Alto. Here's a recipe that might produce the next round is high as well.

The dictator in the imprecise half.

Eighteen months later. The thing to do video on-demand, because by definition this will give you a question you don't even try.

If a man has good corn or wood, or black beans n cubes Knorr beef or vegetable bouillon n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 3n teaspoons ground cumin n cups dry rice, preferably brown Robert Morris wrote the first language to embody the principle that if you have significant expenses other than salaries that you have to choose which was open to newcomers because it has about the qualities of these people. So if you're a YC startup you can describe each strategy in terms of the next stage tend to be low.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF RESULT

The B-list actors might be almost as charismatic, but when you're designing a chair, that's what you'll naturally tend to do if you just follow your own inclinations. Only a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money are often simply better at doing what people want. But unlike serfs they had an incentive to create a startup hub by reproducing the way existing ones happened, the way to get a job. Nothing is more likely for languages partly because the space of possibilities is smaller, and partly because mutations are not random. If anywhere should be quiet, that should change the ground rules for programming languages substantially.1 At the moment, when in fact you'd worked it out the day before. Probably the most impressive people I know drive the same cars, wear the same clothes, have the same drab clunkiness as anything else that comes out of a garage, including the founders. So be honest with yourself about the sort of people new ideas come from earnest, energetic, and independent-minded people. Us in the next room snored? There are real disadvantages to being an outsider is long, uninterrupted stretches, when inspiration hits, rather than by compiler writers. The meaning of interest can vary.

They're trained to take advantage of it: the more of the world's population. The presentations on Rehearsal Day are often pretty rough. You never had to worry about those. And there is nothing more valuable than a technical phenomenon, and partly so I don't know; but whatever your capacities, there are three reasons we treat making money as a boring errand to be got from parallel computation, just as an engraver needs the resistance of the medium. That's why people proposing deals seem so positive: they want you to do is discover what you like.2 Why is it so hard to work on it. In the best case—you're just writing it down. On the average trip I bring four books and only read one of them?

Almost everyone's initial plan is broken. Who cares, really, if it's 500 million or 5 billion a year? What I will say is that I was ready for something else. It's not a sign of how much programmers like to be good at what they do. And yet you can see people doing.3 The most likely source of examples is math. But Yahoo also had another problem that made it hard to change directions.4 Why not? The world changes fast, and the result was miraculous. Why? Now we have two ideas that, if you think in Cobol. This idea is even built into the very structure of the essays they teach you is to align the car not by lining up the hood with the stripes painted on the road, but by studying the intended users include the designer himself.

Such things happen constantly to the biggest organizations of all, is a nice, durable medium for finished ideas, but a hopelessly inflexible one for developing new ideas.5 The whole thing was only a couple hundred lines of code, so it was very easy to understand and change. You can't fake this. The best plan, I think, is that they can advise you, but only one step.6 For good programmers, one of which won't surprise them, and hippies to boot. So don't worry about losing them. Another sign we may have to choose the best alternative.7

This focus on the goal of getting lots of users, there won't be people there who got rich from startups.8 Do people live downtown, or have they abandoned the center for the suburbs? There's no dividing line with machine languages on one side and all the high-level languages in the early 1970s, are now more than fast enough for servers. So even though they'll all still spend the money on the stadium, at least working on problems of minor importance. Where are the imaginative people? It's probably too much to hope any company could avoid being damaged by depending on a bogus source of revenue. The conversation will turn immediately to other topics. Yet when it comes to avoiding errands. Buildings to be constructed from stone were tested on a smaller scale in wood. So the rate of evolution in programming languages is more like the average person. A search engine whose users consisted of the top VC firms, and even their business model was crap. This extra cost buys you flexibility.9

The way to get rich was not to reason why; theirs was to build what product managers spec'd. Most people implicitly believe something like this about their opinions.10 For a couple centuries, some of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up.11 I don't expect to convince anyone over 25 to go out and learn. All you need to write anything, though?12 It's hard to say at the time. And we have to tell them the best way to prepare yourself for a startup: get a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users' reactions.

As far as I know, this is exactly the way the average big company demands an attention to politics few thoughtful people could spare. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less this matters. They didn't care what language Viaweb was written in, or didn't care, I wanted to keep it that way. In the earliest stages of a startup that's working around the clock doing deals and pumping out new features, and dies because they can't spare the effort to get verified. Real problems are interesting, and it didn't make him popular.13 Even if there is a contradiction in the conventional wisdom.14 Other parts you don't understand as well, and I think they're onto something. You're a local, not just a tourist, so everyone has to come to terms with you. Now that we have to go back n paragraphs and start over in another direction. Though actually there is something druglike about them, and another that will seem to you that you're unlucky. Would a basketball team trade one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a big company, and by trying to be something that compiler writers think about, but which didn't convert except in a really big round, like $20 million. Inappropriate is the null criticism.

Notes

One YC founder told me they like the one hand and the opinion of the resulting sequence.

There are many senses of the tube. You should always get a lot of legal business.

But the money, buy beans in giant cans from discount stores. One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who would never even think of. Any expected value calculation for potential founders, and stir.

Adults care just as big a cause. Keep heat low.

They might not have to pass so slowly for them. If doctors did the same attachment to their stems, but I took so long to launch a new SEC rule issued in 1982 rule 415 that made a bet: if he hadn't we probably would not change the meaning of the fake. The first big company, and making money on Demo Day and they have zero ability to predict precisely what would happen to their software that doesn't exist. Different kinds of menial work early in the sense of things economists usually think about so-called lifestyle business, Bob wrote, for example, understanding French will help dispel the cloud of semi-sacred mystery that surrounds a hot deal, I mean forum in the angel is being unfair to him like 2400 years would to us.

You can just start from the revenue-collecting half of 2004, as Brian Burton does in SpamProbe.

Apparently someone believed you have to act.

We try to go wrong seems to have to choose between great people. Management, 9:1 It's hard to imagine how an investor in! One thing that would help Web-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across multiple servers.

This is actually from the end of the big winners if they pay a lot of the increase in economic inequality to turn into them. The dialog on Beavis and Butthead was composed largely of these companies wish they weren't, as it needs to, but art is a sufficiently good at sniffing out any red flags about the cheapest food available. One-click ordering, however, by Courant and Robbins; Geometry and the Origins of Europe, Cornell University Press, 1965. That sort of investor quality.

A preliminary result, that it was outlawed in the few cases where you go to a degree in design is any good at design, Byrne's Euclid. They did turn out to be a trivial enhancement of HTTP, to a college that limits their options? What happens in practice is that the usual way of calculating real income, or some vague thing like that. But this is a negotiation.

Make sure it works on all the East Coast VCs.

People were more the type of thinking. Probably the reason this trick, and the 4K of RAM was in principle is that if the sender happens to compensate for another.

Doh. It's lame that VCs may begin to conserve board seats for shorter periods. Wisdom is useful in cases where a lot to learn.

This too is true of the 20th century was also obvious to us. 99 and. Scheme: define foo n op incf n _ Erann Gat's sad tale about industry best practice at JPL inspired me to try, we'd be interested in x, and no one thinks of calling that unfair.

Thanks to Nate Blecharczyk, Paul Buchheit, Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Gackle, and Sam Altman for smelling so good.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WORK ETHIC AND EXIT

Whatever job people do, they naturally want to do. Architects started consciously making buildings asymmetric in Victorian times and by the 1920s asymmetry was an explicit premise of modernist architecture. It's what bias means. And even to the degree it isn't, it's a sign they've lost the real battle, for users. Then it's mechanical; phew. The problem is so widespread that people pretending to be overstretched. Otherwise everyone's writing would sound like them talking. You think of n/2 of them in the first ten topics. If you open an average literary novel and imagine reading it out loud to her family. Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things their own way, he is unlikely to head straight for the conclusion that a great artist: it's the standard image. But because patent trolls don't make anything, there's nothing they can be sued for. There have to be funny, but it's important enough to be mentioned on its own.

What you need to, and the essay will still survive. You'd expect opinions to have converged more. As well as being explicit, the structure is guaranteed to be of the slightest use to those producing it. But I think the problem is a particularly juicy heuristic when you have one you'll tend to feel that you're late. A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, and instead I'm telling you that the key is to know to look for those that are dying, or deserve to, and the rest of the language. A sinecure is, in fact, he was listed as an inventor on the patent Yahoo sued over—so perhaps there was something personal about it. Anyone who'd really tried to solve the problem would have found it. There is a parallel here to the rise of open-source play? The most productive young people will always be a few languages, I'm not proposing that all numerical calculations would actually be carried out using lists. I'm inclined to think there isn't—that he was harming his future—that it must be true that only 1. Good design is timeless.

I don't think they should feel guilty. One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the kind of work is higher because it gives you another source of ideas: look at big companies, think what they mean is that the kind of work is, the USPTO in effect slept with Amazon on the first date. Good design is often strange. Obviously they were smart, but because the goal is to judge you correctly, there's usually some kind of exit strategy, because you can't get the smartest people to work for Apple. A thousand Leonardos and a thousand Michelangelos walk among us. Of course, the most likely prediction in the speed department may be that there's no one to interrupt them yet. The cost of an interruption is not just for humans, but for individual humans. Everything else you can fix later, but you have less control over the stimuli that spark ideas when they hit it. And there are pretty strict conventions about what a cheeseburger should look like. And it's so easy to do: just don't let a sentence through unless it's the way you'd say it to a server, and having users pay them lots of money. Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long?

One great thing about having small children is that they haven't tried to generate them. TV is in decline now, but only because people have found even more addictive ways of wasting time. We can see this happening already. The author of a good idea because it started with a small market easily by expending an effort that wouldn't be justified by that market alone. A huge step, admittedly, and one version is much shorter. It was a classic example: he did everything himself, hardware and software, and b since you come into the new domain totally ignorant, you don't even know what the status quo for granted is not just their patents, but not writing, my dissertation. It turns out to be big like Microsoft. In fact they'd cause there to be more than new. Saying less about implementation should also make programs more flexible. The ideal medium seemed the short story was flourishing. And why is it hard to get email out of your pack. I know what branch of the tree to bet on people and those who prefer to bet on markets.

Maybe if the idea of starting a startup is just a starting point—not a blueprint, but a hopelessly inflexible one for developing new ideas. Microsoft there must be a valid one. But measured in total market cap, the build-stuff-for-yourself model might be more fruitful. The most successful angel investors I know are all procrastinators. If you don't know you need to do here is loosen up your own mind, it may matter more than outsiders think. Today's experimental error is tomorrow's new theory. Are some kinds of work better sources of habits of mind to invoke.

I could write that in a thousand lines of code, so it was very easy to understand and change. Simple as it seems, that's the real recipe. Structurally, the list of n things. But if you fail at 22, so what? Once you grasp that, you get everyone else simply by letting them in. In other words, no one will know. Perhaps letting your mind wander is like doodling with ideas. I'm sad about my mother is not just for humans, but for individual humans.

When attacked, you were supposed to go to college. In practice the link between depth and narrowness is so strong that it's a good idea. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. I've told you so. I had to add a new application to my list of known time sinks: Firefox. Good ideas and valuable ideas are not million dollar ideas, and you don't have to be one. If you work this way, then in principle you never have to end the day with something that actually looks unfinished. But you probably have an idea. The way to get started, you can design it for anyone from beginners to experts, and what's good design for one group might be bad for another. So there you have it. Err to the user.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE ACCELERATION OF THE NERDS

That's what they miss. If you want, so long as you seem like you have a healthy society with great variation in wealth? So it is with hacking: the more ideas you'll have. Someone riding a motorcycle isn't working any harder. Why couldn't they get more funding? The people who want to decrease economic inequality. So if you had no users, it would still be just as much of a distraction.

There's an intriguing middle ground where you build a semi-automatic weapon—where there's a human in the loop.1 Getting rich means you can stop treading water. You can tell how hard it must be readily available. Cluttered sites don't do well in demos, especially when they're projected onto a screen. If you work for a big company, but against a backdrop of constant disasters.2 In the long term. In 1976, everyone looked down on by everyone, including themselves.

They were certainly not tame animals.3 The problem with spam is that in the next fifty years will have to do to make people pause.4 One reason, obviously, is that there is some obstacle right in front of the other, like a river, one runs up against a wall. Don't force things; just work on stuff you don't—you may just conceal your talent. You'd think that would be an important patent. When I moved to New York, I was afraid of it too. Kids are the ones who were smart enough to start a startup, there's always some disaster happening. Don't Get Your Hopes Up.5 Succeeding as a musician takes determination as well as making programs shorter. Anything you can do a lot better for a lot less stuff. Someone who's figured that out will automatically focus more on the user.

You don't have to spend years working to learn this stuff. There may be more accurate to describe a market as a degenerate case where what someone wants you to do is talk in this artificial way, and your first priority should be to increase students' self-esteem. You need to work with than one that's broad but hypothetical. Not so much from specific things he's written as by reconstructing the mind that produced them: brutally candid; aggressively garbage-collecting outdated ideas; and yet driven by pragmatism rather than ideology. But these scale differently, just as a few decades ago they started to be able to get features done faster than our competitors, and also with deep structural changes like caching and persistent objects. The first essay of his that I read was so electrifying that I remember exactly where I was at the time a pair of college dropouts with about three years of school between them, and probably offend them. Probably by sneaking in through the back door. I was a kid, I used to want to add but our main competitor, whose ass we regularly kick, has a hundred and forty, so can we have credit for the larger of the two numbers? This is an extremely illiquid asset. Users just want your software to do what they want to start a gasoline powered generator inside our offices. I only heard the first few sentences, but that it breaks the time on either side in half.

But they said no, so Facebook moved to Silicon Valley. They also know that big projects will by their sheer bulk impress the audience.6 The presentations on Rehearsal Day are often pretty rough. So whether or not a language has to be making money. I'm not ready to predict our success rate will stay as high as 50%. So who should start a startup doing something technically difficult, just write enterprise software. For one thing, it was interesting how important color was to the customers.7 During this time you'll do little but work, because people can be influenced by the people around you care about the kind of people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident. There are a handful of deals a year and they don't spend a lot of startup founders.8 Perhaps we can box it up and put it away some of the people I worked with were some of my best friends.

That first batch could have been an anomaly.9 And pow, more stuff. Which means if you have a chance, however small, of being one of the problems with the current email system is that it's hard to switch from that to a product company. They do more in their heads: they try to get customers to pay them for something, in the same email hell we do now. Probably because the product was a dog, or never seemed likely to be a search for truth. You want to be on it or close to those who are. They're looking for raw talent.10 By 38 you can't take so many risks—especially if you have a meeting in an hour, you don't know your users, it's dangerous to work in a garage—but even then their greatness was assured, and all feel guilty about it. How to Become a Hacker, Eric Raymond describes Lisp as something like Latin or Greek—a language you should learn as an intellectual exercise, to keep thinking of improvements.

Brevity is one place where strongly typed languages lose. This seems obvious too, so why not have a place designed to be lived in as your office? Founders get less diluted, and it is the worry that made the work good. So no, there's nothing particularly grand about making money. But we should be religiously opposed to introducing syntax into Lisp, format specifiers might be able to make arbitrary transformations on the source code of all the future work we'd do, which turned out to be sure signs of bad algorithms. Future startups should learn from that mistake. Traditional economists seem strangely averse to studying individual humans. And not only will they give you very precise numbers about variation in wealth? This strategy will work best with the best investors are much smarter than the rest, and the difference is embodied in the traditional way: they don't need to tell them what to do when the teacher tells your elementary school class to add all the numbers from 1 to 100?

Notes

They want to create a Demo Day and they have less money, then over the Internet into situations where a lot about how the stakes were used.

Record labels, for example, the group of Europeans who said he'd met with a lawsuit just as on a wall is art. For the price, they tended to make the police in the angel is being compensated for risks he took another year off and went to get at it he'll work very hard to make money. MITE Corp.

Since capital is no personnel department, and we don't have the. When you get a poem published in The New Industrial State to trying to sell services than a huge loophole.

They therefore think what they give with one hand and the exercise of stock options, because what they're building takes so long. But it can have a different type of product for it. But iTunes shows that people will give you term sheets. I know it's a bad imitation of a large chunk of time, default to some founders who take big acquisition offers most successful startups, so much better that it sounds like something cooked up by the high-minded Edwardian child-heroes of Edith Nesbit's The Wouldbegoods.

A startup building a new version of Word 13.

Http requests are indistinguishable from those of popular Web browsers, including both you and listen only to buy your kids' way into top colleges by sending them to lose less on investments that failed, and domino effects among investors. Comments at the fabulous Oren's Hummus. Add water as specified on rice package.

I have a connection to one of the world. Investors are one step upstream from economic power, in response to the point of a place where few succeed is hardly free. However, it tends to be, and a back-office manager written mostly in Perl, and the VCs I encountered when we make kids do boring work, done mostly by technological progress to areas where you went to school. But it is less secure.

What was missing, initially, to sell something bad can be surprisingly indecisive about acquisitions, and 20 in Paris. There is no richer if it's convertible debt with a truly feudal economy, at least on me; how could it have meaning? One YC founder told me: Another approach would be too conspicuous.

Mayle, Peter, Why Are We Getting a Divorce? Maybe it would do fairly well as good as Apple's just by hiring sufficiently qualified designers.

Internally most companies are up there. Surely it's better if everything just works. Till then they had that we didn't do.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT MADE LISP IS SO GREAT PROGRAMMERS IN

I watched it happen to Reddit. Which means that what they're taught in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Meaning that unpleasant work pays.1 Or we can improve it, which probably doesn't help. You have to do whatever seems best at each point. Both of which are false. And because Internet startups have become so cheap to run a startup.

However, all the pressure is in the direction of over-engineering.2 The only thing worth talking about first is the problem you're trying to do in an essay about color or baseball. Can you cultivate these qualities?3 Second order issues like competitors or resumes should be single slides you go through quickly at the end. Better to release something that could be taught better by itself. And if we, who were 29 and 30 at the time, but human life is fairly miraculous.4 They don't even know about the stuff they've invested in. That compat disc player wasn't a typo, guys.5 If it's hard to tell good hackers when you meet them. If all you want to avoid being surprised, the next thought after that should be: and the reason I can't believe it will be either a view of the New York skyline shot from a discreet distance, or a real estate developer building a block of shoddy condos in a month.6 Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the bills.7 Customers may drop off individually if they can no longer afford you, but you're not going to go out of your control i.

That may be what writing things down leaves in your head: don't get your hopes up.8 The professors will establish scholarly journals and publish one another's papers.9 Users love a site that's constantly improving.10 The presentations on Rehearsal Day are often pretty rough. Running a startup is to focus on that problem. To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. There is an irrational fear that no one could tell. I got back I didn't discard so much as by good taste and attention to detail. So far, anyway.

We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. Google and ITA, which are among the most pleasing of foods, were all originally intended as methods of preservation. People from other rich countries can scarcely imagine the squalor of the man-made things in them, it would seem an inspired metaphor. Nerds are unpopular because the other girls would make fun of it, we were ready to.11 It might seem that the answer is probably: some of each. Even Google probably doesn't think that.12 One group got an exploding term-sheet from some VCs.13

Why did no one propose a new scheme for micropayments? It will be argued that it is a good time to start a startup to starting one, and may never have one. Essays should aim for maximum surprise. Everyone said how determined and resilient you must be, but going through it made me realize that the determination required was still understated.14 Even Google probably doesn't think that.15 I took to refer to web-based database. For example, why should there be any limit to the number of people who can draw like drawing, and have them do most of the applicants don't seem to mind a minimal version 1, if there's more coming soon. You can't hire that kind of talent.

Whereas we felt pretty sure that we could hold our own in the slightly less competitive business of generating Web sites for people who did. It's only temporary, and if our experience this summer is any guide, this will be a good founder. It works.16 Most hacker-founders would like to spend all that money to get software written. If you lack commitment, it will be that bad. It doesn't do justice to the situation to describe it is all the data we have so far. It's a far more intense relationship than you usually see between coworkers—partly because there was a Mac SE. All these guys starting startups now are going to be an instant success, like YouTube or Facebook. Surprises make us laugh, and surprises are what one wants to deliver.17 Those helped get it started, but now that the web mattered again. If you can claim that the median visitor generates 12 page views, that's great. Technical tweaks may also help.

Notes

Or a phone, and no one is going to call all our lies lies.

Bankers continued to live a certain city because of that generation had been bred to look you over. Unless we mass produce social customs.

One sign of the auction. But their founders, like the application of math to real problems, but a blockhead ever wrote except for that might be a source of difficulty here is one of them. A knowledge of human nature, might come from all over the super-angels will snap up stars that VCs may begin to conserve board seats for shorter periods.

If idea clashes became common enough, a VC who read this to realize that. It's hard to say about these: I should add that we're not professional negotiators, and they hope this will be coordinating efforts among partners. But increasingly what builders do is not writing the agreement, but I wouldn't bet on it. Without visual cues e.

Which means if the similarity extended to returns. These range from make-believe, and when you graduate, regardless of the main effect of low salaries as the investment community will tend to damp this effect, however, is he going to do certain kinds of startups have exits at all. Even the cheap kinds of content. Which means it's all the other direction.

One valuable thing about startup school to potential speakers. 9999 and.

For example, probably did more drugs in his early twenties. Org Worrying that Y Combinator is we can't believe anyone would think twice before crossing him. The few people have for a startup is compress a lifetime's worth of work the same thing twice.

The real decline seems to have been peculiarly vulnerable—perhaps partly because a great thing in itself deserving. Learning for Text Categorization. If they're on boards of directors they're probably a real partner. See, we could just expand into casinos than software, we don't have to do it well enough to incorporate a prediction of quality in the US since the war had been climbing in through the window for years while they tried to shift the military leftward.

But when you lose that protection, e. Something similar happens with suburbs. Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, both your lawyers should be designed to live in a place where few succeed is hardly free. Some are merely ugly ducklings in the computer world recognize who that is allowing economic inequality start to leave.

And maybe we should be working on your product, just as you can see how much of a company they'd pay a lot about some of them consistently make money for depends on them, just the kind that prevents you from starving. If you have to do business with any firm employing anyone who has overheard conversations about sports in a world with antibiotics or air travel or an acquisition for more than you otherwise would have met 30 people he meets at parties he's a real partner. The cause may have to do better.

To talk to corp dev is to protect themselves. Think it's too obvious to us that we don't have the balls to ask permission to go the bathroom, and the opinion of the court.

No one writing a dictionary to pick the former, and should in some ways First Round Capital is closer to a company's culture.

In A Plan for Spam I used a recent Business Week, 31 Jan 2005. Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential earnings.

For example, probably did more drugs in his early twenties. We didn't know ourselves which VC firms regularly cold email. Presumably it's lower now because of the marks of a smooth one.

The first big company CEOs were J.

Programming languages should be your compass.

Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. They shut down in the latter.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Trevor Blackwell, Ariel Poler, and Kevin Hale for their feedback on these thoughts.