Why it Pays to Get Your Kids Into Coding Early

As Jason Calacanis finds out from uber prodigy Amjad Masad :

Learnt to code in 1993 when he was six years old! (Amjad Masad is from Jordan)

Why learn compilers :

I joined Yahoo! for my first job out of college, who'd just acquired a company in my hometown. As part of the acquisition, we were tasked with moving to the Yahoo! stack, and they were adamant about us using YUI instead of jQuery. The task fell on my lap, which felt like a crushing mountain of repetitive work.

Like any good (read: lazy) programmer, I decided to automate the task. The task was more intricate than simply a massive search and replace because you had to deal with many variations of names, formatting, and patterns. I'd been learning about compilers and ASTs, and I figured this was an excellent time to deploy my newfound skills.

First, I backfilled into YUI some jQuery-like to make the transition easier. Then I wrote a transformer that took in jQuery code and automatically translated the calls into YUI code.

A many-month project turned into a week project. My colleagues were dumbfounded when they saw the volume of patches flying out of my desk. This is the kind of leverage that compiler technology can give you.

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Here is what Carmack thinks an antifragile system might look like:

1. You are working on a problem and you get an idea and with it the initial idea high
2. You should instantly try to defeat your idea -- think of all the ways it could not work, test it out, put it under stress
3. If the idea survive the brutal scrutiny then it has legs for further investigations or implementation
4. If the idea is implemented and it works then that's great
5. If the idea fails the scrutiny or implementation you can quickly move on to the next idea without feeling the lows because you haven't obsessed or talked about it i.e. it's not your pet idea.

For a Change, Some Gems from Farnham Street

Didn't think much of the book, TBH, but, this latest one on Genghis Khan has some good maxims :

As we first succeed, we will find ourselves in new situations, facing new problems. The freshly promoted soldier must learn the art of politics. The salesman, how to manage. The founder, how to delegate. The writer, how to edit others. The comedian, how to act. The chef turned restaurateur, how to run the other side of the house.

It takes a special kind of humility to grasp that you know less, even as you know and grasp more and more. It’s remembering Socrates’ wisdom lay in the fact that he knew that he knew next to nothing.

With accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pretend that we know more than we do. To pretend we already know everything. Scientia infla (knowledge puffs up). That’s the worry and the risk—thinking that we’re set and secure, when in reality understanding and mastery is a fluid, continual process.

Wynton Marsalis : “Humility engenders learning because it beats back the arrogance that puts blinders on. It leaves you open for truths to reveal themselves. You don’t stand in your own way. . . . Do you know how you can tell when someone is truly humble? I believe there’s one simple test: because they consistently observe and listen, the humble improve. They don’t assume, ‘I know the way.’”

No matter what you’ve done up to this point, you better still be a student. If you’re not still learning, you’re already dying.

The solution is as straightforward as it is initially uncomfortable: Pick up a book on a topic you know next to nothing about. Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person.

Ever been in a meeting where the boss polls people and says we'll wait for more info to decide and sets the date for the next meeting? Consider FS' podcast with Stan the Generale McChrystal :

As a military rookie, Stan asks Dad for peacetime-signs a person is a good commander in combat. "You won't know until you're in combat." OK, what about signs in combat? He said, “Some people keep asking for more information and what they’re trying to do is drive uncertainty to zero so that there’s really not a question on the right course of action because you know everything.” But you can’t do that. It’s not achievable. So they become hesitant. They become tentative, and they become focused on getting more and more information to ratchet the uncertainty out of the situation and they don’t act."

What a gem! Ever read the Colin Powell powerpoint? At what point should you go with your gut? Focus on proximate objectives that are worthwhile - take that hill, secure this building, etc. The battlefield keeps changing. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.