Programme Starting Quotes

The 85 Percent Solution: Getting started is more important than becoming an expert.

What would happen if you allowed a bug to slip through a module, and it cost your company $10,000? The nonprofessional would shrug his shoulders, say “stuff happens,” and start writing the next module. The professional would write the company a check for $10,000!

While overpaid CEOs take long vacations and hide behind e-mail autoresponders, some programmer is working eighteen-hour days coding the start-up that will destroy that CEO’s business.

In some ways, programming is like painting. You start with a blank canvas and certain basic raw materials. You use a combination of science, art, and craft to determine what to do with them.

Every pro starts off as an amateur. There's not one top artist, athlete, writer, scientist, architect, entrepreneur, programmer, musician, or potter who enters the field at the top of her game. To begin anything new or learn anything new means you will be a neophyte. You must go from outsider to insider. Respect that. Embrace it. Be willing to suck.

Programmers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don't think about the larger picture. To my mind, a programmer is not an engineer, because an engineer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an organization or a society has and says, "OK, here's this problem that we have- how can we solve it?" The engineer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That's engineering.

In some ways, programming is like painting. You start with a blank canvas and certain basic raw materials. You use a combination of science, art, and craft to determine what to do with them. You sketch out an overall shape, paint the underlying environment, then fill in the details. You constantly step back with a critical eye to view what you've done. Every now and then you'll throw a canvas away and start again. But artists will tell you that all the hard work is ruined if you don't know when to stop. If you add layer upon layer, detail over detail, the painting becomes lost in the paint.

If we were to define a sleeping bag as a house, India would move swiftly towards ending her housing shortage. A shortage of nearly thirty-one million units. Accept this definition, and you could go in for mass production of sleeping bags. We could then have passionate debates about the drastic reduction in the magnitude of the housing problem. The cover stories could run headlines: ‘Is it for real?’ And straps: ‘Sounds too good to be true, but it is.’ The government could boast that it had not only stepped up production of sleeping bags but had piled up an all-time record surplus of them. Say, thirty-seven million. Conservatives could argue that we were doing so well, the time had come to export sleeping bags, at ‘world prices’. The bleeding hearts could moan that sleeping bags had not reached the poorest. Investigative muckrakers could scrutinise the contracts given to manufacturers. Were the bags overpriced? Were they of good quality? That ends the housing shortage. There’s only one problem. Those without houses at the start of the programme will still be without houses at the end of it. (True, some of them will have sleeping bags, probably at world prices.)

There is a simple marketing trick that helps teams communicate as one: generate a brand. When you start a project, come up with a name for it, ideally something off-the-wall. (In the past, we've named projects after things such as killer parrots that prey on sheep, optical illusions, and mythical cities.) ...Use your team's name liberally when talking with people. It sounds silly, but it gives your team an identity to build on, and the world something memorable to associate with your work.

People talk a lot about midlife crisis, the momentary stress that arises when you finally slack off. The sublime flash of greenish light as the curtain of the sanctuary rips, when poets start reviewing books and programmers take jobs in quality control.

About ten other young, male undergraduates regularly attended these sessions of midnight programming. “It was a whole subculture. It’s been popularized now, but it was a secret cult in my days,” said Alsing. “The game of programming—and it is a game—was so fascinating. We’d stay up all night and experience it. It really is like a drug, I think.” A few of his fellow midnight programmers began to ignore their girlfriends and eventually lost them for the sake of playing with the machine all night. Some started sleeping days and missed all their classes, thereby ruining their grades. Alsing and a few others flunked out of school.

the only way we can become more inclusive and ultimately more legitimate and successful at ensuring peace, prosperity and women's rights is by ensuring that all people can see themselves at the table, and that young women in particular have role models, mentors and the necessary support and amplification to ensure that we occupy those spaces. It was the reason I started my own mentorship programme - because, often, we can't be what we can't see.

Ill-timed German aggression had tipped Wilson onto their side. But if the Russian revolution had started a few months earlier, if Germany had postponed its decision to resume unrestricted U-boat warfare until the spring, or if Wilson had been able to stay out of the war until May, what might have been the result? Could the war have continued? Might democracy in Russia have been saved? As the departing German ambassador to Washington Count Bernstorff noted in agonized retrospect: If Germany over the winter of 1916–17 had ‘accepted Wilson’s mediation, the whole of American influence in Russia would have been exercised in favour of peace, and not, as events ultimately proved, against’ Germany. ‘Out of Wilson’s and Kerensky’s Peace programme’, Germany could surely have rescued a peace

The best way to start fixing a bug is to make it reproducible. After all, if you can’t reproduce it, how will you know if it is ever fixed?

The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you’re a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.

I flicked through the library to choose from one of a dozen eBooks I’d downloaded but had yet to start reading. As a rule, novels bore me. The concentration it takes to remember what you’ve read and who is who as you swipe from one page to the next is arduous. I much prefer downloading a television programme and watching it on my phone instead. But Janine, our branch manager, frowned upon us doing that, one of many petty little dislikes she’d made us aware of since she’d taken charge seven months earlier

There were the venture capitalists, who’d gotten in early, watched the tokens they bought climb to ludicrous heights, and now believed they could predict the future. There were the founders of crypto start-ups, who’d raised so many millions of dollars that they seemed to believe their own far-fetched pitches about creating the future of finance. Then there were the programmers, who were so caught up with their clever ideas about new things to do inside the crypto world that they never paused to think about whether the technology did anything useful.

Before you start to look at the bug, make sure that you are working on code that built cleanly—without warnings. We routinely set compiler warning levels as high as possible. It doesn’t make sense to waste time trying to find a problem that the computer could find for you! We need to concentrate on the harder problems at hand.

One broken window—a badly designed piece of code, a poor management decision that the team must live with for the duration of the project—is all it takes to start the decline. If you find yourself working on a project with quite a few broken windows, it's all too easy to slip into the mindset of "All the rest of this code is crap, I'll just follow suit.

But the real problem was that the treatment was based around the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme, and as soon as my counsellor started talking to me about God, I flipped out. I didn’t want to know about religion: religion was dogma, it was bigotry, it was the Moral Majority and people like Jerry Falwell saying that AIDS was God’s judgement on homosexuals

My very best thinking led me to a therapist’s office weeping and pleading for help regarding my alcoholism at the age of 19. I thought I could ‘manage’ my alcohol addiction, and I failed miserably until I asked for help. My older friends in recovery remind me that I looked like ‘death’ when I started attending support groups. I was not able to give eye contact, and I covered my eyes with a baseball cap. I had lost significant weight and was frightened to talk to strangers. I was beset with what the programme of Alcoholics Anonymous describes as ‘the hideous Four Horseman – terror, bewilderment, frustration and despair’. Similarly, my very best thinking led me to have unhappy, co-dependent relationships. I can go on. The problem was I was dependent on my own counsel. I did not have a support system, let alone a group of sober people to brainstorm with. I just followed my own thinking without getting feedback. The first lesson I learned in recovery was that I needed to check in with sober and wiser people than me regarding my thinking. I still need to do this today. I need feedback from my support system.

there is a rule for solving certain types of problems in artificial intelligence called the “most constrained variable.” It means that in a problem where you are trying to assign different values to different variables to meet constraints, you should start with the variable that has the most constraints, or put another way, the variable that has the lowest number of possible values.

Younger wizards in particular went about saying that is was time magic started to update its image and that they should all stop mucking about with bits of wax and bone and put the whole thing on a properly-organised basis, with research programmes and three-day conventions in good hotels where they could read papers with titles like 'Whither Geomancy?' and 'The role of Seven League Boots in a caring society

Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.” “Almost precisely.

The problem is that if the person then says I would rather go home and finish the job tomorrow, they start to feel guilty. Their Chimp is now saying, ‘You can’t let the troop down, what will they think?’ Well as we now know, it isn’t the troop at all. It is work and work colleagues. Looking after the Chimp by getting it home on time and looking after the real troop is more important than working to please work colleagues.

I would walk round that beautiful, unspoilt little island, with its population of under a hundred and where there isn’t a single tarmac road, thinking about how he would truly sound. Perhaps the quietness of the island helped me do so. ‘Everybody thinks he’s French,’ I said to myself as I walked across the great stones that littered the beach at Rushy Bay, or stomped over the tussocky grass of Heathy Hill, with its famous dwarf pansies. ‘The only reason people think Poirot is French is because of his accent,’ I muttered. ‘But he’s Belgian, and I know that French-speaking Belgians don’t sound French, not a bit of it.’" "I also was well aware of Brian Eastman’s advice to me before I left for Bryher: ‘Don’t forget, he may have an accent, but the audience must be able to understand exactly what he’s saying.’ There was my problem in a nutshell." "To help me, I managed to get hold of a set of Belgian Walloon and French radio recordings from the BBC. Poirot came from Liège in Belgium and would have spoken Belgian French, the language of 30 per cent of the country’s population, rather than Walloon, which is very much closer to the ordinary French language. To these I added recordings of English-language stations broadcasting from Belgium, as well as English-language programmes from Paris. My principal concern was to give my Poirot a voice that would ring true, and which would also be the voice of the man I heard in my head when I read his stories. I listened for hours, and then gradually started mixing Walloon Belgian with French, while at the same time slowly relocating the sound of his voice in my body, moving it from my chest to my head, making it sound a little more high-pitched, and yes, a little more fastidious. After several weeks, I finally began to believe that I’d captured it: this was what Poirot would have sounded like if I’d met him in the flesh. This was how he would have spoken to me – with that characteristic little bow as we shook hands, and that little nod of the head to the left as he removed his perfectly brushed grey Homburg hat. The more I heard his voice in my head, and added to my own list of his personal characteristics, the more determined I became never to compromise in my portrayal of Poirot.

With programmes such as flooding of emotions, the parts involved might not feel safe in turning the programme off. But you might be able to negotiate that they turn it down so it is barely noticeable. Or you could ask the spinner parts to spin in the opposite direction, so that they spin the effects back into the part who originally held those feelings rather than out to the rest of the system. Or you could insert a hidden drain and start draining out some of the feelings. Or you could find a way for the parts doing their jobs to implement the programme without doing harm. p126-127

We're programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We're not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds. There's a subtle reason why programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: They are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It's harder to read code than to write it.

Think about two young adults who go to college. One is brilliant, a genius who floats above her colleagues like a cirrus cloud, the other is merely a plodder: dogged, determined, competent. Throughout their education, the genius has always been able to leap obstacles as though they’re not there while the plodder has, through necessity, learned patiently to climb walls. One day, say in the second year of their Ph.D. programme, that genius will come across a wall so high even she can’t jump it. But she doesn’t know how to climb. The plodder, on the other hand, rubs his hands, checks his equipment, and starts hammering in the first piton. Who do you think will reach the top first?

Change always starts at home. The only person you can actually change is yourself. No matter how functional or dysfunctional your organization, you can begin applying XP for yourself. Anyone on the team can begin changing his own behavior. Programmers can start writing tests first. Testers can automate their tests. Customers can write stories and set clear priorities. Executives can expect transparency. Dictating practices to a team destroys trust and creates resentment. Executives can encourage team responsibility and accountability. Whether the team produces these with XP, a better waterfall, or utter chaos is up to them. Using XP, teams can produce dramatic improvements in the areas of defects, estimation, and productivity.

Imagine us saying to children: "In the last fifty or so years, the human race has become aware of a great deal of information about its mechanisms; how it behaves, how it must behave under certain circumstances. If this is to be useful, you must learn to contemplate these rules calmly, dispassionately, disinterestedly, without emotion. It is information that will set people free from blind loyalties, obedience to slogans, rhetoric, leaders, group emotions." Well, there it is. ...It is interesting to speculate: what country, what nation, when, and where, would have undertaken a programme to teach its children to be people to resist rhetoric, to examine the mechanisms that govern them? I can think of only one - America in that heady period of the Gettysburg Address. And that time could not have survived the Civil War, for when war starts, countries cannot afford disinterested examination of their behaviour. When a war starts, nations go mad - and have to go mad, in order to survive. ...I am not talking of the aptitudes for killing, for destruction, which soldiers are taught as part of their training, but a kind of atmosphere, the invisible poison, which spreads everywhere. And then people everywhere begin behaving as they never could in peace-time. Afterwards we look back, amazed. Did I really do that? Believe that? Fall for that bit of propaganda? Think that all our enemies were evil? That all our own nation's acts were good? How could I have tolerated that state of mind, day after day, month after month - perpetually stimulated, perpetually whipped up into emotions that my mind was meanwhile quietly and desperately protesting against?

For many years there have been rumours of mind control experiments. in the United States. In the early 1970s, the first of the declassified information was obtained by author John Marks for his pioneering work, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate. Over time retired or disillusioned CIA agents and contract employees have broken the oath of secrecy to reveal small portions of their clandestine work. In addition, some research work subcontracted to university researchers has been found to have been underwritten and directed by the CIA. There were 'terminal experiments' in Canada's McGill University and less dramatic but equally wayward programmes at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan and numerous other institutions. Many times the money went through foundations that were fronts or the CIA. In most instances, only the lead researcher was aware who his or her real benefactor was, though the individual was not always told the ultimate use for the information being gleaned. In 1991, when the United States finally signed the 1964 Helsinki Accords that forbids such practices, any of the programmes overseen by the intelligence community involving children were to come to an end. However, a source recently conveyed to us that such programmes continue today under the auspices of the CIA's Office of Research and Development. The children in the original experiments are now adults. Some have been able to go to college or technical schools, get jobs. get married, start families and become part of mainstream America. Some have never healed. The original men and women who devised the early experimental programmes are, at this point, usually retired or deceased. The laboratory assistants, often graduate and postdoctoral students, have gone on to other programmes, other research. Undoubtedly many of them never knew the breadth of the work of which they had been part. They also probably did not know of the controlled violence utilised in some tests and preparations. Many of the 'handlers' assigned to reinforce the separation of ego states have gone into other pursuits. But some have remained or have keen replaced. Some of the 'lab rats' whom they kept in in a climate of readiness, responding to the psychological triggers that would assure their continued involvement in whatever project the leaders desired, no longer have this constant reinforcement. Some of the minds have gradually stopped suppression of their past experiences. So it is with Cheryl, and now her sister Lynn.

More proof that Lynn is still meant to continue with the government programme occurred during the winter of 2000, when she was sitting at a cafeteria table at the area college. It was later in the afternoon when a few people congregated there with books spread out so they could study while drinking coffee or snacking. Many tables were empty, yet after Lynn had been sitting for a few moments, an elderly man sat down across from her. The old man seemed familiar to Lynn, though, at first, she pretended to ignore him. He said nothing, just sat there as someone might when all the tables are filled and it is necessary to share space with a stranger. His presence made her uncomfortable, yet there was nothing specific that alerted her. A short while later, Mac, the man who had been Lynn's handler in Mexico, came out of the shadows and stopped at the table. He was younger than the old man. His clothes were military casual, the type of garments that veteran students who have military experience might recognise, but not think unusual. He leaned over Lynn and kissed her gently on the forehead, spoke quietly to her, and then said 'Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.' Those were the code words that would start the cover programme of which she was still part. The words led to her being switched from the control of the old man, a researcher she now believes may have been part of Dr Ewen Cameron's staff before coming to the United States for the latter part of his career, to the younger man. The change is like a re-enlistment in an army she never willingly joined. In a very real way, she is a career soldier who has never been paid, never allowed to retire and never given a chance to lead a life free from the fear of what she might do without conscious awareness.

Let’s consider another similar story — the dating website Plenty of Fish. German programmer Markus Frind started the company in 2003 as a programming exercise. He had been wanting to learn a new coding language called ASP.NET, so he built the site in two weeks — and to his surprise, it took off. Frind never raised a dime of outside money, because the venture was profitable from the beginning. “I didn’t see the need to raise money because I wouldn’t know what to do with it,” he said in a 2015 interview with Business Insider. “It was a profitable company, and there was no need to raise money.”3 Plenty of Fish grew slowly and organically for more than 10 years, eventually growing to about 75 employees and 90 million registered users. In 2015, Match Group (which also owns dating sites Match.com and OKCupid) bought Plenty of Fish for $575 million. “It wasn’t like I had a plan to create a dating site,” Frind said. “It was just a side project I created that got really big.” Not bad for what started as a hobby.

Grades can also be profoundly unfair, especially for students who are unable to keep up, because the level of the exams usually increases from week to week. Let’s take the analogy of video games. When you discover a new game, you initially have no idea how to progress effectively. Above all, you don’t want to be constantly reminded of how bad you are! That’s why video game designers start with extremely easy levels, where you are almost sure to win. Very gradually, the difficulty increases and, with it, the risk of failure and frustration—but programmers know how to mitigate this by mixing the easy with the difficult, and by leaving you free to retry the same level as many times as you need. You see your score steadily increase . . . and finally, the joyous day comes when you successfully pass the final level, where you were stuck for so long. Now compare this with the report cards of “bad” students: they start the year off with a bad grade, and instead of motivating them by letting them take the same test again until they pass, the teacher gives them a new exercise every week, almost always beyond their abilities. Week after week, their “score” hovers around zero. In the video game market, such a design would be a complete disaster. All too often, schools use grades as punishments.

Repurposing the world’s molecules using nanotechnology has been dubbed “ecophagy,” which means eating the environment. The first replicator would make one copy of itself, and then there’d be two replicators making the third and fourth copies. The next generation would make eight replicators total, the next sixteen, and so on. If each replication took a minute and a half to make, at the end of ten hours there’d be more than 68 billion replicators; and near the end of two days they would outweigh the earth. But before that stage the replicators would stop copying themselves, and start making material useful to the ASI that controlled them—programmable matter. The waste heat produced by the process would burn up the biosphere, so those of us some 6.9 billion humans who were not killed outright by the nano assemblers would burn to death or asphyxiate. Every other living thing on earth would share our fate. Through it all, the ASI would bear no ill will toward humans nor love. It wouldn’t feel nostalgia as our molecules were painfully repurposed. What would our screams sound like to the ASI anyway, as microscopic nano assemblers mowed over our bodies like a bloody rash, disassembling us on the subcellular level? Or would the roar of millions and millions of nano factories running at full bore drown out our voices?

Despite the best laid plans and the best people, a project can still experience ruin and decay during its lifetime. Yet there are other projects that, despite enormous difficulties and constant setbacks, successfully fight nature's tendency toward disorder and manage to come out pretty well. What makes the difference? In inner cities, some buildings are beautiful and clean, while others are rotting hulks. Why? Researchers in the field of crime and urban decay discovered a fascinating trigger mechanism, one that very quickly turns a clean, intact, inhabited building into a smashed and abandoned derelict [WK82]. A broken window. One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don't care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner's desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality. The "Broken Window Theory" has inspired police departments in New York and other major cities to crack down on the small stuff in order to keep out the big stuff. It works: keeping on top of broken windows, graffiti, and other small infractions has reduced the serious crime level.

The nudge movement spawned by Thaler and Sunstein has been spectacularly successful around the globe. A 2017 review in the Economist described how policy makers were beginning to embrace insights from behavioral science: In 2009 Barack Obama appointed Mr Sunstein as head of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The following year Mr Thaler advised Britain’s government when it established BIT, which quickly became known as the “nudge unit”. If BIT did not save the government at least ten times its running cost (£500,000 a year), it was to be shut down after two years. Not only did BIT stay open, saving about 20 times its running cost, but it marked the start of a global trend. Now many governments are turning to nudges to save money and do better. In 2014 the White House opened the Social and Behavioural Sciences Team. A report that year by Mark Whitehead of Aberystwyth University counted 51 countries in which “centrally directed policy initiatives” were influenced by behavioural sciences. Nonprofit organisations such as Ideas42, set up in 2008 at Harvard University, help run dozens of nudge-style trials and programmes around the world. In 2015 the World Bank set up a group that is now applying behavioural sciences in 52 poor countries. The UN is turning to nudging to help hit the “sustainable development goals”, a list of targets it has set for 2030.32

The development of the economic programme which consists in the destruction of these monopolies and the substitution for them of the freest competition led its authors to a perception of the fact that all their thought rested upon a very fundamental principle, the freedom of the individual, his right of sovereignty over himself, his products, and his affairs, and of rebellion against the dictation of external authority. Just as the idea of taking capital away from individuals and giving it to the government started Marx in a path which ends in making the government everything and the individual nothing, so the idea of taking capital away from government-protected monopolies and putting it within easy reach of all individuals started Warren and Proudhon in a path which ends in making the individual everything and the government nothing. If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State. This was the logical conclusion to which Warren and Proudhon were forced, and it became the fundamental article of their political philosophy. It is the doctrine which Proudhon named An-archism, a word derived from the Greek, and meaning, not necessarily absence of order, as is generally supposed, but absence of rule. The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that "the best government is that which governs least," and that that which governs least is no government at all.

The concept of product/ market fit originates in Marc Andreessen’s seminal blog post “The Only Thing That Matters.” In his essay, Andreessen argues that the most important factor in successful start-ups is the combination of market and product. His definition couldn’t be simpler: “Product/ market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” Without product/ market fit, it’s impossible to grow a start-up into a successful business. As Andreessen notes, You see a surprising number of really well-run start-ups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board—heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/ market fit. Unfortunately, it’s far easier to define product/ market fit than it is to establish it! When you start a new company, the key product/ market fit question you need to answer is whether you have discovered a nonobvious market opportunity where you have a unique advantage or approach, and one that competing players won’t see until you’ve had a chance to build a healthy lead. It’s usually difficult to find such an opportunity in a “hot” space; if an opportunity is obvious to everyone, the chance that you’ll be the one who succeeds is exceedingly low. Most nonobvious opportunities arise from a change in the market that the incumbents aren’t willing or able to adapt to.

Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought too small. He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers. Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad idea. "Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be much more powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off. Then he started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a small church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a smalltime preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important than the Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began converting people by the hundreds of thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand. L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the creation of Islam. They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many selfdescribed Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that they use his name. It's a postrational religion. "He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or enhancer of the cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that through the use of cult prostitution because it is flagrantly anti-Christian. But one of the major functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and vaccinate people -- and there was more than just vaccine in those needles. "Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.

Television* means ‘to see from a distance’. The desire in man to do so has been there for ages. In the early years of the twentieth century many scientists experimented with the idea of using selenium photosensitive cells for converting light from pictures into electrical signals and transmitting them through wires. The first demonstration of actual television was given by J.L. Baird in UK and C.F. Jenkins in USA around 1927 by using the technique of mechanical scanning employing rotating discs.However, the real breakthrough occurred with the invention of the cathode ray tube and the success of V.K. Zworykin of the USA in perfecting the first camera tube (the iconoscope) based on the storage principle. By 1930 electromagnetic scanning of both camera and picture tubes and other ancillary circuits such as for beam deflection, video amplification, etc. were developed. Though television broadcast started in 1935, world political developments and the second world war slowed down the progress of television. With the end of the war, television rapidly grew into a popular medium for dispersion of news and mass entertainment. Television Systems At the outset, in the absence of any international standards, three monochrome (i.e. black and white) systems grew independently. These are the 525 line American, the 625 line European and the 819 line French systems. This naturally prevents direct exchange of programme between countries using different television standards.Later, efforts by the all world committee on radio and television (CCIR) for changing to a common 625 line system by all concerned proved ineffective and thus all the three systems have apparently come to stay. The inability to change over to a common system is mainly due to the high cost of replacing both the transmitting equipment and the millions of receivers already in use. However the UK, where initially a 415 line monochrome system was in use, has changed to the 625 line system with some modification in the channel bandwidth. In India, where television transmission started in 1959, the 625-B monochrome system has been adopted.

speak to computers in a language that they understand and have them do anything that you want to do. This skill is one whose demand is increasing at an increasing rate the world over. Whether you want to learn code to pursue a career as a programmer, web developer or graphics designer or want to learn code to be able to develop your own web applications and other computerized systems, the one thing you need to do is to start somewhere. What better place to start

Kali Linux: The hacker’s toolbox Frankly speaking, learning and practicing to become a proficient hacker is not as easy as becoming a software developer. This course takes you through the initial steps of discovering hidden vulnerabilities and beating sophisticated security systems. It demands sophistication and creativity among other skills. It goes without saying that Linux is the most preferred operating system for daily use by programmers, hackers, and other computer professionals. This is because of the incredible control the operating system accords the user. If you are new to Linux and are looking to learn all the basics and how to make it work for you, then Kali Linux may not be the ideal starting point for you. It is recommended that you learn the basics with a Ubuntu or Debian-based operating system instead. Having said that, you will find it practical to follow the instructions on how to use Kali for specific hacking purposes in this book whether this will be your first interaction with the OS or you have experience with Linux.

She is an applications programmer for the Feds. In the old days, she would have written computer programs for a living. Nowadays, she writes fragments of computer programs. These programs are designed by Marietta and Marietta’s superiors in massive week-long meetings on the top floor. Once they get the design down, they start breaking up the problem into tinier and tinier segments, assigning them to group managers, who break them down even more and feed little bits of work to the individual programmers. In order to keep the work done by the individual coders from colliding, it all has to be done according to a set of rules and regulations even bigger and more fluid than the Government procedure manual.

Jeff Skoll: There was a moment, about four or five days into it, when the technical team said, “We don’t think that we can bring this up.” And everyone just sat in silence for about twenty minutes. If you have a mind-set where you are always looking for a black swan no matter how good the news has been, then you are always afraid of that black swan. Well, that was our black swan. It was, “Yes, the company is dead,” and we’re all in shock, but then a new breath of life came in. Right around then a junior Oracle programmer said, “I’ve just found something, I wonder if this could be it?” It was a line of code that was just off. And sure enough, that was the problem, and after we made the patch, the system started to come back up, gradually.

Here’s something you may not know: every time you go to Facebook or ESPN.com or wherever, you’re unleashing a mad scramble of money, data, and pixels that involves undersea fiber-optic cables, the world’s best database technologies, and everything that is known about you by greedy strangers. Every. Single. Time. The magic of how this happens is called “real-time bidding” (RTB) exchanges, and we’ll get into the technical details before long. For now, imagine that every time you go to CNN.com, it’s as though a new sell order for one share in your brain is transmitted to a stock exchange. Picture it: individual quanta of human attention sold, bit by bit, like so many million shares of General Motors stock, billions of times a day. Remember Spear, Leeds & Kellogg, Goldman Sachs’s old-school brokerage acquisition, and its disappearing (or disappeared) traders? The company went from hundreds of traders and two programmers to twenty programmers and two traders in a few years. That same process was just starting in the media world circa 2009, and is right now, in 2016, kicking into high gear. As part of that shift, one of the final paroxysms of wasted effort at Adchemy was taking place precisely in the RTB space. An engineer named Matthew McEachen, one of Adchemy’s best, and I built an RTB bidding engine that talked to Google’s huge ad exchange, the figurative New York Stock Exchange of media, and submitted bids and ads at speeds of upwards of one hundred thousand requests per second. We had been ordered to do so only to feed some bullshit line Murthy was laying on potential partners that we were a real-time ads-buying company. Like so much at Adchemy, that technology would be a throwaway, but the knowledge I gained there, from poring over Google’s RTB technical documentation and passing Google’s merciless integration tests with our code, would set me light-years ahead of the clueless product team at Facebook years later.

In the previous two decades, as NUMMI’s success had become better known, executives in other industries had started adapting the Toyota Production System philosophy to other industries. In 2001, a group of computer programmers had gathered at a ski lodge in Utah to write a set of principles, called the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development,” that adapted Toyota’s methods and lean manufacturing to how software was created.

If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you’re a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.

For example, one programmer argued vociferously for the inclusion of a question to female users: "How expensive is your perfume?" The answer would factor into the algorithm by increasing a female user's "femininity" variable if she purchased expensive perfume. Generally speaking, the higher the "femininity" variable, the better the male dates the woman would end up with. DateEx users quickly realized that fact, and the word spread through online forums: start buying more expensive perfume (or lying about it, which would still create the expectation among the general population that perfume was important). The programmer who came up with that question now works for L'Oreal. But,

Woe to the poor developer who buckles under pressure and agrees to try to make the deadline. That developer will start taking shortcuts and working extra hours in the vain hope of working a miracle.

Being a young programmer today must be awful—you can choose 20 different programming languages, dozens of framework and operating systems and you’re paralyzed by choice. There was no paralysis of choice then. You just start doing it because the decision as to which language and things is just made—there’s no thinking about what you should do, you just go and do it.

State wants the alleged techniques, presumably.” “I’ve been wondering about that,” Norman said. “I wonder if we do want them.” “How do you mean?” “It’s a bit difficult to explain … Look, have you been following television at all since you came home?” “Occasionally, but since the Yatakang news broke I’ve been much too busy to catch more than an occasional news bulletin.” “So have I, but—well, I guess I’m more familiar with the way trends get started here nowadays, so I can extrapolate from the couple or three programmes I have had time for.” Norman’s gaze moved over Elihu’s head to the far corner of the room. “Engrelay Satelserv blankets most of Africa, doesn’t it?” “The whole continent, I’d say. There are English-speaking people in every country on Earth nowadays, except possibly for China.” “So you’re acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere?” “Yes, of course—these two who always appear in station identification slots, doing exotic and romantic things.” “Did you have a personalised set at any time, with your own identity matted into the Everywhere image?” “Lord, no! It costs—what? About five thousand bucks, isn’t it?” “About that. I haven’t got one either; the basic fee is for couple service, and being a bachelor I’ve never bothered. I just have the standard brownnose identity on my set.” He hesitated. “And—to be absolutely frank—a Scandahoovian one for the shiggy half of the pair. But I’ve watched friends’ sets plenty of times where they had the full service, and I tell you it’s eerie. There’s something absolutely unique and indescribable about seeing your own face and hearing your own voice, matted into the basic signal. There you are wearing clothes you’ve never owned, doing things you’ve never done in places you’ve never been, and it has the immediacy of real life because nowadays television is the real world. You catch? We’re aware of the scale of the planet, so we don’t accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what’s relayed to us by the TV.” “I can well understand that,” Elihu nodded. “And of course I’ve seen this on other people’s sets too. Also I agree entirely about what we regard as real. But I thought we were talking about the Yatakangi claim?” “I still am,” Norman said. “Do you have a homimage attachment on your set? No, obviously not. I do. This does the same thing except with your environment; when they—let’s see … Ah yes! When they put up something like the splitscreen cuts they use to introduce SCANALYZER, one of the cuts is always what they call the ‘digging’ cut, and shows Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere sitting in your home wearing your faces watching the same programme you’re about to watch. You know this one?” “I don’t think they have this service in Africa yet,” Elihu said. “I know the bit you mean, but it always shows a sort of idealised dream-home full of luxy gadgetry.” “That used to be what they did here,” Norman said. “Only nowadays practically every American home is full of luxy gadgetry. You know Chad’s definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year’s model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after?” Elihu chuckled, then grew grave. “That’s too nearly literal to be funny,” he said. “Prophet’s beard, it certainly is! I found time to look over some of Chad’s books after Guinevere’s party, and … Well, having met him I was inclined to think he was a conceited blowhard, but now I think he’s entitled to every scrap of vanity he likes to put on.

Imagine the power to resolve dozens of issues right on the spot. If a press release needed approval, everyone (including the CFO, the VP of sales, and the software development and marketing chiefs) was there to review and resolve it in minutes. It didn’t float around in emails for days, sucking up hours of management’s time. If Sales was having a problem with the CRM system, the head of IT was there. If Development needed to hire additional programmers, the head of HR and the CFO were there to start the process and sign off on the budget.

There are real ramifications of reading these articles for decades and decades. You start to believe it. You start to think the only way to manage money is to hoard it and create an increasingly long list of noes. Soon, the guilt isn’t just coming from money experts and the outside world. It’s coming from you.

She didn’t turn the compassion off in time. She didn’t remind herself, the way she does at the start of every day, that when the programme wraps up, Beacon will airlift her out of here the same way they airlifted her in. Quick and easy, taking all her things with her, leaving no footprint. This isn’t life. It’s something that’s playing out in its own self-contained subroutine. She can walk out as clean as when she came in, if she just doesn’t let anything touch her. That horse, however, may already have bolted.

We don’t even know that we are trapped in them. It was exactly those subconscious programmes of learned helplessness and powerlessness that we acquired as children which were causing us to hand over our power to abusers and to stay traumatised. It isn’t until we start shifting out of these ways of being that we can unravel the old self and begin to be released into our true self.

Listen to Nagging Doubts—Start When You're Ready

Start with the issue that looks the easiest or, if you want a challenge, the one that looks the most difficult. Or just start with the one that’s the most interesting.

I start with interrogating the way the word ‘creativity’ circulates and gets used in corporate settings. What does it mean to be ‘creative’ in any corporation? If we agree that one of the key ingredients of creativity is ‘to create’, then we can safely say that most of the American people feel alienated from the work they do and from their employers, because they can’t create in the deep sense of what creativity means. Even those who do, most of them feel alienated from the product they create, because they feel it is being utilized for profit only. One quick example that comes to mind is utilizing technological advancement for surveillance and manufacturing weapons. Over the years, I have talked to many people in different professions from pilots to engineers, from coders to programmers, from doctors to other healthcare professionals, who repeatedly confirmed that they often feel that the human and creative value of what they accomplish only seems to matter to the extent it can be monetized and used to expand businesses and increase profits for the few at the top. As such, people feel alienated even with their most creative products and moments. And, if they decide to be critical of the status quo and challenge it (being critical is another key ingredient in creativity), then they face disciplinary action or dismissal from their work. Creativity, then, as propagated by corporate interests really means being creative in maximizing profits and numbers for the few at the top, and to do so, one needs to be creative to lure as many customers as possible to buy products. So, two of the key ingredients of creativity (to create and to be critical) are often replaced with maximizing profits and marketing. [From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]

One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short span of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.

One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short span of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.

Easy!,” you think. “Gently lower the collective pitch lever and you’ll descend gracefully to the ground, a hero.” However, when you try it, you discover that life isn’t that simple. The helicopter’s nose drops, and you start to spiral down to the left. Suddenly you discover that you’re flying a system where every control input has secondary effects. Lower the left-hand lever and you need to add compensating backward movement to the right-hand stick and push the right pedal. But then each of these changes affects all of the other controls again. Suddenly you’re juggling an unbelievably complex system, where every change impacts all the other inputs. Your workload is phenomenal: your hands and feet are constantly moving, trying to balance all the interacting forces. Helicopter controls are decidedly not orthogonal.

People who choose to earn money first, people who put off their real plans until later, until they are rich, are not necessarily wrong. People who want only to live, and who reckon living is absolute freedom, the exclusive pursuit of happiness, the sole satisfaction of their desires and instincts, the immediate enjoyment of the boundless riches of the world - Jérôme and Sylvie had taken on this vast programme for themselves - such people will always be unhappy. It is true, they would admit, that there are people for whom this kind of dilemma does not arise, or hardly arises, either because they are too poor and have no requirements beyond a slightly better diet, slightly better housing, slightly less work, or because they are too rich, from the start, to understand the import or even the meaning of such a distinction.

Here is a question, how can one improve without deconstructing the old? It's the puzzle that's kept programmers in business since they started not figuring it out~! Answer: Build on top of older crumbling systems and allow the old ones to fail under the weight of greater prosperity.

Kaiser was new to shipwork. He began life running a photographer’s shop in New York, moved into the gravel business, and ended up in California running a multi-million dollar construction company that built the Hoover Dam and the Bay Bridge. He had a reputation for tackling the impossible. When the shipbuilding programme started his initial involvement was the construction of four of the new yards on the west coast, but he then began to produce the ships as well. At his Permanente Metals Yards No. 1 and No. 2 at Richmond, on the northern edge of San Francisco Bay, the young Kaiser manager, Clay Bedford, set out literally to mass-produce ships.

To get to the top of motor racing, to drive a Formula 1 car in one of the leading teams, you have to have certain qualities in the right proportion. One of them has always been much admired, and is now more important than ever: consistency. What matters is not a single outstanding move but your performance across the full duration of a race, a racing season, and indeed your career...Clearly consistency is not simply a natural talent within a driver, but the outcome of a long and tough physical programme which will allow us to give our best at all times and reach the end of a race - even the toughest - as fresh as we were to start.

Have a Profession, Not a Job Everyone except trust fund babies and perennial welfare recipients need to work.  It is an unavoidable fact of life that if you don't want to be homeless, go hungry, constantly beg, or wish to have any semblance of a normal, healthy financial life you need to work.  But in the fact work traditionally consumes half of your waking life (more if you include commute), if your job has a point and purpose to it, then so too does your life.  This isn't to say there is anything wrong with being a general laborer, a barista, or a fast food worker.  We all start somewhere and these low-skilled, entry level jobs are a vital part of the economy and a starting point in everyone's working career.  But if you take the time to learn a skill, develop a trade, or earn an employable degree, you can have a profession, not merely a job.  This confers upon you and your life immediate purpose and value as now you get to declare yourself as an individual with a specific skill. “I'm a plumber.” “I'm a CPA.” “I'm a cop.” Or “I'm a programmer.” And this statement declares how you contribute to the economy, how you earn your keep in this society, and is usually the first thing people ask about you – what do you do? Furthermore, as it just so happens, being a professional pays more.  Admittedly, it takes some training and education, and for some particularly prestigious professions it can take years (for example, being a surgeon).  But if you go that extra mile and invest in yourself a year or eight to develop a skill or a trade, the remaining 50-60 years of your life will not only be more profitable, but will give you purpose and meaning for your entire working career.

Abhyantara Yoga is a traditional yoga school based in Rishikesh, Himalayas. Which started with the inspiration of spreading traditional spiritual values of yoga through various teaching programmes such as Yoga retreat and Yoga Teacher Training courses, which offers the first level of yoga training that allows you to become RYT 200 as per the standards and guidelines of Yoga Alliance, USA

One can escape a rational requirement if one fails to meet its conditions in some way. One is then allowed to beg off, and the permissible grounds depend on the general principle from which the particular application of the requirement follows. That principle may in turn apply in virtue of a still more general principle plus further conditions, and if those conditions are not met, escape is again possible. But at some point the retreat must come to an end: one must reach a requirement (it need not be conditional, for it may have been the original one) from which it is not possible to escape by begging off. It is natural to suppose that principles of this sort must underlie ethics, if it exists. It is also natural to assume that the enterprise of justification should focus on these basic requirments, thus yielding an ethical system with cast iron motivational backing. But such a programme appears doomed from the start. For if we justify a requirement, it is in terms of a principle from which that requirement follows, perhaps with the aid of further conditions. But that principle must itself represent a requirement, or else what it is adduced to justify will not be one. Therefore any requirement which we set out to justify will not be ultimate. Something beyond justification is required. 3. I assume that a normative requirement on action must have correspondingly strict motivational backing. If ethics is to contain

It is also natural to assume that the enterprise of justification should focus on these basic requirments, thus yielding an ethical system with cast iron motivational backing. But such a programme appears doomed from the start. For if we justify a requirement, it is in terms of a principle from which that requirement follows, perhaps with the aid of further conditions. But that principle must itself represent a requirement, or else what it is adduced to justify will not be one. Therefore any requirement which we set out to justify will not be ultimate. Something beyond justification is required.

One broken window—a badly designed piece of code, a poor management decision that the team must live with for the duration of the project—is all it takes to start the decline. If you find yourself working on a project with quite a few broken windows, it's all too easy to slip into the mindset of "All the rest of this code is crap, I'll just follow suit." It doesn't matter if the project has been fine up to this point. In the original experiment leading to the "Broken Window Theory," an abandoned car sat for a week untouched. But once a single window was broken, the car was stripped and turned upside down within hours. By the same token, if you find yourself on a team and a project where the code is pristinely beautiful—cleanly written, well designed, and elegant—you will likely take extra special care not to mess it up, just like the firefighters. Even if there's a fire raging (deadline, release date, trade show demo, etc.), you don't want to be the first one to make a mess.

Most software disasters start out too small to notice, and most project overruns happen a day at a time.

project deal is a reason to finish what you've started, be a man please

In 2005, when Congress still depended on Communist votes for a majority in Parliament, a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was passed, assuring any household in the countryside a hundred days labour a year at the legal minimum wage on public works, with at least a third of these jobs for women. It is work for pay, rather than a direct cash transfer scheme as in Brazil, to minimize the danger of money going to those who are not actually the poor, and so ensure it reaches only those willing to do the work. Denounced by all right-thinking opinion as debilitating charity behind a façade of make-work, it was greeted by the middle-class like ‘a wet dog at a glamorous party’, in the words of one of its architects, the Belgian-Indian economist Jean Drèze. Unlike the Bolsa Família in Brazil, the application of NREGA was left to state governments rather than the centre, so its impact has been very uneven and incomplete, wages often paid lower than the legal minimum, for days many fewer than a hundred.75 Works performed are not always durable, and as with all other social programmes in India, funds are liable to local malversation. But in scale NREGA now represents the largest entitlement programme in the world, reaching some 40 million rural households, a quarter of the total in the country. Over half of these dalit or adivasi, and 48 per cent of its beneficiaries are women – double their share of casual labour in the private sector. Such is the demand for employment by NREGA in the countryside that it far outruns supply. A National Survey Sample for 2009–2010 has revealed that 45 per cent of all rural households wanted the work it offers, of whom only 56 per cent got it.76 What NREGA has started to do, in the formulation Drèze has taken from Ambedkar, is break the dictatorship of the private employer in the countryside, helping by its example to raise wages even of non-recipients. Since inception, its annual cost has risen from $2.5 to over $8 billion, a token of its popularity. This remains less than 1 per cent of GDP, and the great majority of rural labourers in the private sector are still not paid the minimum wage due them. Conceived outside the party system, and accepted by Congress only when it had little expectation of winning the elections of 2004, the Act eventually had such popular demand behind it that the Lok Sabha adopted it nem con. Three years later, with typical dishonesty, the Manmohan regime renamed it as ‘Gandhian’ to fool the masses that Congress inspired it.

Hacking? Some programmers try to hack their way toward working code rather than using a systematic approach like the PPP. If you've ever found that you've coded yourself into a corner in a routine and have to start over, that's an indication that the PPP might work better. If you find yourself losing your train of thought in the middle of coding a routine, that's another indication that the PPP would be beneficial. Have you ever simply forgotten to write part of a class or part of routine? That hardly ever happens if you're using the PPP. If you find yourself staring at the computer screen not knowing where to start, that's a surefire sign that the PPP would make your programming life easier.

Tragant (2006: 239) sums up the evidence: ‘When FL (foreign language) instruction starts early in primary school there seems to be a decline in the learners’ attitudes around the age of ten to eleven; when most students start a foreign language or enter immersion programmes in secondary school, their initial attitudes are positive but their interest soon wanes.’ This may, of course, have a lot to do with the kind of teaching the children are subject to. If teachers are untrained in foreign language instruction for young learners, it’s unlikely that even the small amount of time available will be used to best effect. This is especially the case if instruction mimics the kind of teacher-fronted, transmissive, grammar-focused instruction that characterizes language teaching at secondary and tertiary level. And a transmissive approach is typically the default choice in large classes of (potentially) unruly children.

You have to be an optimist to believe in the Singularity,” she says, “and that’s harder than it seems. Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?” “Sounds like a Japanese game show.” Kat straightens her shoulders. “Okay, we’re going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you’re a science fiction writer.” Okay: “World government … no cancer … hover-boards.” “Go further. What’s the good future after that?” “Spaceships. Party on Mars.” “Further.” “Star Trek. Transporters. You can go anywhere.” “Further.” I pause a moment, then realize: “I can’t.” Kat shakes her head. “It’s really hard. And that’s, what, a thousand years? What comes after that? What could possibly come after that? Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.” I’m trying hard to imagine an average day in the year 3012. I can’t even come up with a half-decent scene. Will people live in buildings? Will they wear clothes? My imagination is almost physically straining. Fingers of thought are raking the space behind the cushions, looking for loose ideas, finding nothing. “Personally, I think the big change is going to be our brains,” Kat says, tapping just above her ear, which is pink and cute. “I think we’re going to find different ways to think, thanks to computers. You expect me to say that”—yes—“but it’s happened before. It’s not like we have the same brains as people a thousand years ago.” Wait: “Yes we do.” “We have the same hardware, but not the same software. Did you know that the concept of privacy is, like, totally recent? And so is the idea of romance, of course.” Yes, as a matter of fact, I think the idea of romance just occurred to me last night. (I don’t say that out loud.) “Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade,” she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. “Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue.” Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue. “But I think the writers had their turn,” she says, “and now it’s programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system.” I am definitely talking to a girl from Google. “So what’s the next upgrade?” “It’s already happening,” she says. “There are all these things you can do, and it’s like you’re in more than one place at one time, and it’s totally normal. I mean, look around.” I swivel my head, and I see what she wants me to see: dozens of people sitting at tiny tables, all leaning into phones showing them places that don’t exist and yet are somehow more interesting than the Gourmet Grotto. “And it’s not weird, it’s not science fiction at all, it’s…” She slows down a little and her eyes dim. I think she thinks she’s getting too intense. (How do I know that? Does my brain have an app for that?) Her cheeks are flushed and she looks great with all her blood right there at the surface of her skin. “Well,” she says finally, “it’s just that I think the Singularity is totally reasonable to imagine.

You sketch out an overall shape, paint the underlying environment, then fill in the details. You constantly step back with a critical eye to view what you've done. Every now and then you'll throw a canvas away and start again.

The book is also about cultivating the desire to live a remarkable life. Strangely, we don’t all set out on the quest to lead remarkable lives when we start our careers. Most of us are content to go with the flow. Our expectations have been lowered for us by the media and by our friends, acquaintances, and family members. So, leading a remarkable life is something you have to discover as even being a reasonable goal. It’s not obvious.

Starting with a puppy Starting this recall training programme with a young puppy provides you with a unique opportunity to avoid the mistakes that so many people make with managing their first dog. Especially when it comes to exercising a dog out in the countryside. Achieving an excellent recall from scratch requires a structured approach to training. And that is what Part Two of this book is for. But before you begin training, do think about how you plan to supervise and manage your puppy outdoors, as he grows and becomes more confident. Find out as much as you can about the natural characteristics of your puppy’s breed. If he belongs to one of the more challenging breeds, it is very important that you pay extra attention to building a strong relationship with your dog. Make sure you are interesting to your puppy. One very simple way to be more interesting to your dog during your walks together is to be unpredictable, so when you first start taking your puppy out on walks try to avoid endlessly plodding along the same old path – change direction often. By that I mean literally turn around on the spot and start walking back the way you came. You cannot do this too much. Puppies less than six months old lack the confidence to lead the way and are inclined to follow you. Make the most of this to establish a firm habit in your dog, of watching you to see where you go next. This helps your dog to see you as the person who leads rather than the person who follows. Remember that pups do not need long walks, just five minutes or so per day for each month of their age. Half an hour a day is enough for a six-month-old dog. Make sure that you review your assessment of your puppy as he matures. Try to be objective and to take avoiding action if you start to feel out of control at any point.

If your son does not start to stop within five or ten seconds of your giving a direct instruction, then you need to take immediate action. Of course we feel completely comfortable about taking immediate action when a child’s safety is in danger or when it looks as if property is about to be damaged. Following through immediately with action is just as important when the issue is not safety, but cooperation. The action that you will take will usually be either removing an object from the child or removing the child from the situation. As soon as you make a move to follow through with immediate action, your son will probably see that you mean what you say so he will start to stop. Reinforce his cooperation by following through with Descriptive Praise. If you are feeling annoyed that the initial misbehaviour made you late, it may not be easy to sound pleased. Remember that your son has not yet developed good habits, and it is our job as parents to teach and train the habits we want to see. It won’t happen overnight.

Sitting apart. Sitting apart is a very effective consequence for impulsive misbehaviour that still remains even after you have been doing lots of Descriptive Praise, think-throughs, rewards for being sensible and action replays. Sitting apart is similar in some ways to a time-out, but instead of banishing your son to another room, which children often find very upsetting, it takes place in the room where you are. Your son needs to sit exactly where and how you tell him to, with no misbehaving and no crying or even talking, for the number of minutes of his age. If he gets up, put him back and step away so that he sees that it is his job to stay in the sitting apart place, not your job to hold him there. Then start the timer from zero again. A sitting apart is a learning experience because you are on hand to Descriptively Praise and Reflectively Listen. Other than that, don’t talk to him. His natural desire to interact with you will help him to control himself to get to the end of the sitting apart.

Livingston: In addition to all your responsibilities, you were also starting the Rails project. How did you manage it? Heinemeier Hansson: When you have to do a project like Basecamp and you only have 10 hours a week, you can't spend your time on things that don't produce anything. So you get extremely aware of tools that aren't necessarily helping your productivity and you go seeking tools that can help. That's how I found Ruby. It was such a nice experience for me and a nice productivity booster. I was coming from PHP. I had also looked at Java and other environments and I wasn't finding anything else that would allow me, as a single programmer, to deliver all this stuff.

-“The greatest discovery of this generation is the knowledge that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind” William James -“A man is the sum total of his thinking. You can think your way into, or out of any emotional state, simply by the thoughts you have in your mind. -“Human beings have the power within them to programme their mind to achieve the desires of their hearts. “Whatever the mind can conceive if you believe you can achieve.” “According to your faith be it unto you.” -Mat 9:29 -“One of the most comforting thought is: God is always with you; the power of God is within you, and God has given you the power to call on the universe to attract the desires of your heart.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims POWER OF WORDS -“According to the bible, words were the tool that God used to create the universe. “Let there be.. and it was so.” -“Words have the power to shape our minds, influence our thoughts and move us to action. Knowing the effect words can have in programming our minds and influencing our behavior, we should be sensitive to how words are used when communicating. The Good news is, it is never too late to use words to make changes to our lives.” -“Be mindful of what you say……. for words spoken cannot be taken back. Think carefully before you speak, saying only what you mean. The closest ears to your mouth are yours. Learn to speak positive words both to yourself and to others, since you will be the first to feel the effects.” -“Let your manner of speech be positive if you wish to develop a peaceful state of mind. Start each day by affirming tranquil positive and optimistic words so your days will be pleasant and successful.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims PRACTICE -“Practice does not make excellence, but the right practice makes great improvements. If you Practice an activity the wrong way, all it serves to do is to make you better at doing it the wrong way.” -“Practice does not make perfect, it only makes you better at what you practice. There is no such level as perfection, for in the game of life change is inevitable.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims RELATIONSHIPS -“Take time to know him/her it’s not an overnight thing”… with time the real person will eventually reveal his/her true character. At the beginning of all relationships people often exhibit their best behavior…. they want to sell themselves to you. They will often tell you what they know you want to hear. You can know a person better when you see them at their worst.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims

The true turning point came when I was about fourteen years old. I bought a copy of PC Plus magazine which included a cover CD featuring a full version of Borland C++ Builder. I installed it and carefully followed the "hello world" tutorial which was helpfully included in the magazine. This was it. A new world opened up before me. The restrictions imposed upon my imagination by the material world were gone. My creativity unshackled, the cathedrals in my mind would be made manifest! To what lofty end should I put this new-found tool? It was obvious. The Fuck Generator. As simple as it was elegant, the Fuck Generator (fgen.exe) was a command-line program, and my first advance beyond "hello world." Upon starting, it would prompt the user for a number. With this number n, it would then print out the string "fuck," n times. Finally the user was given the option to repeat the exercise, or quit. Perhaps a little limited in use, I nevertheless was hooked on the power that I had tasted. It is a particular joy that any programmer will know well, to see the machine do your bidding, no matter how simple a task that may be. It works, and it works because you understand how to make it work.

Alexis Tsipras, the Syriza leader, has in recent weeks abandoned his pledge to “tear up” the country’s bailout agreement with international creditors and is emphasising more moderate steps to address Greece’s debt load as well as his deep commitment to the euro. Krishna Guha, of Evercore ISI, warned that — at a minimum — investors now faced “a four-week period of elevated uncertainty in which eurozone risk assets will struggle to perform”. Yet Mr Guha added: “We believe that Tsipras will prove more pragmatic than past Syriza rhetoric suggests. He has opened back channels to Berlin, Paris and Frankfurt, and has every incentive to try to negotiate relatively cosmetic changes to Greece’s programme and ride the early-stage Greek recovery rather than derail it.” Nick Wall, a portfolio manager at Invesco, also noted Mr Tsipras’ recent attempt to tack to the political centre. “They are going to need private sector investors, particularly if they are going to start running deficits again.

Caldwell ignores this speech and makes her appeal directly to the sergeant. “Melanie belongs to me,” she reminds him. “To my programme. If we lose her, it will be your responsibility.” It’s the wrong thing to say. Parks doesn’t seem to like being threatened. “I spent four years servicing your programme, Doc,” he reminds her. “Today is my day off.” Caldwell starts to say something else, but Parks talks over her–to Justineau. “If we let her go, why would she come back?” “I

Reducing whingeing, complaining, pestering and arguing First, let’s remember that it rarely helps to reason with an immature child. Often he does not quite understand our adult reasons, or possibly he does understand but does not really care. So don’t bother trying to reason with your son when he is being unreasonable. A much more useful strategy is to look at him as he is whingeing or arguing, but bite your tongue and say nothing. This takes self-control! Wait a few seconds for a pause in the whingeing or arguing. Then you can say, ‘You’re not whingeing now,’ or ‘You stopped saying you want another ice cream.’ He might start whingeing or complaining or pestering again straightaway because he knows that usually gets a rise out of you, and he’s thinking there’s a chance you might give in. These annoying habits have been his way of getting your attention and, up until now, it has been pretty foolproof. So it is understandable that he may test you for a while before he realises that the old way of getting your attention is no longer working. If you have accepted my challenge and are making a point of Descriptively Praising your son ten or more times a day, he will soon see, probably within the first week, that now he is getting attention for the sensible behaviour. Here are some examples of Descriptive Praises for little bits of self-control:   You were so brave at the doctor’s. You didn’t make a fuss. You just sat there quietly while she gave you the injection.   I can see you’re upset, but you’re remembering not to shout.   You’re waiting patiently. (Say this after one or two minutes of waiting patiently. If you delay this praise, he will probably reach the end of his tether and start misbehaving; then you won’t be able to praise him for being patient.)   The Descriptive Praises will sink in and start to change how your son views himself. So whenever your son is doing something annoying, think ‘I’ll wait for a pause and then Descriptively Praise the absence of the negative.’ Parents report that at first they focused their Descriptive Praises on their son’s three or four most annoying habits. Within a few weeks or months, those habits had improved so much that they hardly happened any more.

People who choose to earn money first, people who put off their real plans until later, until they are rich, are not necessarily wrong. People who want only to live, and who reckon living is absolute freedom, the exclusive pursuit of happiness, the sole satisfaction of their desires and instincts, the immediate enjoyment of the boundless riches of the world - Jérôme and Sylvie had taken on this vast programme for themselves - such people will always be unhappy. It is true, they would admit, that there are people for whom this kind of dilemma does not arise, or hardly arises, either because they are too poor and have no requirements beyond a slightly better diet, slightly better housing, slightly less work, or because they are too rich, from the start, to understand the import or even the meaning of such a distinction. But nowadays and in our part of the world, more and more people are neither rich nor poor: they dream of wealth, and could become wealthy; and that is where their misfortunes begin.

Until you have your ducks in a row, hold off on hiring a bunch of salespeople. First, hire an expert to help you build a solid playbook, figure out what kind of people you want to hire, set up your daily huddle, and figure out who your customers are. That’s really what it looks like to transform into a sales-driven culture, where it’s everyone’s job to think about how to make sales more effective, from the receptionist taking a message to the software programmer in charge of the Content Management System. As companies grow, it’s easy for them to become more siloed and disconnected from other departments, but a salesdriven culture reaffirms the principle that the company exists to solve a problem, to connect customers to the solution for their problem, and to close that deal.

The programme of life is the same as that of a bathing establishment, a crowd, or a journey: sometimes things will be thrown at you, and sometimes they will strike you by accident. Life is not a dainty business. You have started on a long journey; you are bound to slip, collide, fall, become weary, and cry out: "O for Death!

The Life Force To discover the Life Force on your Stone of Life, imagine that you are 100 years old and on your death bed with one minute left to live. Your great-great-grandchild asks, ‘Before you die, tell me what I should do with my life?’ Pause for a moment now and try to honestly answer the question immediately within the next minute. You have just one minute, start now and then when the time is up and you have worked out what you would say to them, continue reading. Answering this question will identify what is important to you, what is the essence of the Sun within your Universe. It is what life is all about to you. It is your ‘Life Force’. Many of you will answer with statements such as, ‘it doesn’t matter what you do’, ‘be happy’, ‘don’t worry’, and ‘make the most of it’. Whatever your advice was to your great-great-grandchild is really the advice to yourself. If you are not living by this advice, which is the essence of your existence, you are living a lie. Don’t live a lie; it will unsettle you more than anything else.

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After lunch Ruth will still experience that old Sunday afternoon dread—a heady mix of undone homework and uniform drying by the fire, cosy and sad at the same time. She’ll get the Dread even though she doesn’t have to go to work tomorrow. Summer School is over and the holidays have officially started. But as soon as the Sunday evening programmes come on the television—costume dramas, antiques and the countryside—the Dread will descend.

Because we sit there in the gap for a long time saying [gasps]. And that’s when you begin to learn the meaning of ‘Lord Have Mercy’. I can’t do anything to raise my state but what I can do is stay honestly ahead of, in plain sight, what’s happened, acknowledging. Here I am. And I think it’s from that repeated acknowledgement of my own helplessness at that level, but refusing to simply hide from that helplessness, that gradually, gradually, gradually the energy that had originally gone into your, sort of, ego programmes gets recaptured to begin to hold this other kind of field of awareness, of attentiveness, that’s not identified with that small self acting out and can begin to become a nest for that deeper and fuller and truer wiser self to live in. And then we begin to Be. Then we begin to have Being. And it’s from that Being that sometimes we can pull ourselves out of that spiral we were heading into, and it’s from that Being that we can begin to offer our force of Being to the world as love, as assistance, as a shift in the energy field for someone else. ‘Baraka’ the Sufis call it. But it comes slowly, because you can’t just, kind of, click your heels together and have Being. It has to accumulate slowly in your being for a life of painfully bearing the crucifixion of inner honesty, and slowly it emerges. Interviewer: So that brings up the question in me, what is then freedom? Because you go on this journey. We start out on this journey to become free, which we call enlightenment. Cynthia: Well, you know, we have so many mixed metaphors as Western and Eastern ways of contexting reality come together like tectonic plates. And they don’t often match up. I think, in a very obvious way, freedom is easy. At the obvious level, what it means is what you’d call ‘freedom from the false self’. Most of us think we’re free, and yet we are not free at all because we are under the absolute compulsion of agendas, addictions and aversions that have been programmed into us from early life, and sometimes from the womb. We have our values, we have our triggers, we have our flash points, we have our agendas. And, as A.H. Almaas said so famously, “Freedom to be your ego is not freedom.” Because that’s slavery. You’re being pulled around by a bull ring in the nose. So part of the work of freedom begins when you can stabilise in yourself this thing that some of the Eastern traditions helpfully call ‘witnessing presence’, which is something deeper that’s not dependent on the pain-pleasure principle, that’s not attracted by attraction, or repulsed by aversion. You know, as my teacher Rafe, the hermit monk of Snowmass, Colorado, used to say, “I want to have enough Being to be nothing.” Which means he is not dependant on the world to give him his identity, because he’s learned his identity nests in something much deeper. [...] And as you finally become free to follow what you might call the ‘homing beacon of your own inner calling’, you realise that it’s only in that complete obedience that freedom lies. And, of course, the trick to that is the word ‘obedience’, which we usually thinks means knuckling under, or capitulating, really comes from the Latin ‘ob audire’, which means ‘to listen deeply’. So, as we listen deeply to the fundamental, what you might call the ‘tuning fork’ of our being – which is given to us not by ourself and is never about self-realisation because the self melts as that realisation comes closer – you find the only freedom is to be your own cell in the vast mystical body of God.

Being a young programmer today must be awful—you can choose 20 different programming languages, dozens of framework and operating systemsand you’re paralyzed by choice. There was no paralysis of choice then. You just start doing it because the decision as to which language and things is just made—there’s no thinking about what you should do, you just go and do it.

Think about the part you find yourself playing, the self you put on like a costume. Who cast you in this role? Most of us are living out a script that someone else has written for us. We’ve not been invited to live from our heart, to be who we truly are, so we put on these false selves hoping to offer something more acceptable to the world, something functional. We learn our roles starting very young and we learn them well: Joey’s the smart kid and his role is to be smart. He’ll help you with your homework and grow up to be a computer programmer. Karen is the victim of abuse, struggling against overwhelming odds. She’s been given the role of being used. The pretty girls get to be the cheerleaders, the others are sent to the library. The athletic boys are picked for the team, the others are simply picked on. Either we’re chosen for the wrong reasons or not chosen at all.

So in 2011, when Nokia needed to lay off 18,000 employees due to difficulties in its mobile phone business, it had learned its lesson. It launched the Bridge programme, giving these workers five potential paths forward: finding another job within Nokia, finding another job outside Nokia through outplacement, starting a new business, taking business or trade courses, or building a new path such as volunteering – the last three funded by grants from Nokia.

As demonstrated especially by the fox, goose, and corn problem, restating a problem can produce valuable results. In some cases, a problem that looks very difficult may seem easy when stated in a different way or using different terms. Restating a problem is like circling the base of a hill that you must climb; before starting your climb, why not check out the hill from every angle to see whether there’s an easier way up?