Leo Messi in America has reached peak hype, and for a good reason. 36 year old forward started his North American career on the rightest of feet, scoring in every game of the Leagues Cup (for a total of 11 goals in 7 games) and taking Inter Miami (last place in the MLS Eastern conference prior to his arrival) to the title.

As is the case every twenty years or so, many believe this is the moment when soccer finally takes off in America.

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As universities are switching to 100% remote teaching in the coming semester, many undergraduate students should strongly consider getting a “DIY” CS degree: take the same courses you would at your own school, but on any one of the online Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms, like Coursera or edX.

Advantages

Cost: this one is a no-brainer. According to US News one year of college tuition costs $10,116 on average for in-state students at a public school, and $36,801 on average at private schools.

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It’s been a while. Running my blog off of a WordPress on EC2 was just very… undelightful :) It was a pain to maintain, it cost a lot to run (in relative terms), it was ugly and slow.

I kept wanting to write but the experience was so cringy I never did.

So I decided it was time for a change.

I came up with what I think a blog should be like in 2020:

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As a hiring manager, I’m probably looking at a hundred candidate profiles a week, at least. Here are some common mistakes you can fix and improvements you can make right now as a candidate / job seeker, to increase your chances to find a job. This is biased for software engineering roles, but many things apply to any role.  

Profile picture

The recruiter will be looking at your online presence and the first thing humans look at are the picture. There are a few common mistakes here: Not having a picture. A default “egg”-style profile picture is simply not acceptable. Another common mistake is having a shitty picture. Those come in two flavors: Having an unprofessional picture - from a trip abroad, partying, doing your favorite activity, making a funny face, with your dog, with your boyfriend/girlfriend. Those are all fine for other social media, but on LinkedIn, AngelList and other recruiting sites, nobody wants to see you getting hammered with your friends or finger propping the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Second common mistake is not having your face nice and big in the picture. You should have your face fill about 80% of the image. Humans are wired to be attracted to faces. There’s a ton of research - Google it. You must have a high res picture of your face. Potential gain: +50 points.

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There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.

Benjamin Disraeli

  With the elections less than two weeks away, many have already proclaimed Hillary Clinton as the winner. This is based on Clinton’s overwhelming dominance in the polls and election forecasts.   I’d like to show that the race, based on what we know now, is much closer than what most of us think, in two very meaningful ways:

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We live in a glorious time: information is more accessible to us than at any time in the past, by far. A middle schooler in a small town has access to more information using her phone today than a Nobel Prize winning researcher did in 1900 using the greatest library of the time. Unfortunately, our mental capacity as humans did not progress as much, on average. This led to a situation where we are incapable to process the huge amount of information we’re being bombarded with. By default, our lazy brains cope by developing “shortcut” techniques: we became skilled at skimming through hundreds of tweets, posts and headlines in a very short amount of time (I am as guilty of this as the next person). The distributors of information are well aware of this: they honed mechanisms to catch our attention and help us consume bite sized, semi-digested “content”: click-baiting headlines, tweets, “listicles”, fact-checks, “memes”. Easily understandable, broken down, eye-catching, easily shareable.   I think of this type of “content” as the information equivalent of junk food: engineered to taste better and satisfy faster, tempting to consume much more than the body needs, and unfortunately not that nutritious. But as anybody who consumed a gallon of Coke or a party-sized bag of Fritos knows: there is a price to pay.   When you skim over tweets, headlines in your Facebook feed or Reddit and watch 20 second videos with no sound, you’re not attaining knowledge but something else:

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Disclaimer: this is a highly speculative, controversial-on-purpose post. Historic events and data is mostly fact. Predictions and forward-looking analysis are mine, based on gut feelings and what-if thinking, not based on fact.   This is just a friendly reminder that in September 1999, a few months before the presidential election that brought him to power, Putin staged “terrorist attacks” in multiple cities across Russia in which 298 people lost their lives. The Chechen rebels were blamed for the bombings. Putin, campaigning on a hardline approach to the war in Chechnya won the election in March 2000 and the rest is history. Oh what are you saying that the leader of the second more powerful nuclear power in the world killed hundreds of his own people to tip the outcome of presidential elections get out of here! Putin has since been at the helm for 16 years and counting but that’s not our problem, our problem is right here, right now: I would argue that the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election can be easily swayed with one strategically placed and timed “act of terrorism” on U.S. soil or against an American target. See, it’s not that one candidate or the other is the “better anti-terrorism candidate”. All you need is for a not-too-large (see below) group of voters to be temporarily affected by a dramatic news event and vote for the candidate whose rhetoric is more plainly and one-sidedly “against terror”. Oh but you’re being funny this is America not Russia that stuff doesn’t happen here what are you talking about we have rule of law and folks who prevent that kind of thing! Really? Like nobody would hack a major party’s emails to influence public opinion in favor of an outspoken Putin sympathizer? No way! Don’t forget, this is the kind of stuff presidents used to quit their jobs over. Listen there buddy, hacking emails is one thing, blowing up people is another. Don’t forget, the potential for real terror acts is out there constantly. The reason there’s not a bombing taking place on U.S. soil every day is because the terrorists, as a whole, are much less competent and worse funded than the government agencies combating them. And that’s a good thing. But what if a serious, professional organization, skilled in international sabotage, decides to intervene on behalf of the terrorist and just help them a little tiny bit? That’s a different story. You do remember Putin is a Lt. Colonel in the KGB. But that’s cool, when tens of millions of people vote, reason will surely prevail over any temporary outbursts of anger. Not so fast. The predicted gap between Trump and Clinton has been steadily shrinking over the last two weeks. As of today (9/19, source: http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast), Clinton is predicted to win 287 electoral votes, just a 37 vote lead over Trump:   A lot? Not really. In fact, if all else remains the same, all it takes is swinging just one state like Pennsylvania, wielding 20 electors, to tip the scale in Trump’s favor. Pennsylvania has been polling strongly in Clinton’s favor:   But think about this: Pennsylvania has 8.3M registered voters. Assuming a very high 65% turnout rate (this is, after all, a highly engaging and controversial campaign), we can expect about 5.4M votes to be cast. Looking at the poll data above, a 5% swing can change the outcome of the vote in Pennsylvania. That’s just 270,000 people. What if there’s a terrorist bombing with multiple casualties in downtown Philadelphia two weeks before election date? Can you imagine 270,000 people in Pennsylvania voting in anger, despair and fear? I can.

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Twitter is rolling out their polls feature. How many normal Twitter users care about polls? That’s obviously not going to be a big deal in terms of solving “Twitter’s problems” of not growing fast enough and not generating a ton of revenue. Twitter Polls is an ideal example of something that should just be a third party app. In a world where you can build apps on top of Twitter that seamlessly integrate into the Twitter UI and/or can live outside of it - this is an interesting product for a small team to build on top of Twitter. Everybody wins. At the same time, their CEO is apologizing to developers. I worked on a project built entirely on top of Twitter. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort to heal the Twitter-developer relationship but it’s worth it. I would not build a software business on top of Twitter right now, because if it’s any good there’s a good chance Twitter will just build the same thing themselves. I think the only way for Twitter to succeed is to make it into the de-facto communication layer that allows both machine-machine, machine-human and human-human communication and regain developers trust enough for them to build real businesses on top of this layer. And they should charge developers for it. I think there’s “common knowledge” saying that you can’t justify a company the size of Twitter (~ 20B market cap) buy selling APIs. You must also sell higher order services, to larger markets (consumers, not developers). Maybe Twitter can be the one to break this mold.

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Beyond the usual hoopla over the Facebook acquisition of Oculus VR hides a truly spectacular feat of individual Making (capital M) and a huge milestone in the history of (crowd)funding and selling a business. In my mind, it even eclipses the acquisition of WhatsApp just a month ago, as well as the acquisition of Instagram (all by the same acquirer, more on that in a bit).

Palmer Luckey, the founder and inventor of the Rift, began working on the product sometime around 2009 as a student at USC. He posted about his little project on August 21st, 2009:

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As more and more sad details surface about Apple’s legal crusade, I keep thinking why I’m using the iPhone and don’t just switch to an Android.

Yeah, it’s not as good still, and I always told myself I’ll get an Android phone eventually, when they’re good enough.

But then it hit me:

It doesn’t matter. Apple is not going to lose only because eventually its customers will switch to the competitors’ products. Apple is going to lose because eventually its own employees, the people that make it the greatest company in the world, will leave.

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