Category: personal AnGoL

Avoid the “tyranny of the articulate”

In many engineer-driven startups, world-class debaters end up making many of the decisions. Ben talked about why this is problematic:

There’s this tyranny of the articulate that happens at companies…But there’s only a loose correlation between how good people are at communicating and how good they are at actually building stuff.

I personally think debating is a horrible way to get to any solutions. There’s this idea that vigorous debate yields results, but in my experience, vigorous debate yields people who vigorously defend what they think. As a result, they’re unwilling to compromise at some point because it’s a debate and the objective is to win.

When it is necessary to have a debate, Ben offered this important reminder:

Most debates never get anywhere because there’s no clearly agreed upon goal. So scope what the actual problem is; articulate the goal.

Source: Pinterest Founder Ben Silbermann’s Lessons on Decision Making, Values, and Taking Time for Yourself

The same advice I give aspiring writers is relevant to anyone, in anyone industry, who wants to become successful.
You have to share your work. Regularly.
You have to practice in public.
You have to let people be part of the process, because it’s through sharing that you learn and grow the most.

Source: Most People Who Want To Become Successful Don’t Practice This 1 Simple Skill

Continuing the series of posts on how to connect DataGrip (or any other IntelliJ-based IDE) to various data sources, in this post we’ll show you how to connect to Google’s BigQuery. BigQuery is a low-cost enterprise data warehouse designed to handle data analytics at a massive scale. Currently, DataGrip does not come with a built-in connector for BigQuery, so let’s connect the IDE to it.

Source: Using BigQuery from IntelliJ-based IDE | DataGrip Blog

Library Rules means keeping to yourself, keeping your voice down in hushed tones, not distracting one another. If you do need to talk to someone at normal volumes, grab a room. A key to making open floor plans work is also having private rooms scattered throughout the space. A place where a few people who need to discuss something in real time can jump in, talk it up and work it out without bothering anyone on the outside.

Source: Library Rules: How to make an open office plan work

Daniel Kahneman advocates for recording your decisions in a dedicated decision journal. A good decision is known before the outcome. It involves a mental representation of the facts known at the time as well as applied judgment. Good decisions are valuable but they are more valuable if they are part of a good decision process because a good process allows for feedback about where you can improve. This feedback, in turn, allows you to constantly get better at making decisions.

Source: Why Bad Things Happen to Good Decisions

3. Write down decisions you make — and your rationale at the time — into a “decision journal.”

Next time you hire someone, cut a partnership deal, decide on a key product spec — or make any hard decision — write down your reasoning in a journal. Later, you can see how the decision played out relative to your reasoning at the time you made the decision. You can learn whether you should have trusted your gut at the time or not.

Source: Pinterest Founder Ben Silbermann’s Lessons on Decision Making, Values, and Taking Time for Yourself

In the end, the nothing-to-hide argument has nothing to say. When the nothing-to-hide argument is unpacked, and its underlying assumptions examined and challenged, we can see how it shifts the debate to its terms, then draws power from its unfair advantage. The nothing-to-hide argument speaks to some problems but not to others. It represents a singular and narrow way of conceiving of privacy, and it wins by excluding consideration of the other problems often raised with government security measures. When e

Source: Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’

“We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side” — Charlie Munger

Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. It is a dynamic, emergent property of interaction and can be destroyed in an instant with an ill-timed sigh. Without behaviors that create and maintain a level of psychological safety in a group, people do not fully contribute — and when they don’t, the power of cognitive diversity is left unrealized. Furthermore, anxiety rises and defensive behavior prevails.
So the question is, how do you establish and maintain psychological safety with a cognitively diverse group?

Source: The Two Traits of the Best Problem-Solving Teams

In this blog post we had a little bit of a history lesson regarding object detectors. We also had a sneak peek into a Python framework that I am working on for object detection in images. From there we had a quick review of how the Histogram of Oriented Gradients method is used in conjunction with a Linear SVM to train a robust object detector. However, no matter what method of object detection you use, you will likely end up with multiple bounding boxes surrounding the object you want to detect. In order

Source: Histogram of Oriented Gradients and Object Detection – PyImageSearch