A commonly asserted fact is that as an individual employee's working hours increase, his hourly productivity decreases. This is supported by a variety of studies. This naturally begs the question - why do employers often demand that employees work for long hours? Are employers simply irrational? In this post I ...

Attribution theory is the practice in advertising where you attempt to figure out how to allocate credit for a sale to a given advertisement. I argue that attribution theory is asking the wrong question - it doesn't matter how to allocate credit for your past purchases. What matters is how to alter your advertising portfolio to maximize your next purchases.

A Different Box of Tools, by Richard Feynman. There are two great things about this article. One is the "Feynman" method of debunking a theory - come up with simple examples that satisfy the theory yet are obviously false (typically look in mental areas different from the person cooking up the ...

Scalaz Stream is a relatively new concurrency and dataflow library for Scala. Near as I can tell, it's single-box use cases are the same as Akka's, provided you don't plan to build a distributed system. I've been struggling to learn the library, and figured I'd ...

Back in my days as a physicist, my Ph.D. adviser came to me with a proposed theory. He wanted to study the many-body Schrodinger equation - to study the interaction of a single charged particle with a conductive screen. I didn't like this theory very much - it offended my ...

In a groundbreaking work back in 1975, Scott Alexander made a prediction of dire environmental consequences by the year 2015 if we don't change our behavior. His book No Limits to Bears predicts an upcoming bearpocalypse and so far his predictions seem pretty accurate - I ran a statistical test ...

I previously wrote a review of Gabriel Weinberg's new book Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers. I was lucky enough to receive a pre-release copy of it, and for the most part all I can say is that it was an excellent book. The gist of my review ...

Recently microservices have been getting a lot of attention, both positive and negative. Articles about them tend to fall into two camps, which I'll affectionately label the hipster camp and the neckbeard camp. The hipster camp tends to strongly favor microservices, due to the excellent benefits they provide regarding ...

My review of Gabriel Weinberg's Traction Book. In short: buy it and read it.

Scalaz Task - the missing documentation

Cache efficient functional algorithms

Why the tails come apart

Scalaz 7.10 is now released.

A Principled Approach to Operating System Construction in Haskell

The Unspoken Rules of Favela Construction.

Unspoken Ground Assumptions of Discussion. A very important insight:

...someone proposing a really insightful possibility ...