- Performance optimizations that equates to 3M extra revenue (data obtained with A/B testing with 95% statistical significance)
- Reduce CPU lag on our fleet of servers 10-fold (Optimizations)
That's exactly what I did. I'm doing it on poloniex, but I'm pretty sure you could do the same for bittrex too. However, they are a bit limiting on the kind of orders you can make (I believe it's limit orders only). Poloniex has fill or kill orders, which makes some things easier to handle.
Same here. Precision 5520 (the business edition of the XPS). Only thing I wish I took was the better GPU. 4K screen + external screen can be a lot to ask from the onboard graphics.
Other than that, it is so much more performant than my old MBP. Couldn't be happier to have 32GB of ram and the infinity display.
I understand where you're coming from. But that's kind of a slippery slope argument. It is based on the premise that manipulation is evil. Manipulation isn't evil.
Let's consider for a minute an event where persuasion psychology is used to have someone buy services from a personal trainer. This PT helps the lad. She becomes healthier, happier, and fit as a result. Isn't manipulation good, in this case?
What if your product is awesome and makes people's lives better. Isn't it your moral imperative to market it to people? Isn't it moral to manipulate people into using and buying it if it makes their lives better?
Am I trying to convince myself here? Maybe. But I was reading "The Ultimate Sales Letter" this morning and there's a passage in it which says
> "ALL Successful Selling is by Nature and Necessity manipulative"
I agree wholeheartedly with you. Not all manipulation is evil. In this case the argument is that this specific class of manipulation is not altruistic. Cui bono? It's not the consumer.
I don't think I would agree with the universal that all market transactions are manipulative. But even if we granted that, it would come to your distinction: what kind of manipulation is it? Who benefits from the manipulation, and is anyone taken advantage of? Beyond the singular instance, does the sum of individual actions taken together constitute something good?
There's theoretical instances where strong manipulation may benefit the manipulated (PT? Medicine?), but this too is a slippery slope towards a justification for paternalism. I'm sure that the business, in whatever form of cognitive dissonance it can muster, may think that the prospective consumer will benefit from its product. A great example of this are the people who sell healing water and crystals. What we want is for consumers to be informed and we want a healthy society (friends, family, neighbors, society) to encourage people to make choices that have clear indicators that they will benefit. We don't want the crystal seller to be the one educating the consumer on crystals - just as we would rather have a person choose for themselves to get physical therapy than be coerced into it. (The difference between societal encouragement and education versus marketing is overtness, necessary in hypothesis for us to call it manipulative).
There's also the other question you didn't touch on. In the aggregate do we want a market system that competes on being better salesmen or one that competes on making better products and manufacturing them more affordably? Recognizing here that these are not mutually exclusive which do we want to be emphasized?
I don't think that the above argument is grounded on the premise that all manipulation is evil. A more reasonable interpretation I think categorizes the type of manipulation being done in the instance, and the motivations for it, as being selfish and underhanded - the sort of thing we might think about condemning. Furthermore it suggests that the type of manipulation being done on a larger scale is not a healthy economy make.
There's a couple of things I do that I've found beneficial to deal with this problem.
1. I've found it very beneficial to "Lock down" goals and objectives for the entire year.
Spend 2 days thinking of what you want, with a 4 day review period and match
them with a list of habits. Then put them somewhere you'll see every day.
For instance, I put them on the right hand side of my main Trello Board.
Every day, I see there's seven of them and that perhaps playing with this shiny object won't "move me" towards their realization.
2. The purgatory list
To deal with the shiny object problem, I've come up with a system for reviewing my urges of curiosity.
A "purgatory" Trello board for instance, which I review at the end of the week.
"Should I do it?"
"Will it move me forward?"
The answer is typically obvious.
During the week I'm focused on the things at hand, and when I'm done with my week I choose what to do next.
Separating the thinking from the doing is always beneficial.
3. Systems.
Read "The War of Art"[1], or "Daily Rituals"[2], or listen to any kind of podcast by productive people.
They all say the same thing, losers have inspiration, productive people have systems.
Taylor Pearson has the "Weekly Entrepreneur Review".[3]
I've implemented it. Tweaked it.
It's great.
4. Information diet.
It's good to limit your consumption of information to X amount per day or to specific periods of the day.
If you're like me, you love to learn and you want to do it all the time.
At some point though, you'll know much more than you can show.
Remember "Show don't tell", how much do you know that you would not be able to show other people?
Probably a lot!
Nobody cares that you "learned X or Y".
They want you to show that you know those things.
Projects, experience, etc.
That works if you are using bash, but if you are, for example, using zsh, you would first have to run "setopt histignorespace" which would enable hiding lines prepended with a space in the history (it's off by default).
I can't remember from whom I read/heard this from, I think it's from Rob Walling in "Start small, stay small", but what resonated with me was the following:
1. Put yourself on an information diet, and
2. Filter out any reading that you cannot turn into an actionable item.
For instance, I have pocket open right now. There's an article named "Cache is the new RAM". I just removed it. Why? Yes. It is interesting. But the information cannot be translated into something of value with respect to what I do.
Believe me, you won't miss out on the things you forgot existed.
I believe in similar things. Here, where I currently live, we spend so much time working and being productive that we forget to ask questions. "Why am I doing this?" "What is the meaning of it?" "What is really important?" Then we end up lost, depressed and what not. Not all of us do, but some? Certainly. We do it because others do it. Because we believe that pursuing a different venue is not realistic. Others have that? Hell, I should have it too.
"I should totally run a startup."
Anyways, it happened to me. Went to SEA for four months. Dreamed. Life is amazing. I can do whatever I want. I don't need money to live. yadi. yada. Then you come back, and no one understands you. You are a hippy. I'm not.
In periods of doubt, I write things down. Then I remember what I believe. Then I remember I'm going back soon. That it is what I should be doing.
Being productive is ok. It's fun. But, in the end, it's not important. People are. At least, that's the conclusion I came to.
I'm a recent immigrant to USA, and while I don't presume to know everything about American culture, your comment and this article really resonate with my observations in the time I've spent here.
There is a consistent message pervasive in the culture - you are worth what you produce. You are defined by what you produce. Productivity is the currency that buys you respect in society. I've met many many people who rise above this view, but as a society, this is prevalent. Everything has to be about "winning" in some way - even if you are working out, or playing a game, you gotta "play hard", compete, kick the other guys ass, not feel sorry for yourself, not mope, just WIN. Forget about what you're winning, what or why you produce, as long as you produce more than the other guy. Other cultures may use wisdom, or age, or kindness as currencies for respect/status in society.
And then people wonder why society is becoming increasingly isolated. See, when you tie your worth to what you produce, you must give up everything to produce. EVEN IF "producing" means painting a beautiful portrait in your garage, the compulsion to produce is the problem. It makes people focus too hard on themselves and how they can improve/level-up. Too focused inward to see the people around you and their lives, and the joy that can bring. That isolation leads to addiction, depression, isolation and all manner of mental illness. Because humans have evolved to be social creatures. It is hardwired in our nature. We cannot and should not try to fight that. We should not view that as a sign of weakness or an obstacle to productivity, or money, or fame, or any other idol.
Sometime I wonder about the "meaning of life", but the real question is "what is the purpose of civilization?".
Cynics could argue that civilization is like a cancer, thus we should make sure civilization grows as fast and as big as possible to survive a cataclysm or to make sure one's country wins a future war.
That's the only argument to have higher standards and incentives to be productive, just so that society can be fatter and faster. There is no incentive to be happier at all when you want to be the strongest. Modern, developed capitalistic societies is just about scoring money. You just can't be happy in a society like this, because everything, to economical policies to the customs, are now made towards bigger faster stronger.
Sometimes it seems that the poverty and the crisis of the 30s scared one generation, and set a whole mentality of never being poor and unproductive ever again. Economics and scoring are now the highest priority. We're not individuals, we're just scores.
There used to be multiple civilizations. There still are, but there are less of them. Connecting the world is turning us into a monoculture, and as biologists know, monocultures are extremely vulnerable to diseases wiping them out.
I think we should encourage localized micro-civilizations, if only to keep the species safe. For example, capitalism has become the system that the world runs on. Pretty much all of us exchange currency for goods. But there are lots of failure modes for this system. To keep ourselves safe, we should encourage enclaves with alternative economic systems like bartering and collectivism.
Unfortunately, in the US at least, if someone suggests that capitalism might not be the best for everybody, they get labeled as a "socialist" and shunned.
Do you think communism, in some way, was a different form of civilization, and that the fall of the berlin wall increased this phenomenon of "monoculture" ?
Yeah, I think so. I'm not a fan of communism as it was practiced by the USSR, but I think in smaller communities that collectively agreed to it, it would work.
I can think of - mostly books - that gave me an "aha" moment. Off the top of my head I can think of "Four Steps to the Ephiphany" and "Crossing the Chasm."
Pragmatic Front-End Engineer working on big projects (50M+ Revenue).
Areas of focus:
Skills: Recent successes: Rate: $105/hContact: charles[at]cpclermont.com