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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
, 4 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
One of the least heralded and most important technological advances of the last 20 years is a battle getting fought one piece of paper at a time to replace workflows with web applications. It’s slow, boring, and enormously impactful.
It’s surprising how much you can get done these days *without* needing to call anyone, line up, or make a visit to an office to figure out the correct form to file something.
Random example for you: the IRS hires 10k people every year to type numbers from returns into the computer. This is a decrease from earlier, since e-filed returns don’t need to be redundantly retyped.
“IRS employment down from 19X0” You’d certainly hope so, now that they’re no longer artisanally handcrafting every comparison of a 1040 and W-2.
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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Most tech interviews and hiring processes are broken.

This is a really good guide to how to adapt to the brokenness as a candidate: blog.usejournal.com/i-interviewed-…
I particularly like the emphasis on funnel management and scheduling (for probabalistically landing as many high quality opportunities as possible), specific recommendations for a course of study (and “You should study.”), and advice on how to comport yourself in an interview.
One thing I think most candidates don’t appreciate is that they treat it like a test but it’s more instrumentally effective to treat it like a game. Discover the rules of the game and then provide the game with the input that the rules score highly.
Read 5 tweets
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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
An interesting thread about "ugly food" (the theory that supermarkets largely don't stock cosmetically impaired perfectly good food, which is mostly true for some supermarkets, and therefore that this food gets wasted, which is not).

This has always been a curious theory for me, because it suggests that multi-billion dollar American companies would tolerate waste of (SWAG from someone who knows nothing about agricultural science) 60% of their raw inputs because they hate money or something.
(This is one of the many, many views on capitalism which views it as a superposition of people who evilly and rapaciously optimize everything which sparks joy out of life while simultaneously being nincompoops.)
Read 5 tweets
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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
When folks ask me a question about our codebase internally I try to

a) answer the question
b) say "If I were trying to find the answer to that question with our tools, here's my entry point, here's the search query, and here's my mental heuristic for why I'd click on result #3"
This is trying to thread the needle on always, always being happy to give responsive answers to questions while also increasing people's ability to self-serve on them in the future.
Since it's publicly available, let me mention that the most common tool I use for answering these questions is livegrep and that I intend to boot up a livegrep instance on the first day of every startup for the rest of my life.

It borders on miraculous.

github.com/livegrep/liveg…
Read 5 tweets

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‏ً
@yoongiftobrien
✦*˚ * STUDY THREAD ✦*˚ *

- designed to help you guys reading this thread study
- please feel free to share your way of studying if I didn’t include it
- I hope this helps you
- good luck with future exams :)
✦*˚ * CONDENSE

this is probably the most important/ most helpful study technique, condense your notes, you are more likely to remember a few words than a whole paragraph
✦*˚ * COLOURS

colour co-ordinating your notes is a great way of helping your brain process certain information. for example: blue for key terms, yellow for equations, etc.. this way you don’t always see the colour you always write in
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Eric Columbus
@EricColumbus
As the year draws to a close, I’d like to recommend a personal holiday tradition: reading James Joyce’s lovely yet bracing novella “The Dead,” which can be found at this link. Please indulge me for a few tweets. 1/ ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/joyce/james/…
Unspooling over the course of a holiday party and the hours that follow, the story, which is easily readable in one sitting, is a useful bookend to another seasonal classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” 2/
If the lesson of “It’s a Wonderful Life” is that you may loom larger in others’ lives than you think, the lesson of “The Dead” is that sometimes you don’t. 3/
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Captain Awkward
@CAwkward
Fellow #ADHD kids, what elaborate new planning/organization systems and rituals are we going to embrace enthusiastically for the first half of January?
If we can crowdsource data about price, fiddliness, cult following, # of dedicated subreddits, # of naturally organized people who swore it would change our lives or said “if I can do it anyone can!”, etc, then I can get a jump start on shame spiral trajectory calculations!
My poor therapists (all): Have you tried to-do lists?

Me: Yes! I love making them, but I constantly forget to check. Also putting a task on the list can “solve” its urgency & I forget. Whereas if I DON’T write it, the terror of forgetting might keep it in focus!

Therapists:
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Linda Tirado
@KillerMartinis
Set your clocks, because tonight we have a cultural activity!

The last time we read a book was Bob Woodward’s “Fear.” We’ve also read Comey, Spicer, Ivanka, Hillbilly Elegy etc, and those links are at the top of the included thread:
Tonight we’re reading a book about fascism and talking history and hysteria!

Send drinks to paypal.me/riseandbeheard or to Venmo at Linda-Tirado-3

See y’all at 5pm Eastern or so!
Okay! I hope you have your drinks and are settling in!

Usually I am reading books so that you don’t have to, but in this instance we are reading a book because we all should! So if you want to buy the thing, you can do that here: amazon.com/Anatomy-Fascis…
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Sibel Edmonds
@sibeledmonds
#Khashoggi Case Thread: I am going to ‘pin’ this post to use it as an ‘Info Thread’ on the #Khashoggi Case. I am in #Turkey. I’ve been following the case closely and with access to sources & experts here. This is a very ‘sensitive’ criminal case due to ‘Diplomatic Booby Traps’!!!
The Evidence Obtained Outside Cameras will not show any evidence of ‘tempering’ but other than license plates of dozens of diplomatic cars (Many with tinted windows-large trunks) with related time stamp, drivers Info, model/year: Nothing.
#Turkish Intel-Investigative Bodies also have the list of all Diplomatic & Private Saudi & “other significant’ Planes in #Turkey for the period of ‘interest.’ Many of the Target airports have their own security cameras & related evidence.
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Tamara Malcolm
@IndigenousXca
This is my story: I am 34. I have been fighting to get my children returned back from Child and Family Services in Winnipeg for 10 years. As I stated before I am Anishinaabe, I have four children. Two remain apprehended in CFS in Winnipeg.
I was 5 yrs old when me & my brother Gene were taken into care for one year. I was moved around in hotels and foster homes. I was moved about 5 times. I was placed w/ a white couple, an old native lady, a young native lady, and a worker who was drunk & left us in a hotel.
In one of those places I was abused, but I'm not ready to talk about that yet. In the hotel we were placed in we were left there for 1 week w/ hardly any food. The worker stayed in another room. She would come & go during the days and told us not to open the door if anyone came.
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