A recent study found that toiling outside of regular -to- hours undermines people's intrinsic motivation for their professional and academic pursuits. This spells trouble for companies considering that (a) people do their best work and are happier when they're fueled by an inner drive (b) surveys show that employees especially working parents want to work for companies that allow as much flexibility as possible.

Flexible Working: The Cons

Longstanding conventions about when we should or shouldn’t be working are not easily cast aside Working nonstandard hours often means that you’re working alone and research from the University of Chicago has shown that people are more intrinsically motivated to work when they have the sense that other people are working even if those people are not in the same room.

Social Cues About when To Work Are Hard to Ignore

Researchers surveyed participants to determine how people felt about working on the Monday of a long weekend versus a normal Monday, to see how motivated people felt working a holiday versus a regular day, and to figure out what was generally on people's minds while working holidays.On holidays, it turned out that people were "almost automatically," thinking about all the places they could be instead, which helped researchers see the connection to the psychology of regret.

Make Non-Standard Work Hours More Tolerable

<ul><li>Studies have shown that people are happiest when they can share time off with people they're closest to.</li><li>Sometimes it's better to have more constraints, not fewer.</li><li>Managers should consider giving everyone the same day off if that's a reasonable option.</li></ul>

Protect Time Off to Be with Friends and Family

Breaking free of the nine-to-five sounds like freedom, but it comes with a surprising cost.

career

Career

timemanagement

Time Management

Working flexible hours can make you feel less motivated

Starting a new job is exciting but can also feel uncomfortable. It's helpful to know what makes these transitions so awkward so you can reduce feeling uneasy.

The feelings around a new job

You feel awkward because you don't know what to expect and can't forecast what will happen. When we're uncertain about what will happen, we revert to inaction, convincing ourselves that not doing anything is less likely to cause bad outcomes. The tendency to be quiet is made worse by worrying that you'll say the wrong thing. In reality, your new colleagues rarely notice the things you thought would be awkward. It's ok to chat with your new colleagues and ask questions.

Your prediction engine fails

If you are ready to speak up, there's a set of unfamiliar jargon. Every company has its acronyms for certain departments or processes and its own terms for people, places and things. "I had to get EVPP and VPR to approve a PAR before sending it to OSP." It's useful to get a translator. See if a colleague can draw up a cheat sheet for you of commonly used acronyms and phrases. Then, get their permission to ask when a new term arise that you don't know.

You don’t know the language

When you start a new job, you don't have a group of people you feel comfortable with yet. You may feel like an outsider if you see groups of people talking about shared experiences. Remember that it takes time and that everyone was new at some point. You can start by having conversations with a few people and find out how the group engage. An easy way to meet a group of people is to get someone to introduce you to others.

You don’t have a squad — yet

And strategies to help smooth the transition.

teamwork

Teamwork

Why Starting a New Job Feels So Awkward

In the world, there is continued violence and prejudice against under-represented groups that undermine belonging and equality. Airbnb Engineering strives to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. Team members worked with employees from affected communities to address non-inclusive terminology in their codebase.

Creating an inclusive engineering culture

Airbnb wants to eliminate non-inclusive terminology. So they measured the usage of non-inclusive terminology in the code, then addressed the problem in two ways: <ul><li>Preventing new additions of these terms. They rolled out a linter to flag pull requests that introduce non-inclusive terms.</li><li>Driving down existing terms.</li></ul>

Building new habits

For the initial terms, members of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) sourced offensive word lists and implemented these improvements. ERGs provided a dedicated space for employees to join around shared characteristics, interests, and life experiences. For example, Black@ represents African-American and Black employees, and Able@ supports people with disabilities, chronic conditions, or mental health conditions. To help everyone feel like they belong when working on Airbnb code and systems, they created an anonymous feedback form that any engineer can use to surface their thoughts.

Strengthening the approach

Driving non-inclusive terminology is part of a larger effort in the technology community to make engineers from all backgrounds feel heard and valued. By eliminating non-inclusive terminology that does not reflect the values of Airbnb, they show that everyone belongs and that they are seen and respected. To support similar efforts, Airbnb made public the list of terms they consider non-inclusive.

Sharing their work

Code is our craft. At Airbnb, we view our code and product as a reflection of our values. Each developer imbues their work with a piece of themselves. We want all engineers to be proud of the…

computerscience

Computer Science

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Building an Inclusive Codebase

Your browser, on each request to the website/resource, tries to load as little data as possible by reading cached information from local memory. This is only possible we provide enough instructions for the browser, to explain what resources it needs to keep and for how long.These instructions function as directives; to tell your browser about them, you must add them to response HTTP header information. The most common directives involved in the cache process are “Cache-Control”, “Expires”, “Etag” and “Last-Modified”.

How does the cache work behind the scenes?

Etag is one of the cache settings. The main idea behind this HTTP header is to allow your browser to be aware of modifications to relevant resources without downloading full files.The server could calculate something similar with hash sum of each file and then send this hash sum to the client. The next time the client tries to access this resource, instead of downloading the file, the browser will send something like this in the HTTP header: If-None-Match: W/“1d2e7–1648e509289”

Etag (Entity tag)

Another cache control setting is the “Last Modified” HTTP header. Servers have a timestamp of the last modified date for each file; after the first file loading, client has the ability to ask the server if the resource has been modified since the specific moment the files was last accessed by the client.To do this, the browser sends If-Modified-Since: Fri, 13 Jul 2018 10:49:23 GMT in the HTTP header. If the resource has been modified, the browser has to download a new file, otherwise it uses a cached version.

Last Modified

In this article, I will show you the right cache settings and techniques to help you keep your website up to date for all users after every deployment.

Best practices for cache control settings for your website

When you hear inflation, that translates to demand for products and services. When you hear deflation, that translates to less demand for products and services.When there is more demand for products and services, prices go up and so does inflation. When there is less demand for products and services, prices go down to create more demand again.

The Simplest Way to Think About Inflation Versus Deflation

If you know your money is worth less in the future then you’ll spend it now. If you know your money is worth more in the future you won’t spend it.When people spend their money on products and services then inflation occurs. Businesses revenues go up slightly more — thanks to inflation — and that means they can afford to pay their employees slightly more each year.When people don’t spend money, deflation occurs. Deflation typically happens around or during a recession.

Spending Vs Not Spending Your Money

Governments can print money out of thin air. When you hear that stimulus checks are going to be handed out, that’s just secret handshake talk for “printing money.”Printing more money should make people spend more. But what if it doesn’t? When people are fearful like they are right now, they typically want to save their money.Printing money is pointless if it doesn’t get spent. And if a government prints too much money then they create hyper-inflation like what happened in Venezuela when their currency inflated 1,700,000% in 2018.

Printing Money

The money you have in your bank account or wallet right now is about to lose a lot of value. This is not something to be fearful of. It’s a concept to understand and learn about, so you can avoid the…

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Cryptocurrency

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

If You Have Any Money, It’s About to Lose (A Lot) of Value

Milton Friedman (received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences) proposed to give everybody free money in his book “Capitalism and Freedom”.&nbsp;He mostly referred to this plan as a negative income tax (and he also referred to it as a guaranteed income because that’s exactly what it is.)

Milton Friedman 

<ol><li>Reduce Government Bureaucracy. A guaranteed income program could replace the current government mess of 126 separate anti-poverty programs.</li><li>The Efficiency of Free Markets. Markets allow people to vote with their dollars. And people must have at least a minimum amount of money to vote with.</li><li>End the Welfare Trap. With a guaranteed income, it pays to work.</li><li>To Enable Work. Removing the burden of needing to earn an income, will help enable people to do work that is otherwise not compensated.</li><li>Justice &amp; Equality: The virtue of [a negative income tax] is precisely that it treats everyone the same way.</li></ol>

5 Reasons Why Milton Friedman Supported a Guaranteed Income

Milton Friedman proposed to give everybody free money in his book “Capitalism and Freedom”. He mostly referred to this plan as a negative income tax (and he also referred to it as a guaranteed income…

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

Why Milton Friedman Supported a Guaranteed Income (5 Reasons)

... before it’s finally available for you to trade:&nbsp;<ul><li>Integrate new blockchain&nbsp;</li><li>Build deposit module&nbsp;</li><li>Build withdrawal module&nbsp;</li><li>Integrate security module&nbsp;</li><li>Integrate cold wallets&nbsp;</li><li>Integrate hot wallets&nbsp;</li><li>Thoroughly test entire token integration&nbsp;</li><li>Integrate trading module&nbsp;</li><li>Thoroughly test trading module&nbsp;</li><li>Test release&nbsp;</li><li>Go live.</li></ul>

What happens in a token-listing process

It will ensure that you don’t miss out on opportunities to trade any of your favourite tokens. What does it mean for you?&nbsp;<ul><li>Deposits — You won’t be able to deposit the token from another wallet to your WazirX wallet.&nbsp;</li><li>Trading — You will be able to buy, sell, trade the token in our USDT and BTC markets with absolute ease.&nbsp;</li><li>Withdrawals — You won’t be able to withdraw the token from your WazirX wallet. What you can do instead, is sell it in our USDT or BTC market.&nbsp;</li></ul>

What happens in the Rapid Listing Initiative?

Namaste Tribe! “When more tokens” — that’s what many of you have been asking us for so long! Yes, we heard you and are excited about what we have in store for you. 💪 First, here’s a little…

Rapid Listing Initiative on WazirX

Ledgers record the facts underpinning the modern economy. Property title registers map who owns what and whether their land is subject to Caveats. A club is a ledger, structuring who benefits and who does not. Ledgers map economic and social relationships, says Robert McDonald. Mcdonald: a ledger is a network of ownership, employment and production relationships with a single purpose, a firm is a led 

Ledgers all the way down

Each country asserts the right to control who crosses its borders. Each country maintains a ledger of which of its citizens have the right to travel. A passport is a physical item — call it a token — that refers back to this ledger. In the nineteenth century, the possessor — ‘ bearer’of a BANKNOTE had a right to draw on the issuing Bank the value of the note.&nbsp;Passports are a relatively straightforward example of this distinction. But as Bitcoin has shown: money is a ledger, too.

Ownership, possession, and ledgers

The first major change to ledgers appeared in the fourteenth century with the invention of double entry bookkeeping. In the late twentieth century ledgers moved from analog to Digital ledgers. The Blockchain is a distributed ledgers that does not rely on a trusted central authority to maintain and validate the ledger. A Database allows for more complex distribution, calculation, analysis and tracking. A Database is Computable and Searchable. But a Digitised ledger is only as reliable as the Organisation.

The evolution of the ledger

The 2009 Nobel laureate in economics argued that people produce and Exchange in markets, firms, or governments depending on the relative transactions costs of each institution. The government keeps databases of citizenship and the right to travel, taxation obligations, social security entitlements, and property ownership. Firms also maintain ledgers: proprietary ledgers of employment and responsibility, of the ownership and deployment of physical and human capital, of suppliers and customers, of intellectual property and corporate privilege.&nbsp;

Blockchain and the economic institutions of capitalism

Classical and Neoclassical economists study production and distribution of scarce resources. Institutional Cryptoeconomics studies the institutional consequences of Cryptographically secure ledgers. It focuses on the economic principles and theory underpinning the Blockchain and alternative Blockchain Implementations. It looks at game theory and incentive design as they relate to Blockchain mechanism design. In institutional Cryptoeconomics, the economy is a system to coordinate exchange, says Aaron Carroll.

Institutional cryptoeconomics

The global economy faces (what we expect will be) a lengthy period of uncertainty about how facts that underpin it will be restructured, dismantled, and Reorganised. The best uses of the Blockchain have to be ‘ discovered’. Then they have to be implemented in a real world political and economic system that has deep, established institutions that already service ledgers. Some of the most fundamental principles governing our society are up for grabs.

The economic consequences of the blockchain

The Internet has Revolutionised the way we interact and do business. But the Blockchain allows us to exchange differently. It is usually compared to the internet, but that is not entirely true. Blockchain can be better understood if it is compared to mechanical time.Mechanical time opened up entirely new categories of economic organisation that had until then been not just impossible, but unimaginable.

Blockchain Isn't Internet Version 4

Smart contracts on the Blockchain allows contractual agreements to be automatically, autonomously, and securely executed. A complete contract specifies what is to occur under every possible contingency. An incomplete contract allows the terms of the contract to be renegotiated in the case of unexpected events. The real gains to be made in the Blockchain revolution, we suggest, are in developing better and more powerful oracles that convert incomplete contracts to contracts that are sufficiently complete to be written Algorithmically and executed on the Blockchain.

Complete and incomplete smart contracts

The blockchain economy puts pressure on government processes in a whole host of ways, from taxation to regulation, to service delivery.Investigating these changes is an ongoing project of ours. But consider, for instance, how we regulate banks.

Whither government?

The ability to write more complete contracts on the Blockchain means entrepreneurs and innovators will be able to maintain ownership and control of their human capital and profit at the same time. The age of human capitalism is dawning. Entrepreneurs will be able to write a valuable App and release it into the ‘ wild’, ready to be employed by anyone and everyone who needs that functionality. A designer could release their design into the ‘ wild’ and final consumers could download that design to their 3D printer and have the product almost immediately.

Whither Big Business?

The blockchain is a digital, decentralised, distributed ledger.Most explanations for the importance of the blockchain start with Bitcoin and the history of money. But money is just the first use case of the blockchain. And it is unlikely to be the most important.It might seem strange that a ledger — a dull and practical document associated mainly with accounting — would be described as a revolutionary technology. But the blockchain matters because ledgers matter.

Blockchain Defined

Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson and Jason Potts are from the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub, the world’s first social science research centre into the economics, politics, sociology, and law of…

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

The Blockchain Economy: A beginner’s guide to institutional cryptoeconomics

Especially if you are trying to learn while working full-time. It is easy to let your learning drag on and on if you don’t have any external pressure pushing you. So you need to create internal pressure. Your goal should be simple and quantitative. You should do enough research to come up with a reasonable goal

You need to have a goal

Once you have a goal, you need a plan to help you get there. This is where you consume as many success stories as you can. None of them will match your exact situation, but you can take some advice from each one.

The plan

Most people only started to attend meetups when they were looking for a job, but at that point it is almost too late. There are so many reasons to start early. To name a few:<ul><li>Developing relationships takes a long time. Starting early means that you have connections who can vouch for you when looking for a job later</li><li>Talking about programming with strangers is a great way to prepare for interviews</li><li>You can learn new frameworks, tools, and learning resources from people who are ahead of you. This can influence your future learning plan.</li></ul>

Networking

<ul><li>Find out what motivates you and use it to your advantage. If you are not motivated to reach your goal, then nothing else matters because you won’t finish.</li><li>Make goals and meet them. Monthly goals to make sure you are on track to meet your main goal, and daily goals to make sure that you actually make daily progress. </li><li>Go to meetups way before you think you are ready. </li><li>Contribute to open source way before you think you are ready. </li><li>Start applying way before you think you are ready. You will not know when to apply. So you might as well start now. </li></ul>

If you want to make a change

In this post, I’ll share how I went from zero(ish) to a six-figure software engineering job offer in nine months while working full time and being self-taught. Whenever I would start reading a…

startup

Startups

product

Product & Design

softwareengineering

Software Engineering

How I went from newbie to Software Engineer in 9 months while working full time

There are two major types of languages: compiled and interpreted: <ul><li>A compiler figures out everything a program will do, turns it into “machine code”, then saves that to be executed later. </li><li>An interpreter steps through the source code line by line, figuring out what it’s doing as it goes.  </li></ul>

Compiled vs Interpreted

If you are writing an interpreted language, it makes a lot of sense to write it in a compiled one (like C, C++ or swift). If you plan to compile, a slower language (like python or Javascript) is more acceptable.

Choosing a Language

A programming language is generally structured as a pipeline. That is, it has several stages. Each stage has data formatted in a specific, well defined way. It also has functions to transform data from each stage to the next.

High Level Design

The first step in most programming languages is lexing, or tokenizing. ‘Lex’ is short for lexical analysis, a very fancy word for splitting a bunch of text into tokens. The word ‘tokenizer’ makes a lot more sense, but ‘lexer’ is so much fun to say that I use it anyway.

Lexing

A token is a small unit of a language. A token might be a variable or function name (AKA an identifier), an operator or a number.

Tokens

The parser turns a list of tokens into a tree of nodes. A tree used for storing this type of data is known as an Abstract Syntax Tree, or AST. At least in Pinecone, the AST does not have any info about types or which identifiers are which. It is simply structured tokens.

Parsing

The parser adds structure to to the ordered list of tokens the lexer produces. To stop ambiguities, the parser must take into account parenthesis and the order of operations. Simply parsing operators isn’t terribly difficult, but as more language constructs get added, parsing can become very complex.

Parser Duties

The predominant parsing library is Bison. Bison works a lot like Flex. You write a file in a custom format that stores the grammar information, then Bison uses that to generate a C program that will do your parsing. I did not choose to use Bison.

Bison

<ul><li>Minimize context switching in workflow: context switching between C++ and Pinecone is bad enough without throwing in Bison’s grammar grammar </li><li>Every time grammar changes bison has to be run before the build.</li><li>A custom Parser is completely doable.</li></ul>

Why Custom Is Better

Put simply, the action tree is the AST with context. That context is info such as what type a function returns, or that two places in which a variable is used are in fact using the same variable. Because it needs to figure out and remember all this context, the code that generates the action tree needs lots of namespace lookup tables and other thingamabobs.

Action Tree vs AST

Once we have the action tree, running the code is easy. Each action node has a function ‘execute’ which takes some input, does whatever the action should (including possibly calling sub action) and returns the action’s output. This is the interpreter in action.

Running the Action Tree

Over the past 6 months, I’ve been working on a programming language called Pinecone. I wouldn’t call it mature yet, but it already has enough features working to be usable, such as: I’m not an…

Working flexible hours can make you feel less motivated

Why Starting a New Job Feels So Awkward

Building an Inclusive Codebase

Best practices for cache control settings for your website

If You Have Any Money, It’s About to Lose (A Lot) of Value

Michael Pham