sivers

28 ms·

331.
by sivers 15y ago
Suggestion: add the states and provinces of the world as if they are cities. Sometimes you know the person you're scheduling is in California/US, Alberta/Canada, or Bahia/Brazil. But since those are not cities they're not coming up in you
332.
by sivers 16y ago
Singapore wasn't in the study because English is Singapore's first language. (Article mistakenly says that the reason is because it's too small.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore
333.
by sivers 16y ago
No need to discourage someone trying to be helpful. If he's learned something helpful along the way, I'm glad he's sharing it. I loved your awesome "Book a flight" blog post - http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/05/laid-off-one-t...
334.
by sivers 16y ago
Great article! For what it's worth, here's my take on the same subject: http://sivers.org/how2hire Similar problem, different perspective, some similar solutions. Hope it helps.
335.
by sivers 16y ago
No desk = no mess! http://www.tagbento.com/243/dereks-desk :-)
336.
by sivers 16y ago
Brilliant. Well-put. No matter how busy I get, when I get a nice succinct 3-5 sentence email with a specific question, I'm always happy to take a few minutes to answer. It doesn't even matter who it's from or what they're asking. Form is
337.
by sivers 16y ago
I never thought I would sell, but I got three offers in one week. I told them all no. But after thinking about it a while, I told them all yes. Thing is, Amazon was not one of the three. And I always thought that Amazon would be the perf
338.
by sivers 16y ago
This is a TED talk I gave in India last month (December 2010), here: http://theinkconference.com/ (Didn't want anyone to think it was going to be at the next 2011 TED Conference.)
339.
by sivers 16y ago
Yeah, that's a different story I'll figure out how to properly tell some day as a lesson in what NOT to do. I'm still trying to extract some lessons from that and think what should have been done differently. But if an employee has low mor
340.
by sivers 16y ago
Yeah - different lesson, so different story. I learned, the hard way, that over-delegation can lead to abdication.
341.
by sivers 16y ago
I'm a natural introvert. I prefer to work alone. It seems the 1% inspiration --> 99% perspiration ratio is kept, this way. But really it's just that I like being alone.
342.
by sivers 16y ago
Actually, the new people learning it would clean it up. If they found anything hard to understand, we'd apologize and ask them to make it easier to understand for the next person. Since they had just felt the pain of it being unclear, they
343.
by sivers 16y ago
The innovation was really just me. It was usually just looking at places where our operations were very un-optimized or ineffective, and figuring out a way to do it better. That better way usually meant me programming some new aspect to the
344.
by sivers 16y ago
Actually my hiring policy was ridiculous. Because I was "too busy to bother", I'd just ask my current employees if they had any friends that needed work. Someone always did, so I'd say, "Tell them to start tomorrow morning. $10/hr. Show the
345.
by sivers 16y ago
Thanks for the update. Didn't realize seq was just a GNU coreutils thing. Sometimes I geek out on getting something like this all onto a single readable page which I save in my homedir, then make my default home/open page in my browser, fo
346.
by sivers 16y ago
A lot of fascinating ideas in this collection of essays - not just his. Single-page: for i in `seq 1 17` ; do curl http://edge.org/q2011/q11_$i.html >> edge.html ; done
347.
by sivers 16y ago
Yes! I came in here to recommend those, too. I was about to re-invent that wheel, too. See http://thoughts.pro/beekeep/ But when I heard of Ledger I abandoned it. A lot of great work has been put into Ledger. UpTheAsset looks like a gr
348.
by sivers 16y ago
Great point, and I totally agree. I recklessly picked Coltrane and Feynman as two extreme examples without knowing their thoughts on their work. Sometimes little tiny essays like this can be too vague if they use no examples at all. The e
349.
by sivers 16y ago
I'm also a huge Arch Linux fan. It's my only OS, and for the same reasons you're looking for: I just wanted the bare minimum. After you get the base installed, just type "pacman -S chromium", and it'll just install the dependencies, and vo
350.
by sivers 16y ago
Any big company. Anyone who I had promised my clients I could deliver them to, then changed their mind. Really more my fault than Apple's, for promising something to my clients before I had a signed contract in my hand. But the way they ma
351.
by sivers 16y ago
It was scarier then, because it affected my business deeply, then. Now it doesn't affect me at all - it's just an old tale I can tell, that someone might find entertaining or helpful.
352.
by sivers 16y ago
Oh well. :-) All turned out wonderful in the end. We never needed to re-rip the CDs after all. Apple took bulk-uploads the same as all the other companies. An incredibly efficient way of delivering over 2 million songs+metadata from one
353.
by sivers 16y ago
We had already automated it. But Apple was insisting we not use our own software or ripped files. That they had to come directly from the master audio CD.
354.
by sivers 16y ago
Exactly. I think most of this timing was circumstance, not causal. Maybe they were just busy dealing with the bigger labels first, and put a positive public spin on their delay. I was hanging on his every word, since we were hearing nothin
355.
by sivers 16y ago
Yeah. Made me wary to tie any future business too closely to any one big company. Also see http://sivers.org/big-vs-little-clients
356.
by sivers 16y ago
Brilliant!
357.
by sivers 16y ago
You'd be surprised how many of us really are introverts. I talk about this subject with successful people quite often at conferences like TED, because it's so difficult and painful for me to be social even for a few hours a day at these ev
358.
by sivers 16y ago
Singapore is not shown, but is near the top, (150 countries vs Denmark's 157) and deserves special mention as the only passport that's visa-free for both US and China. http://www.henleyglobal.com/citizenship/visa-restrictions/
359.
by sivers 16y ago
Caribbean places like British Virgin Islands and Nevis are so shockingly cheap and easy to set up a corporation, it's amazing. On a whim, I emailed TridentTrust in BVI with the name of a new company I'd like to incorporate. 2 hours later t
360.
by sivers 16y ago
(FYI, just in case:) It's referencing this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI

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