Ben Kuhn

I agree with you but an alternative view, "Why are gradual static types so great?" https://www.benkuhn.net/gradual/

There’s an article I like on this topic called Staring into the Abyss: https://www.benkuhn.net/abyss/ It talks about asking yourself really hard, scary questions as a habit, that may result in having to admit that you made wrong decisions or wasted time or money. Persevering is often the easiest decision but may not be the best.

Behind every good wireless network, there is a fantastic wired backbone. I have access points in every room that comes out of a wired ethernet network. My daughter stopped complaining about latency with her games the day she learned that it is better to stay wired with her computer. Wireless is a convenience, but I’d always prefer wired connections wherever I can. https://www.benkuhn.net/wireless/

This is a tech-focused selection from my personal list, with a few more business-y sources thrown in: - https://erikbern.com - https://lethain.com - https://commoncog.com - https://scattered-thoughts.net - https://danluu.com - https://ideolalia.com - https://staysaasy.com - https://collabfund.com - https://blog.nelhage.com - https://jacobian.org - https://equalventures.substack.com - https://defmacro.org - https://spakhm.com - https://apenwarr.ca - https://scarletink.com - https://benkuhn.net - https://cpojer.net - https://brandur.org - https://zeptonaut.com Let me know if you want some reading recommendations for any of these!

If the product is being shut down, it is definitely not a big acquisition. The only way to be sure it's worth something is if a secondary market exists for the shares. This is only going to be true for later stage companies, not early stage ones though. I think the best advice on the topic of early stage options is this blog post: https://www.benkuhn.net/optopt/ The TL;DR for me is: Be more picky about the company than the specific comp package. When you're there, find as much as you can about the revenue growth and retention metrics (assuming B2B), and quit after your cliff if it doesn't look like it is going well enough to justify the valuation.

Environmental lighting conditions rule the day! I have astigmatism and I prefer bright backgrounds; #000 text on #fff backgrounds works great for me, but that's because I work in a room lit by a 250W 30,000 lumen corn-cob LED bulb[0] that makes my small office as bright on the inside as the shaded ground from a tree on an overcast day (which is quite bright compared to usual indoor lighting). In a room that bright, high contrast text works great and is highly readable, with "dark mode" often looking washed out and muddy. Even small reductions in contrast (such as what https://devdocs.io does with text of #333 in light mode) can make me notice and wish for greater contrast. [0] - https://www.benkuhn.net/lux/

I maintain a directory of small tech blogs with extracted RSS links: [0] https://blogs.hn Here are some of my favorites: • https://sive.rs • https://sonnet.io • https://benkuhn.net • https://schmud.de • https://stephango.com • https://taylor.town (this is me!) Protip: all YouTube channels and Substack newsletters also have RSS feeds :)

Location: North Carolina Remote: yes Willing to relocate: yes Technologies: Ruby, Go, Python, C++, JavaScript (Typescript, Node.js, React), HTML/CSS, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, AWS, Terraform, Haskell Résumé/CV: https://james-e-thompson.github.io/resume.pdf Email: available at https://veilmail.io/e/NaHPv_ Hi! I'm James. I'm a full-stack software engineer who loves elegant abstractions but also has a healthy appreciation for blub (https://www.benkuhn.net/blub/). I recently co-created Laridae, an open-source tool for performing reversible, zero-downtime schema migrations in PostgreSQL (more details here: https://laridae-migrations.github.io/).

I read Ben Kuhn's post about this topic[0] last year and bought two corncob LED bulbs, one for each side of my desk. I'm not sure how big of a difference they make (very hard to compare my emotional state in November 2021 to the following two years because a lot has changed since then), but I do feel more energetic during work hours. An unexpected side effect is that my lighting for Google Meets is incredible. [0] https://www.benkuhn.net/lux/

Great article! I also find this one very useful for a new manager. https://www.benkuhn.net/abyss/

Happy user [0] of Bear Blog [1], would recommend. I would also recommend spending less than 30 minutes setting up a blog if you have less than 4 posts written. [2] [0]: https://thrice.me/ [1]: https://bearblog.dev/ [2]: https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/#set-up-your-blog

I've got two IKEA FLOAT Led panels on my ceiling, each 2400 lumen. The panels can be adjusted in Kelvin (2200 to 4000) and are dimmable, so when it's evening and I need to get some work done I turn them a lot more yellow to not mess with my sleep rhythm. I find making the room very bright helps a lot with waking up and focus, compared to when I had only one or two bulbs as lighting. It does take some getting used to as some have already pointed out here. I've seen more people interested in this topic so I'm adding some recent links I've came across: https://www.benkuhn.net/lux/ https://blog.plover.com/tech/corn-bulbs.html https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens

I quite like Ben Kuhn’s discussions of the topic, e.g. https://www.benkuhn.net/terms/ and https://www.benkuhn.net/offer/ I’d not really thought about it before reading the first post I linked but it’s clearly incorrect to take valuation = price payed for preferred shares * shares outstanding because you’re pricing the preferredness at 0 when it is not worth 0.

The strongest case for startup equity as compensation is made by Ben Kuhn, in my opinion, and it amounts to: you can diversify your equity exposure in more companies than you could as an angel because (i) the best companies will want to hire you and (ii) you can quit your company as soon as it appears to not be a rocketship, something you'll have insider knowledge of. https://www.benkuhn.net/optopt/

This is horrific for employees. Ben Kuhn already nailed the math here[1]. The optionality embedded in long-dated grants is a huge fraction of total comp at high-growth companies and represent almost the entire right tail of outcomes. It also requires assumptions about the future, which is why companies generally abstain from quantifying what it's worth. It seems like the companies doing this are trying to arb that uncertainty by retaining all of the potential gain for themselves in exchange for a slightly larger nominal income. Don't do it. [1] https://www.benkuhn.net/optopt/

If you're too lazy to build something like this out but like the idea I highly recommend bright LED lighting for the day (explained here: https://www.benkuhn.net/lux/). I bought two ~7000 lumens LED corn bulbs and have noticed a huge shift in energy levels from having a brightly-lit room in dark PNW days. I put together a bunch of resources when I was researching buying some here: https://www.notion.so/vimota/LED-World-fce39f79710b42708b92ab5ac82ff5c…

See also Ben Kuhn's "Make your habits zero-effort" - https://www.benkuhn.net/zero/ "Life hacks abound: Tell your friends about your plan so you’ll be embarrassed if you fail! Make sure you keep an unbroken streak! Charge yourself money if you don’t stick to it! Donate the money to your least favorite charity! Forget donations, how about electric shocks? The escalating absurdity should tell you that this problem is unsolved. But in my opinion, that’s because everyone tries to do it wrong. Personally, I’ve found my productivity habits to be extremely long-lived when I make sure they’re literally zero maintenance."

I have had sleep issues my entire life. I've cut out sugar, caffeine (both for other reasons), and used blue light filtering applications on my devices. None made a significant difference. I think another issue worth looking at is people not getting a daytime light signal. I've purchased and ultra bright light that I saw in this post [1] and it seems to have helped more than anything I have tried before. 1. https://www.benkuhn.net/lux

Some I follow: https://apenwarr.ca/log/ - programming, high level perspective https://www.benkuhn.net/ - programming, startups, effective altruism https://danluu.com/ - programming, hardware https://pedestrianobservations.com/ - public transit https://sideways-view.com/ - lots of interesting ideas, very eclectic And plugging my own blog: https://www.jefftk.com - effective altruism, contra dance, diy, not very focused

How many of those $10B companies are actually really worth that, not just an inflated result of funding rounds? The parent is talking about S&P 500 companies, which means publicly traded ones. The thing where private companies have inflated valuations [1][2] doesn't apply here. [1] https://www.benkuhn.net/terms [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2955455

It would be great if some of the repetitive tasks didn't even require a keyboard but rather use subtle gestures, eye tracking, and voice commands. Leap Motion, for example, never panned out but Google's Soli project might get us there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QNiZfSsPc0 Throw in better autocompletion (http://www.benkuhn.net/autocomplete) and software development becomes more precise and less repetitive.

Strategically increasing the amount of light I'm exposed to was a game changer. Turns out we're bad at gauging how much light is in our environment. Few would suspect that the amount of lux we're exposed to indoors is often far less than 1% of the lux outside. A typical corporate office has under 500 lux, vs 50k+ midday-if you're at home and haven't put much thought into the lighting situation, the lux could be in the low double digits. You can get a free app "Lux meter" to measure yours now. We evolved to be outside a lot, and light regulates aspects of our biology. We probably shouldn't stay two orders of magnitude beneath the factory recommended exposure levels for months at a time. Hence clinical or sub-clinical SAD,sleep and mood disturbances etc [see references]. One solution is high wattage LEDs: https://www.benkuhn.net/lux/ I've had several ~250w LEDs over the years (these are huge and actually draw 250w, they aren't 250w equivalent). 250w might be overkill, and 80w is fine for me and a lot more practical. If you get one , be warned that depending on the wattage you'll probably have to build your own stand for it as most fixtures aren't rated for that high wattage. Related to light amount is of course light timing. This may be more important than getting a steadily high amount of lux during the day. Get lots of light in the morning, and not a lot at night (just low intensity bulbs, maybe just red ones, starting 1-2h after sunset is nice). That helped my sleep a…

It's also really easy to have high quality audio! The author recommends a "podcasting" microphone, but a $35 standalone headset mic[1] is almost as good and much easier to use. If you want to hear a comparison, I got kind of obsessed with this problem at one point and took some comparison recordings here[2]. (You need a standalone mic since most headsets, even really nice ones, have really bad mics because most headset buyers don't care about or even know how good their mic sounds. The one I linked is wired because wireless is evil[3] and in particular, Bluetooth will silently degrade your audio quality. If you want a pair of wired headphones, I like these[4] which are "open back" and therefore sound more natural + cool your ears better, although the open back also means they "leak" sound and are only suitable for working without people next to you. But you shouldn't be having calls with people next to you anyway!) [1]: https://www.amazon.com/V-MODA-BoomPro-Microphone-Gaming-Communication/… [2]: https://www.benkuhn.net/vc/#get-a-better-microphone [3]: https://www.benkuhn.net/wireless/ [4]: https://www.amazon.com/Philips-SHP9500S-Precision-Over-ear-Headphones/…

> "How do you know what files are directories?" `ls -F` helps with this on terminals without color. > "I feel like I am inside a coat closet!" Some terminals do offer higher character resolutions than 80-by-25. > Sad because my memories of how great it was to have a terminal that could do line insert so when editing files over a 1200 baud modem it still felt fast, were now pitiable. I use a terminal on a somewhat regular basis (an IBM 3151 emulating a VT100, connected to a Raspberry Pi running FreeBSD). It can be a great tool for learning Unix command line fundamentals thoroughly (a prime example of blub studies [1]), and as you get comfortable with it, you might find it useful for deep work (George R.R. Martin's use of WordStar 4.0 on DOS [2] is a famous example of modern-day usage of text-mode computing, which isn't the same as using a hardware terminal on a Unix machine, but close enough in spirit). The caveat is that it does require patience and commitment to the process, which is tough when more convenient and capable user interfaces exist. Oftentimes I'll look up documentation on my phone while using the terminal, since it's simply more convenient than trying to navigate through modern websites on a text-mode browser. [1] https://www.benkuhn.net/blub/ [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502

I spent $300 on high lumen output light bulbs. 28 200W equivalent LED bulbs and 2 LED corn bulbs. Just a TON of light. Depending on severity either run it all day (late January and February tend to be the worst months), but even 10 minutes in the morning helps substantially. Just a lot of light. You can get hung up on high CRI and full spectrum but just do it badly first, then if it works worry about perfecting the setup. I just kept buying more bulbs and as I bought, I felt better and better. Edit: this was the blog that gave me the idea, it comes up on hacker news a lot. https://www.benkuhn.net/lux/

There's a... sad comparison of this article about over-responsibility, and https://www.benkuhn.net/blub/ about the value of learning about the stack you use (the more you know about the workings of bugs, sometimes the more they gnaw at you).

Have you read "You don't need to work on hard problems"? I don’t entirely agree with it, and it's more targeted at early-career people, but it might be interesting to read. https://www.benkuhn.net/hard/

I've gone down a lighting rabbit hole... Two tips that work well for me: - Very bright, high CRI photography light pointed at the ceiling, so the light diffuses evenly everywhere. True, it heats the room a little, but at least it's not direct heat - I face the window, but I sit against the opposite wall so the window isn't very close to my eyes. Also, if your whole room is bright, then the window no longer causes eye strain This post started the rabbit hole for me: https://www.benkuhn.net/lux/

Since I missed the link, here's his blog post about how to improve video calls: https://www.benkuhn.net/vc/

Or Wi-Fi, I've had atrocious pings between two systems on the same AP https://www.benkuhn.net/wireless/