a more or less weekly digest of juicy stuff

• optimize for happiness, we do all this because we're optimizing for happiness, and because there's nobody to tell us that we can't. highly recommended
• on contact management, curiously i had exactly the same idea a few years ago and felix talked me out of it. he made some valid points though
• my addressbook? keep it. telephone numbers are a disgrace to our generation, this whole system assumes i want to call their cellphones. which is not true - i want to call them
• how a programmer reads your resume, hilarious
• how to recognise a good programmer
• first rule of usability? don't listen to users. to design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior.
• if it's important, don't hack it, tricking your users just so you hit your metrics causes long term, if not permanent, damage
• the founder's lie about comfort zones, we run startups - we are constantly at the border of our comfort zone. aren't we? no we are not. we are just better in lying - especially to ourselves
• how cold calling (properly) works better than adwords
• bad bloggers copy, great bloggers steal
• full vim help as pdf
• linux performance analysis and tools, now this is a detailed overview (pdf)
• culture is not about aesthetics, record companies complain the internet will destroy music. musicians complain that they can't make a living any more. the problem isn't piracy - it's competition
• why are we attracted to beautiful things? we feel pleasure when we see something beautiful, making attractive things feel like they work better
• interviewing humans, conducting a good interview is actually about shutting up. this can be very hard, especially when you're enthusiastic about the topic
• how doctors die, of course, doctors don't want to die; they want to live. but they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. and they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain and dying alone
• there is no such thing as a perfect lens, if you want the very best quality obtainable, then a nice f/2.8 zoom would be priced at $20,000 to $40,000. what a coincidence - that's about the price range of cinema-quality zooms
• the banksy vs robbo war in pictures
• noah, short film by walter woodman and patrick cederberg