amohr

I am a fun and outgoing guy looking for a strategist or community management type position. I've got some dev experience (LAMP, JS, ~python, working on jquery) and a minor in CS, but coding full-time gives me cabin fever of the brain.

I'm super curious, intellectually fearless, and willing to relocate (currently in Chicago; would prefer SF.) Contact info is in my profile.

I know it's hard to believe, but there are people who legitimately enjoy finding the exact right word. This is like trashing someone for working on an open source project - they're just doing something they love the best they know how. In this case it's not strategically optimal and finding that out was a (perhaps overdue) shock.

Badges? It's become kind of cliche as of late, but it might work. I've known many a pot-smoker who were (overly) concerned with their rep as a connoisseur, as it were.

There's been a lot of hating on us poor liberal arts graduates that didn't have the foresight to know that our education was going to invariably lead to crushing, static unemployment, so I figure I'd throw in my $.02

I've been building and tinkering with computers since I was 11 and it has always been sort of a foregone conclusion that I would go into CS or compe. But when I started college, for a number of reasons, I decided I wanted to study physics. But a few years in, I realized I wasn't really getting the full-bodied education that I was hoping for. I noticed this in myself as well as my peers in comparable science/engineering programs. It turns out, many of the programs that leave you with marketable skills necessarily sacrifice breadth of understanding.

This isn't to say all cs grads know nothing of the world, but it was a noticeable problem. There is, of course, virtue in training people to think only about a single field and think about it deeply and constantly. But I didn't want to be one of those people, so I switched to Political Science.

Political Science, at my school, was an interdisciplinary program - it allowed students to design their own concentrations within the framework of the program. Because of this, I was able to take advanced level courses in philosophy, music theory, english, astrophysics, economics, and computer science. No I'm not an expert on any of these, but I have the groundwork to understand any of them that I wish to personally pursue further. And many of them, I have.

Of course, after five years of college, I finally realized that I'm most passionate about writing, advertising, and technology, but I'm stuck competing against people with more specifically tailored credentials. This is obviously a problem, and I'm not going to claim I haven't spent nights wishing I had just stuck with something that would land me a job and a life of comfort. But comfort is as dangerous as it is pleasant and a lack of it often spurs the greatest innovation. That last part, however, I'm still working on.

But what about my CS friends? Some of them are legitimately well-rounded and interesting people... and some sold their souls at 100 hr/wk at nyc firms making 100k but they'll never see the world with the appreciative eyes of the destitute - they'll always want more because that's all they've ever been taught to value. Many will live lives hopelessly seeking satisfaction through abundance.

Save your pity for those guys, thank you.

PS: I don't really think all these guys are doomed because they took high-stress, high-paying jobs, I just wanted to represent the other side of the coin. Don't assume all LAS grads are forever useless... also, if you have the means, hire one. (specifically, me)

Any solar hackers out there? I wonder if you could extend that lifetime at all - that's like a bonus experiment on top of whatever else you're doing.

In school, we had a group that did microgravity experiments in freefall, could be useful research applications along those lines. Although I'm not sure how much control you have over the physical satellite.

Perhaps you could do some LEO photography? I'm thinking, if this is possible, there could be some interesting mapping applications.

When I interviewed at Airbnb, IIRC, I believe they said they were profitable or close to it. [citation needed]

I have and loved it - it is responsible for my regular use of the word 'gumption.' But, now that you mention it, I should go back and read it again. When I first read it, I was much more technically oriented and have since shifted towards a focus on writing. This is largely what caused said quandary.

When you're working on technical problems, the question of value is relatively straight-forward: you are attempting to solve a problem by creating tools or applying existing ones. As a writer, it's a bit more nuanced. Moreover there's not a quick or easy way to measure that value.

If I hack up a script to grep a dataset, when it's done, I can toss the code and nobody has to know how ugly it is - the task is done. I cut an hour of work down to 30 seconds using 15 minutes of coding: saved time = obvious value.

If I rewrite the copy on my landing page, I may see an increase in conversions, but there's a strong chance that I timed that rewrite to coincide with a marketing push. Did my new landing page with a stronger call to action and a more approachable voice convince people to sign up? Did my popular friend give me some twitter love? Or did I change the copy to fit a new, more attractive design?

Basically, 'value' is an extremely elusive concept. I've asked a lot of people about it and the resulting conversation is pretty formulaic: it starts with a simple, poorly veiled abstraction of what the respondent does and, as I challenge it, it morphs into this maddeningly abstract compromise.

This response was inappropriately long, I realize, but it's obviously a topic that's been tugging on my brainstrings.

Anecdotally, I was surprised, above all, by how natural it feels to start meditating. There's thousands of years of practices and traditions meant to improve/structure the act, but I never really thought of those as being aimed at someone like myself. As a result, most of my exposure, up until a few months ago, was either through articles like this one or occasionally at the end of martial arts workouts.

But I spent a part of this summer working on a farm in rural Wisconsin and I ended up with a period of downtime in the early evening - after the day's work and catching up with emails and whatnot. As it turns out, I was also struggling with a particular quandary (specifically, I was trying to define 'value') and one day, I just sat down cross-legged on the porch with my eyes closed, facing the setting sun.

What I did from there is hardly what any sort of zen master would consider 'meditation,' but I was amazed at what a difference it made to simply make a conscious decision to sit and think only of one topic. Consequently, I was reminded of a zen koan that I had encountered earlier in my investigation of the meaning of value, which was edifying enough for me to feel okay with calling what I had started doing 'meditation.'

I guess the bottom line is not to put too much stake in what everyone else says meditation is or isn't and focus on the practice of just taking time to be alone with your thoughts long enough to organize them in such a way that makes sense for you. Again, this is strictly anecdotal, but I think that's where you'll really see many of the benefits associated with meditation coming from. As someone who was diagnosed ADHD in college and has always had a problem with focus, I can say that having a disorganized mind can really be toxic to your life and work.

I wouldn't call it a prisoner's dilemma - competitors that oppose HFCS have no incentive to make the switch as the perception (or reality) of better taste/health are their top selling point.

You don't fill up on salad before a pie eating contest and you don't get into the ring with Coca-Cola on their terms.

The problem here is that Coke has to decide between a unified front and hedging their bets. One way kind of undermines the other.