I think Sanctuary, Hydraulics, and XXIX are proving this assumption wrong. As designers and developers, we create tools for a living. That includes tools for helping other teams make great decisions. Tools to help their coworkers ask and offer feedback. Tools to help their peers get clear on where they want to grow. We obsess over making tools that improve the way we work. When we see an opportunity to improve, we upgrade our tools. Or build a new tool, toss the old one, and thank it for serving its purpose (Marie Kondo style).

We intend to revise those skills so that they reflect what good leadership looks like in a distributed organization. Things like:Noticing a problem/opportunity and proposing an experiment to solve itKnowing how to offer and give helpful feedbackKnowing how to receive feedbackActive listeningHelping others get clear on where they want to growCoaching (rather than managing) others toward their goals

Expressing frustration at the absolute waste of the property, Airbnb owner Ben Hobbs told reporters Monday that he was outbid on a house by a family that was just going to use it as a home. “I wanted to fix up the place and rent it out to tourists at a premium nightly rate plus fees, and all this family is going to do is use it as their primary source for shelter and warmth,” said Hobbs, adding that he was sick and tired of losing out on new revenue streams to people who only want to plant roots and watch their children grow up.

It’s not just a question of “how do we make this usable?” it’s more about “how do we make this usable for users and increase feature adoption which will drive more revenue?“

I sit at the intersection of design, anthropology, and programming. These three are at the core of everything I make. Combining them into a coherent career is a weird and ongoing challenge.Titles and disciplines are fickle and fleeting. But my work fits under the umbrellas of UX design, visual interface design, and DX (developer experience). With some cultural analysis, writing, and visual illustration sprinkled on top.

You can look at an interface and see it as a clearly signposted user journey you should follow. Or you can see it as a collection of functions and affordances to repurpose. As raw material, rather than a guided path.

The reason startups are so counterintuitive is that they're so different from most people's other experiences. No one knows what it's like except those who've done it. Which is why YC partners should usually have been founders themselves.

the essence of what happens at YC is to figure out which problems matter most, then cook up ideas for solving them — ideally at a resolution of a week or less — and then try those ideas and measure how well they worked. The focus is on action, with measurable, near-term results.

A small improvement in navigational ability can make you a lot faster, because it has a double effect: the path is shorter, and you can travel faster along it when you're more certain it's the right one. That's where a lot of YC's value lies, in helping founders get an extra increment of focus that lets them move faster. And since moving fast is the essence of a startup, YC in effect makes startups more startup-like.Speed defines startups. Focus enables speed. YC improves focus.

However good you are, good colleagues make you better. Indeed, very ambitious people probably need colleagues more than anyone else, because they're so starved for them in everyday life.

Everyone can - and often does - have confident opinions about those questions. But you can't really answer them in any objective way unless we can agree on a definition of the word.There are basically two categories of definitions:The interpersonal definitions. Something like "Prejudice or antagonism directed against another person based on their membership in a racial group."The sociological definitions. Something like "A highly organized system of 'race'-based group privilege that operates at every level of society and is held together by a sophisticated ideology of color/'race' supremacy."

“Eliminated the idea of personal racism” is kinda an overstatement isn’t it? Like yeah, it exists, but interpersonal racism against white people just doesn’t do anything, or at least nothing worse than any other kind of insult like calling them an asshole. It maybe hurts white feelings a little and that’s it, but most white people don’t even seem offended by terms like “Mayo monkey” or “cracker” and I would guess it’s because those terms aren’t representative of white people being systemically oppressed for being white, since that’s never been a thing. There’s an important distinction in that things like N word or the propaganda trying to paint black and brown people as being criminals is literally tied to slavery

Basically, these kinds of disagreements boil down to there being two ways to define racism: a colloquial definition, where racism is just treating someone differently due to their race, and a more academic definition drawn from the social sciences and philosophy where racism is, to use the standard simplification "prejudice plus power."

You're using the first definition, on which you are correct that it appears to be possible to be racist against white people; and your sister is using the second, on which she is correct that it would seem impossible to be racist to white people, at least in the context of a society where whites are and have historically been in a position of power over other racial groups.