http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/06/good-friends-can-make-bad-business-partners.html

Feedback

Negative: Negative feedback is valuable. If you think an idea is terrible, don't just downvote, also explain. The trick to giving good negative feedback is doing so with productive goals in mind, which means, rather than saying “this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard”, think about what specifically it is that you think makes the idea infeasible in its current form, and what would turn it into a good, or at least a better, idea.

Keep in mind that negative feedback is a double edged sword. It helps people refine their ideas, and can create success in place of failure. Unfortunately, even in its best forms, it also can easily sap a person’s motivation. It tends to do this on the monkey mind level, not on the analytic level, which is frustrating since negative feedback is such a beautiful tool for the analytic mind. I’ve seen how even the slightest negative feedback can have a huge impact, even stopping people from working on projects that are pretty decent on the whole. There is a minority of people who are relatively unfazed by negative commentary, but most of us can’t help but internalize it somewhat. Agentiness is rare, and something that can be cultivated or trampled with feedback. Being specific is the one of the most helpful things you can do to deliver the most constructive criticism, because the information tends to be more helpful toward solving the problems and less personal.

Another thing that helps avoid killing someone’s motivation is speaking with the assumption that the person you're talking to is an intelligent human being whose idea could be good if worked out a little further. This is often the case, especially here. When people sense that you anticipate that they'll come back with an intelligent answer, they often do.

Here's an example for making negative feedback more specific: Perhaps you think that a person is vastly underestimating the difficulty of raising funds for their idea. I would suggest phrasing it as a question: “How do you propose to get funding for this idea?” You don’t need to convey your doubt in the question, but if you do feel the need to bring it up, do it as specifically as possible: “When I’ve tried fundraising in the past, I found it extremely hard, and extrapolating that, I have a hard time imagining it working for this project. Can you please explain how you see this happening?”

In summary, I think that it is very much worth giving negative feedback, even though it does often harm motivation. Ideas need to be good if they’re going to work, and by giving negative feedback, you are helping people improve their ideas. Even if the person with the idea doesn’t get it or update, it might help bystanders. And there’s a decent chance that the person who you talk to will understand, and you might be able to help a project happen that wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without your well framed remark.

Positive: Validation for good ideas is really helpful. You may think that people who have a good idea know that it's a good idea already. I know a lot of people, though, who feel a little better and more encouraged - and who are more likely to follow through when given validation. So if you see someone mention something great, be sure to give them a thumbs up. It will be even more powerful if you respond with a comment saying specifically why it's a good idea, with as much detail as you can manage. Not only will the person feel validated, but other people reading are also more likely to see the value that you see, so the idea is more likely to get funding, refinement, and resources. If this thread goes as I hope, any comment or up/down vote that you make might well have a impact on whether or not a world-improving project gets implemented.

Clarification: Sometimes someone will make a good point that is obvious to you, but not obvious to other people. If you understand a good point that someone has made and you think it's not likely to get across to others, it's super helpful if you can restate it clearly and succinctly so that the concept gets conveyed to everyone.

A reading light. It's battery-powered and can clamp onto things. I find it useful for reading in bed, especially when travelling.

I'd like to propose a new guideline for rationality quotes:

• Please don't post multiple quotes from the same source.

I enjoy the Alpha Centauri quotes, but I think posting 5 of them at once is going a bit overboard. It dominates the conversation. I'm fine with them all getting posted eventually. If they're good quotes, they can wait a couple months.

Having just attended the June minicamp and having some time to kill in the Bay Area, I'm spending this afternoon on Haight hacking my fashion. So far my clothes choices have elicited a compliment on the fit from the clothing store staff at least, so I think that's a positive step.

I'm writing a book on some failures of the traditional scientific process in the domain of software engineering (so-called). It's not finished but I'm told people who read it in its current state found it enjoyable, and by buying it now you'll encourage me to put more work into it (and get FREE! updates).

I agree with everything mentioned, but I'd like to add one thing:

If you use your computer a lot and you have money, don't hesitate to buy something expensive. The cost per hour ends up being ridiculously low. I've said this for years, but many of my peers are still averse to spending "too much" on computer equipment.

I was in the same spot as you until I read this post by Sam Harris. It's a pretty good intro to mindful meditation. It also links to some useful resources, such as guided audio tracks.

Have you considered existing solutions, such as Krugle, or IntelliJ and Eclipse's built-in tools or plugins (assuming you're coding in Java or Python or whatever else Eclipse supports) ? If so, what were their major deficiencies, and how is your solution better ? The reason I'm asking is because, well, I'm a selfish bastard who doesn't feel like implementing his own code search engine, so I might as well use yours :-)

For the past couple of weeks I've been writing a utility to search through code quickly. I'm doing this because at work, some large dependencies got tossed in extern, making ack and grep pretty slow. At first I tried to make them faster (creating aliases to ignore certain files), but I soon gave up and started writing my own thing.

Grep is slow because it doesn't ignore files by default. Ack is slow because it's written in Perl. So I'm writing it in C, using libpcre for the regex matching. So far it's about 3x faster than ack and 10x faster than grep. With some tweaking to ignore special files like generated code, I got it even faster than that. (0.5 seconds to search the codebase. For comparison, grep was 12 seconds and ack was 4.)

The Github repo is here. I don't recommend anyone try it out yet. It's not even close to done. Although I use it daily, I still need to iron out some formatting bugs, a couple of potential crashes, and then write docs. I bet it'll take me a couple weeks to sort all that stuff out.

(Before anyone replies: Yes, I do know about ctags and git-grep. Ctags requires rebuilding an index after changing any files, and git-grep doesn't work on non-git repositories. Also git-grep can't ignore files committed in the repo, such as everything in extern.)